"Jochebed brought Moses to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son" (Exodus 2:10).

Pharaoh hugged and kissed him, and Moses took off Pharaoh’s crown and placed it on his own head (Shemot Rabbah 1:26).

Pharaoh was proud of his foolishness. Said the Holy One, Blessed is He, to Moses, "There is nothing to be done with this fool except to hit him with a stick." Therefore Moses came to him with a staff (Midrash HaGadol, Shemot 7:16).

The Lord spared Pharaoh at the Red Sea, and he went and ruled in Nineveh. When the Holy One sent Jonah to Nineveh to prophesy about it and to destroy it, Pharaoh heard, and immediately rising from his throne, rent his garments, and dressed in sackcloth and ashes (Yalkut Shimoni, Shemot 176).

There are archetypal Biblical heroes; there are archetypal Biblical villains. No villain occupies a greater stage than the Pharaoh, whose regnum was broken by the God of the Israelites piece by piece. Indeed, one of the most penetrating messages of the Bible - for there is no greater national drama in Jewish history than the Exodus from Egypt - is the personal vendetta waged by the Almighty against the tyranny of this god/king. Moses is most certainly God’s agent, and is supplied with supernatural powers for the task at hand, but to view the Lord’s "outstretched hand" symbolically and not literally during the period of the Israelite rebellion and escape from the land of slavery would be to miss the central point of the narrative.

It was all part of Divinity’s plan. The idea: inflame and antagonize the fearsome Egyptian leader to the "boiling" point and then embarrass, humiliate, and ultimately destroy said Pharaoh in front of his minions and his helpless gods. The purpose: to inspire Moses and Israelites with Yirat Adonai - "fear of the God of their fathers and mothers." It seemed to work, at least until the sojourn in the Wilderness when new temptations threatened the unity of the fledgling nation.

Thus the attempt in the rabbinic literature to portray Pharaoh as a clown, impetuous by nature and easy to fool. The infant Moses wittingly usurps the tyrant’s crown, prefiguring his superiority over the Egyptian king as an adult. Time and again Pharaoh doesn’t seem to understand the nature of Moses’s power and belief, reminiscent of the incomprehension Jesus’s disciples later display with respect to their master’s true vocation. But all this is carefully planned, and the Egyptian king’s final awakening to Moses’s great source of strength is that much more devastating because of Pharaoh’s prolonged state of ignorance. When he finally recognizes the awesome and terrible nature of the God of the Israelites - after the splitting of the Red Sea and the drowning of his legions - he drowns himself (Mechilta Beshalach 2:6). Another Midrash suggests he became the despot of Nineveh, unraveled by the preaching of Jonah. It seems, in either case, a watery end.