In this week’s Haftorah for Parshat Vaera, God says to the prophet Yechezkel:
“Turn your face against Pharaoh King of Egypt, and prophesy against him and against all Egypt. Speak these words: Thus says the Lord, I am going to deal with you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the big Tanin, who crouches in the Nile and says, ‘The Nile is mine and I made it.’ …And I will fling you into the desert, with all the fish of your channels. You shall be left lying in the open, ungathered and unburied: I have given you as food To the beasts of the earth and the birds of the sky. Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know That I am the LORD…. I will bring a sword against you, and will cut off man and beast from you, so that the land of Egypt shall fall into desolation and ruin. And they shall know that I am the Lord because he [Pharaoh] boasted, ‘The Nile is mine, and I made it.’”
It seems that God is going to take revenge against Pharaoh because he calls himself the Tanin, the crocodile, and declares the Nile is his. But why a crocodile?
Perhaps the greatest deity in Egypt, as we know, was the Nile, since the Nile gave life to Egypt. Even today, if one looks at Google Maps of Egypt, there is nothing but brown desert except around the Nile where all is verdant. Pharaoh ruled not by being a smart and benevolent King but by casting himself in the eyes of the people as the most powerful deity. Chazal say that Pharaoh was in the Nile each morning when Moshe went to see him because he was going to the bathroom and wanted to hide his human needs in order to perpetuate his image as a deity. At the same time he would be viewed as the ruler of the Nile because swimming in the Nile is quite dangerous. Hundreds of people are killed each year by crocodiles in Egypt. The King of the Nile, which Pharaoh wanted to be, is the crocodile.
Since Pharaoh sees himself as the tannin, the crocodile, the ruler of the Nile, it makes sense that Moshe’s staff becomes a tannin, not a serpent as it originally did, thus showing Moshe’s power over Pharaoh, the self proclaimed crocodile ruler of the Nile.
God does not bring destruction on Egypt in order to get the Jewish people out. Indeed, God could have easily taken the Jews out; instead, he brought destruction in order to address Pharos ego, his need to be a God. Pharaoh is the tragic figure in all these stories. Had he a modicum of humility and been able to let the people go he could have remained king in Egypt and his country might have stayed intact. But he was not about supporting his people and his country; he was about himself. For a bully and a fraud like Pharaoh, the idea that he is God was essential to the functioning of his society.
More important than getting the Jews out Egypt was the need to bring the plagues and defeat Pharaoh, so that humans will know there is a God, and they would know they are not It.
The Haftorah is teaching us that the story of the Exodus is not just a story of how the Jewish people left Egypt, but an essential teaching about leadership and national vision. The Torah is teaching us that when the leader is a fraud, when the leader is a bully, who says “I am at the pinnacle, I am God, I am the crocodile”, this is a grave danger. And so, Yechezkel teaches us that God must unseat these rulers.