An essential element in understanding the Ten Plagues episode is Pharaoh’s “hardening of the heart.”
In Exodus 4: 21 we read:
And the Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform all the marvels that I have put within your power before the Pharaoh. I, however, will stiffen his heart so that he will not let the people go.
On Exodus 9: 12
And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had spoken unto Moses.
On Exodus 10: 1
And the Lord said unto Moses: ‘Go in unto Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might show these My signs in the midst of them;
On Exodus 10: 20
But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the children of Israel go
On Exodus 10: 27
But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go
This is obviously not a marginal motif- it occurs some twenty times in one form or another within the scope of the Exodus story between chapters 4 and 14.
Surprisingly, ten times the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is attributed to God causing it, and ten times, Pharaoh himself is responsible for hardening his own heart.
These incompatible attributions of causes of behavior – theologically framed as the question of predestination and free will-raise a moral question:
If it were God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, not only the head of Egypt could not be blamed for his actions, it would be unjust to punish him.
Moreover, and more shamefully, God would be responsible for puppeteering one man into bringing suffering to millions of human beings.
There is no saying that this issue is at the heart of theological angst affecting any conversation about God from Biblical times to the Holocaust to our days.
Some biblical commentators have tried to deflect the problem. Nahum Sarna, for instance, writes that:
“[…] the idea of God’s hardening the pharaoh’s heart is that He utilizes a man’s natural proclivity toward evil; He accentuates the process in furtherance of His historical purposes.”
This begs the immediate question of why a god who has such a power instead doesn’t use this power to prevent evil people from doing evil.Along the same apologetic lines but using a different thought track, Umberto Cassuto argues:
“The Torah does not seek to teach us philosophy, not even what is called religious philosophy. When the Torah was written, Greek philosophy had not yet been thought of, and Greek logic was likewise non-existent. Moreover, the Torah does not address itself to the thinkers but to the entire people, and it expresses itself in language understandable to the masses and adapted to the thinking of ordinary folk. […] In the period of the Pentateuch, people were not yet conscious of the contradiction that is to be observed between God’s foreknowledge of events and the responsibility imposed upon man for his deeds. If, in general, they were aware of the inconsistency, they resolved it simply and superficially, holding that God’s prescience was only His capacity to discern the nature of His creatures and to know that a certain person in a given situation would behave in accordance with his nature and attributes in a specific manner. […] In early Hebrew diction, it is customary to attribute every phenomenon to the direct action of God. Of a barren woman, it is said that ‘the Lord had shut up her womb’ (I Sam. I 5); of an accident in which one person kills another unintentionally, it is said that ‘God brought it opportunely into his hand (Ex.. 21: 13), and the like.”
More importantly, Cassuto writes: “Pharaoh sinned in that he imposed a hard bondage on the children of Israel, and decreed that their infant sons should be destroyed; for this, he was punished, not on account of his hardness of heart.”
In Isaiah (6:10), God orders the prophet to dullen Israel’s heart the as He hardened Pharaoh’s, making it impossible for the Egyptian monarch to receive the message given to him:
“Dull that people’s mind,
Stop its ears,
And seal its eyes.”
For what purpose? So that they would be unable to understand the destructiveness of their behavior and turn away from it:
Lest, seeing with its eyes
And hearing with its ears,
It also grasps with its mind,
And repent and save itself.”
This brand of theology has boxed itself into a severe dilemma, but this happened hundreds of years later. However, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is an early event in Israel’s understanding of God; it belongs to the pre-history of the “hardening of the heart’s” concept. It argues that divine intervention contributed to the hardening of the Pharaoh’s heart so that the God of Israel would have an excuse to assert his power, compelling the Egyptians to recognize Him. In doing so, however, they were unaware of where this line of thought would take others, such as Isaiah.
In Exodus, however, another understanding of the concept was also at play. The account of the first five plagues does not state, ‘And he hardened Pharaoh’s heart,’ but ‘And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened.’
After commenting that the motif of the hardening of the heart “has been consistently over-interpreted by supposing that it arose from a profoundly theological reflection and seeing it as a problem of free will and predestination,” Brevard Childs remarks that “the hardening phrase comes consistently … after the plague has been removed through Moses’ intercession. This means that … the hardening does not function as the direct cause of the plagues. Rather, the hardening appears as a reaction to the plagues or, more specifically, to removing the plagues. This connection is made explicit in Exodus 7 11, ‘When Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart.”
The biblical narrators understood that this was a case where there was “nobody with whom to talk.” That, no matter how one wishes to explain the causes for such an attitude, when facing an individual unwilling to reason, to listen, who is not even moved by a gradual series of sanctions, there’s no other recourse left than the use of lethal force. This is what the tenth plague is all about.
