There are 79,847 words in the Torah. That’s the length of an average novel, although this number of Hebrew words usually produces more in English translations.

The 52nd to 61st words in this week’s sedra, Shemot, the first chapter of Exodus, are to my mind amongst the saddest in the entire Bible. They read: “Vyacom melech chadosh ul mitzrayim asher lo yodei et Yosef.” Or in English: “And there arose a new king in Egypt who knew not Joseph.” This melancholy sentence, unvarnished by any rabbinical exegesis, has resonated with me since cheder. Even before I found out that Handel’s Israel in Egypt, composed in 1739, opens with them. The music of this wonderful oratorio is Handel’s; the words, selected by George Jennens from an English translation, are Hashem’s.

There has always been uncertainty about this ominous passage. Was the king, who may have been Thutmose IV or Menephtah (a son of the better-known Rameses II), the old pharaoh who chose to forget the great services Joseph had performed for the Egyptian people during his stewardship? Was he a new king who did not know Joseph personally, but knew of Joseph’s work and chose to ignore it? Or was he a new king who did not know that Joseph had been the saviour of Egypt? The first alternative is unlikely; the second and third, even if this pharaoh was from a new regime or dynasty, are scarcely credible. But to my mind, his identity doesn’t matter.

Similarly, later commentators have discussed the next few lines in the light of more recent European history. In English they are: “The Israelites are becoming too numerous and strong for us. We must deal wisely with them. Otherwise they may increase so much that, if there is a war, they will join our enemies and fight against us driving us from the land.”

Is this the first recorded example of antisemitism? According to tradition, the text of the Torah is at least 3,300 years old. Unless there are cuneiform or hieroglyphic tablets out there yet to be discovered, which say, in terms, down with the Jews, it seems to me that the answer is an emphatic “yes”.

I have always been puzzled by Pharaoh’s peculiar logic. First, he claims that the Israelites are too numerous; then he alleges that they are too strong, and finally he makes the extraordinary assertion that unless dealt with wisely, they may breed at such a rate that in the event of a war (and we know that there were plenty of wars in this period), they will, and there is no conditionality about it, side with the invaders, the enemies of Egypt, and help expel the “native” Egyptians from their homes on the banks of the Nile.

The obvious question is: Why would they do that? No explanation is offered — rational or irrational.

The Jews in Egypt basked in Joseph’s reflected glory throughout his life and for about 100 years after his death — up, in fact, to the utterances of this pharaoh. They were well treated by the grateful Egyptians. Why would they risk their prosperity and their safety to side with the enemy any more than anyone else?

If it remains a mystery, then it is one which had world-changing consequences. Without this pharaoh and his determination to convert — if that is the right word — the Jewish people from free citizens into, at best, slaves, there would have been no Moses, no Exodus, no wandering in the desert, no Torah, whether given on Mount Sinai or elsewhere, and, in all probability, no Jewish people.

Ultimately, unknowingly and wholly unintentionally, pharaoh did the Jewish people the most incredible service. He had planned their subjugation, if not their destruction. He ended up ensuring their survival.

Had he not acted as he did, had he not decided on a course of action that changed the history of the world, had he not set his face against a divinely directed or guided Moses, there is every chance that the Jews would have been absorbed into the many tribes and peoples living in the Middle East at the time and lost their unique identity. Oh, and we wouldn’t be here today.

Why? Well, whereas persecution brings forced conversion and/or death, prosperity can mean greater assimilation. Remember, at that time, there were no Commandments. There were no rabbis. There was no Torah — no guidebook to life available to the Israelites. They were completely spiritually vulnerable. In the musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton benefits from having Washington on his side: in their wanderings, the Israelites had the infinitely more powerful Hashem on theirs.

Shemoth is the transitional sedra that propels the Biblical story forwards and leads, inexorably, in a few weeks’ time, to the plagues, the flight and the unqualified joy of eight days of matzos. It is action-packed and full of intense drama and emotion. Oh to have been an Aramaic-speaking fly buzzing around the burning bush in Midian as Hashem discloses the divine plan to a reluctant Moses. Or to have witnessed Moses’s joyous reunion with Aaron.
“And there arose a pharaoh who knew not Joseph” is the hinge, the turning point in the history of the Jews as recorded in the Old Testament. Before this pharaoh, these strangers were pretty comfortable in a land that was no longer strange. After this pharaoh, having evicted themselves from Egypt, they and their children and their children’s children were moulded in the desert and forged into a new nation. We leave them, at the end of Exodus no longer serving the Egyptians, but serving God. We leave them at the end of Deuteronomy, on the point of departure from that desert into the Promised Land.

The last thing pharaoh intended was to save the Jewish people. But, that is what he achieved.
And maybe it is another reason why God admonished the angels who started singing as the chariots of fire and the rest of the Egyptian army, led by pharaoh, drowned in the Red Sea, when in hot pursuit of the fleeing Israelites.

And the paradox of ingratitude? Where does that fit in? Well, in two ways. First — obviously — pharaoh’s ignorance, whether real or feigned, of Joseph’s massive achievements had ultimately and paradoxically profoundly beneficial, though for him entirely unintended, consequences.

Secondly, even though he is right up there with Haman and the other Premier League enemies of the Jewish people, the irony and the reality is that this pharaoh’s ingratitude for Joseph’s life’s work was a blessing in disguise for the Israelites. It may not have seemed so at the time. And we don’t celebrate the ingratitude as such. Instead, at Passover, we emphasise the drama of the plagues and celebrate the Exodus itself.

But before we move into and get caught up by the sheer excitement of the new few chapters, a final reflection on the pharaoh whose actions and obstinacy were responsible for that Exodus.

His Egypt, and that of his predecessors and successors, has long since vanished. It is now only remembered and studied as an ancient, lost civilisation, glimpsed as a tourist destination or inspected as artefacts in museums.

Shelley’s conclusion in Ozymandias, his sonnet about what were then, 200 years ago, newly discovered Egyptian ruins, is peculiarly resonant: “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!” he wrote. “Nothing besides remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

But the Jewish people, who pharaoh sought and fought so hard to destroy, survived. They live on, ironically mostly in a neighbouring country, and can visit, as tourists, the colossal wrecks in situ: the pyramids, the sphinx and the tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings.
And if you ever go there, give monumental thanks that, mercifully, one of those pharaohs… knew not Joseph.

Ian Bloom was a publisher and book reviewer and writer for the JC in the 1970s. He later became a media lawyer