Un-hardening the Heart

and the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have their request. Therefore they plundered the Egyptians. Exodus 12:36  NASB

Let them have – Imagine you’re an Egyptian.  You’ve just had your crops ruined, your water made undrinkable, your livestock destroyed, and your sons killed.  And it’s all because some foreigners occupy part of your country and serve some foreign god.  Finally, mercifully, they are about to leave.  But first they come to you and say, “Oh, by the way, give us all your gold and silver and anything else of value.”  How do you respond?  Well, I suppose you’re ready to do anything to get rid of these people, but if you give them all your valuable assets, what will you have left to start over?  Your whole country is an economic disaster.  And how would you feel about this “request”?  Happy?  If you did, it would probably be the first time in human history that a once-powerful nation (the most powerful in the world at the time) willingly gave its final possessions to a conquering group of foreigners.  You might do it just to get free from them, but I doubt very much you’d be pleased to do so.

Except in this instance God gets involved.  The verse says God gave the people of Israel “favor” in the eyes of their previous oppressors.  The word is ḥēn.  You’ll recognize it from the famous passage in Exodus 34:6 where is it usually translated “grace,” a foundational characteristic of God.  Yamauchi writes: “The verb ḥānan depicts a heartfelt response by someone who has something to give to one who has a need.”^[1]  But that hardly seems to be the case here.  Why would the Israelites be “in need” of the assets of the Egyptians?  They are going off into the desert.  Oh, it happens that later on these metals will be used to build the tabernacle, but they don’t know that yet.  And, furthermore, how likely is it that the Egyptians would have a “heartfelt” response to their once-slave destroyers.  “Oh, gee, we’re so sorry that we treated you so badly and killed your people and enslaved you for hundreds of years, so we’d like to make reparations.  Here, take our money.”  Does that sound reasonable to you?  Is there any incident in human history where this has happened (other than here, of course)?  Can I suggest to you that this is also a divine miracle, the last of the miracles of the exodus?  If it were not for God’s intervention in the hearts of the Egyptians, I cannot imagine that this would have happened.

The verb for “let them have” suggests this miracle hidden in the grammar.  The root verb is šāʾal, “to ask, to inquire, to borrow, to beg.”  “Borrow” and “beg” don’t fit here.  The Israelites are not borrowing.  They’re taking.  And they aren’t begging.  But they did ask.  The miracle is in the form of the verb, a Hiphil.  “The Hiphil stem is generally used to express causative action in active voice. In many cases the noun derived from the same root is the object or result of the Hiphil verb associated with that root. For example, the Hiphil verb הִמְטִיר means ‘to cause to rain down’; the noun מָטָר means ‘rain’.”[2]  In this case, the Egyptians didn’t “let them have” the goods.  They were caused to give them the goods.  Without God’s intervention, it wouldn’t have happened.  The act wasn’t voluntary.  It was spiritually compelled.  God put grace into the hearts of the Egyptians and caused them to give away  their valuables.  When they woke up from this “spiritual condition” a few days later, they sent the army to either destroy or recapture these ex-slaves, and we know how that ended.  This the counter to God “hardening” Pharoah’s heart, which in most cases simply means that God removed the ethical covering from Pharoah so that his true character took control.  Perhaps in the case of the Egyptians, God removes their animosity so that the natural compassion for others comes forward.

It would have been easy for the narrator to describe the resentful compliance of the Egyptians.  We would have understood that.  It would have been easy to recount the event as the last straw to get rid of these people.  We would have understood that too.  But to think that the Egyptians showed “favor” to these destroyers and willingly gave them all their valuables, no, that doesn’t make any sense—unless it’s divinely initiated.  You never know what you might find in the grammar.  Not human perspectives, that’s for sure.

Topical Index: favor, ḥēn, grace, ask, šāʾal, let them have, Exodus 12:36

^[1] Yamauchi, E. (1999). 694 חָנַן. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 302). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] https://uhg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stem_hiphil.html#