When no answer is the answer
And the Lord said to Moses: Come into Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, so that I may set these signs of Mine in his midst; (1)…
And Moses and Aaron came into Pharaoh, and they said to him: ‘Thus saith the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me? Let My people go, that they may worship Me (3)…
But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the children of Israel go. (20)
The meaning of these verses from the 10th chapter of the book of Exodus is baffling because of their contradiction. Pharaoh cannot receive the message delivered to him because the same God asking him to consent is at the same time tampering with his inner self in such a way that even if he had wanted, he could not have obeyed.
Not only does this deny human autonomy- human freedom- it appears to run in the face of God’s very nature, which assumedly should want only humanity’s good.
We see a problem here, wrote Italian-born rabbi and Biblical scholar Umberto Cassuto, because
“…we are not dealing here with philosophical issues such as the relationship between the free will of man and God’s prescience, […] The Torah does not seek to teach us philosophy, not even what is called religious philosophy. When the Torah was written, Greek philosophy had not yet been thought of, and Greek logic was likewise non-existent. Moreover, the Torah does not address itself to the thinkers but to the entire people, and it expresses itself in language understandable to the masses and adapted to the thinking of ordinary folk. […] In the period of the Pentateuch, people were not yet conscious of the contradiction that is to be observed between God’s foreknowledge of events and the responsibility imposed upon man for his deeds;”
Further, Cassuto asks us to keep in mind that for the Biblical way of thinking, it was “customary to attribute every phenomenon to the direct action of God. Every happening has a number of causes, and these causes, in turn, have other causes, and so on ad infinitum; according to the Israelite conception, the cause of all causes was the will of God, the Creator and Ruler of the world.
In other words, the polarity between hardening as an autonomous decision of Pharaoh and as caused by God was never an issue in Biblical times, according to Cassuto and other commentaries; to see here, a problem between free will and predestination smacks of over-interpreting the texts.
While the above is largely accurate when considering certain aspects of the issue, TaNaKh remains proof that ancient Israel was acutely aware of life’s hard questions.
The issue raised by “the hardening of the heart” of Pharaoh is to what point one is responsible for what one is and until what point one can change who they are.
“The sacred authors,” notes Biblical commentator James Plastara, “have not attempted to answer these questions in the exodus narrative.” Their merit is rooted in their “clearly delineated the problem.”
The TaNaKh is, in considerable measure, the cumulative result of persons asking questions about identity and survival, universal questions.
Much of what makes the TaNaKh resilient to the passing of time is that while it recognized the timelessness of the issues it touched, it was acutely aware of the transcience of all answers. It certainly avoided the ideological (or dogmatic) trap into which those who don’t read the Scriptures critically invariably seem to fall.
One of the failures of Biblical education in schools- religious and non-religious- is to “manufacture” answers where there are none, instead of opening a conversation where that’s precisely what the text is begging for.
The Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is possessed of a ruthless and stubborn character. He is an egocentric, unemotional human being, devoid of all compassion, incapable of feeling the pain of others, shame, or guilt.
As we read in chapter 7, verse 13 of the Book Exodus:
Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.’
The metaphor is one of the heart, as being so surrounded by fat that the capacity for reflection, self-examination, and unbiased judgments about good and evil is shut out. In the words of the late biblical scholar rabbi Nahum M. Sarna, “hardening of the heart” becomes synonymous with numbing the soul, a condition of moral atrophy.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm explained:
“What the biblical text stresses here is one of the most fundamental laws of human behavior. Every evil act tends to harden man’s heart, that is, to deaden it. Every good act tends to soften it, to make it more alive. The more a man’s heart hardens, the less freedom he has to change; the more he is determined already by previous actions. But there comes a point of no return, when man’s heart has become so hardened and so deadened that he has lost the possibility of freedom, when he is forced to go on and on until the unavoidable end, which is, in the last analysis, his own physical or spiritual destruction.
The story of Pharaoh’s hardening of the heart is only the poetic expression of what we can observe every day if we look at our own development and that of others.”
In Martin Buber’s memorable imagery:
“Each of us is encased in an armor whose task is to ward off signs. Signs happen to us without respite; living means being addressed; we need only to present ourselves and perceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us; the soundless thundering threatens us with annihilation, and we perfect the defense apparatus from generation to generation. All our knowledge assures us, “Be calm; everything happens as it must happen, but nothing is directed at you. You are not meant; it is just ‘the world’; you can experience it as you like, but whatever you make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet.”
Each of us is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments that penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility. And when such a moment has imposed itself on us, and we then take notice and ask ourselves, “Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of the kind I meet every day?” then we may reply to ourselves, “Nothing particular, indeed, it is like this every day, only we are not there every day.”
The signs of address are not something extraordinary, something that steps out of the order of things; they are just what goes on time and again, just what goes on in any case, and the address adds nothing. […] What occurs to me addresses me. In what happens to me the world-happening addresses me.”