A Little at a Time
Yet Pharaoh’s heart was [d]hardened, and he did not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. Exodus 7:13 NASB
Was hardened – This verse begins a story that has bothered believers for centuries. If God hardens Pharoah’s heart, then how can Pharoah be held accountable for refusing to let the Israelites leave Egypt? Didn’t God make him reject Moses’ request? Where’s the free will act in all this?
We should note that the theme of hardening the heart occurs twenty times in Exodus. Ten of the twenty refer to man’s character without reference to God’s intervention. Nahum Sarna writes:
The “hardening of the heart” thus expresses a state of arrogant moral degeneracy, unresponsive to reason and incapable of compassion. Pharaoh’s obduracy is self-willed. In it only thereafter that it is attributed to divine causality. This is the biblical way of asserting that the king’s intransigence had by then become habitual and irreversible; his character has become his destiny. He is deprived of the possibility of relenting and is irresistibly impelled to his self-wrought doom.[1]
Jonathan Sacks reminds us that our Western concept of freedom interferes with the way we read this text:
The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon—that we have it either all the time or none of the time—blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. . . Pharaoh is everyman writ large. The rule of the ancient world’s greatest empire, he ruled everyone but himself. It was not the Hebrews but he who was the real slave: to his obstinate insistence that he, not God, ruled history.[2]
Gradual. The text suggests that Pharaoh is responsible for the first of these acts of rejection. But slowly, over time, his obstinance grows to the point where it is no longer possible for him to change. And God isn’t done with the lesson. So, God intervenes and makes sure that the full scope of His authority is visible to the Egyptians (and the Hebrews). He finishes the job despite the pleadings of Pharaoh’s own magicians and populace.
Sacks is right. A little at a time—until one day reversal is impossible. Pharaoh became addicted to his own power. His slavery was but a model of our own, one little bit at a time.
Topical Index: hardened, heart, slavery, Exodus 7:13
[1] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), p. 23.
[2] Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid, 2010), p. 50.
