The Book of Jonah’s Kingly Crossover

Rosebud is a sled.
Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
Bruce Willis is a ghost.

In a narrative twist millennia before those cinematic classics, the rabbis offered their own: The King of Nineveh is actually Pharaoh of Egypt.

Exodus 14:28, the biblical verse that describes the watery defeat of Pharaoh’s forces at the raised hands of Moses’ sea-splitting miracle, concludes with a syntactical tongue twister:  “The waters turned back and covered the chariots and the horsemen. Pharaoh’s entire army that had followed them into the sea, there remained not until [even? except for?] one man.

Must be, the midrashic collection Pirkei DeRebbe Eliezer suggests, that this sole survivor dried himself off, lived another 500 years, and went incognito in the Book of Jonah, read in synagogues the afternoon of Yom Kippur.

“Rabbi Nehunia ben HaKana says: Know the power of repentance! Come and see it from Pharaoh, King of Egypt, who rebelled greatly against the Highest Rock [our God] … And then the Holy One saved him from among the dead … [Pharaoh] went and ruled in Nineveh. And the people of Nineveh were writing works of profanity, stealing from one another, engaging in all kinds of perversity, and other such wicked things. And when the Holy One sent Jonah to deliver a prophecy to Nineveh about its destruction, Pharaoh heard and stood up from his throne and tore his clothes, and put on sackcloth and ashes, and announced to all his people that they should fast for three days — and that anyone who did not do it, would be burned in fire.”

Having obtained a promotion (or was it a lateral move?) and threatened with the right hand of the same Israelite God who gave him fits at his old gig, Pharaoh found himself uniquely positioned to lead a national repentance movement. He knew better than anyone what would plague his people should they not mend the error of their ways.

In inserting Pharaoh into Jonah’s tale, the rabbis were not offering a Marvel Multiverse-style crossover. Rather, as the Israeli scholar Pnina Galpaz-Feller notes, they were reflecting profound similarities between the Exodus narrative and Jonah’s journey — and offering a radical reading on the generosity of God’s grace to those willing to repent.

In inserting Pharaoh into Jonah’s tale, the rabbis were not offering a Marvel Multiverse-style crossover. Rather, as the Israeli scholar Pnina Galpaz-Feller notes, they were reflecting profound similarities between the Exodus narrative and Jonah’s journey — and offering a radical reading on the generosity of God’s grace to those willing to repent.

The two stories share multiple thematic similarities. 

The divinely storm-tossed ship in Jonah’s first chapter calms when he is thrown overboard, just as the Red Sea settles as the Egyptians sink to the bottom. The miraculous movement of the waters inspires the faith of the survivors — the Israelites on the other side of the shore in the Book of Exodus, and the gentile sailors who arrive safely at their destination in Jonah’s tale. 

Those sailors, in an echo of the heroism of the Egyptian midwives who spared the Israelite babies, had sought to avoid slaying Jonah, so as not to shed innocent blood. They subsequently bring sacrifices to the Israelite God, as the Israelites did on their way out of Egypt.

Jonah, thrown overboard, finds himself in the belly of a fish. As Moses’ snake/staff had before, the creature serves as a miraculous means of demonstrating God’s might. From the depths, Jonah utters a prayer — which draws on practically identical language and imagery as the Song of the Sea, Exodus’ 15th chapter. Both poems describe spiritual longings from the “heart of the sea,” in which the survivor(s) aspire to express gratitude for salvation, on dry land, in God’s holy abode. 

Jonah then arrives in Nineveh, a city so vast, we are told, it would take three-days to traverse – the exact length of time the enslaved Israelites had asked for a respite from their Pharaonically-imposed labors. There he declares, “In 40 more days” (the length of time Moses was on Sinai), “Nineveh will be overturned.”

The response of the Assyrian king in Nineveh is swift and humble. Who knows, he hopefully and humbly tells his citizens, God might change his mind – if we change our behavior. This is in marked contrast to Pharaoh’s reaction to Moses and Aaron’s request, in the name of the Lord, for liberation – “I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.”

While the domesticated animals in Egypt had been subjected to plagues, in Nineveh they are party to repentance. They wear sackcloth and fast, like the Ninevites themselves. They are subsequently spared.

Jonah, frustrated that God has spared the undeserving, sulks under a kikayon, a caper bush. Perhaps the shrub is an inversion of God’s call to Moses to lead a salvation, emerging from a bush that burned.  

Jonah’s response to God’s declaration of His mercy towards the Ninevites, “and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city …?” is left unanswered in the text. But the rabbis made it clear that at least one party to Jonah’s mission to Nineveh, though not the one that had emerged from the fish, had emerged from the depths spiritually reborn. After all, Pharaoh had been spared at the sea — the tyrannical monarch had become a model penitent, revealed as a model for all those seeking a second chance.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”