The necessity of a hardened heart
When contrition is just another manipulation.
The book of Exodus is a big, well-known story, even if you think you’re ignorant of Bible tales. My childhood religious upbringing had been haphazard at best and then abruptly halted when I hit ten, and I hadn’t cracked open a Bible much even as an adult, yet I knew all about Moses freeing the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. Because of what used to be referred to as our Judeo-Christian heritage, the Moses story is central to American pop culture. It’s from Exodus that we get the Ten Commandments and the metaphors of parting the Red Sea, manna from heaven, and golden idols. Moses’ tale is the original hero’s journey, with an unlikely protagonist called to beat impossible odds.
Exodus is a deceptively simple story, too: Moses travels to Egypt, demands Pharaoh let his people go, and then bests Pharaoh when the tyrannical ruler refuses his request, leading the Israelites to freedom.
When God calls Moses to this incredible task, he says he will perform various miracles, all of which will essentially trump Pharaoh’s own rule backed by a pantheistic suite of Egyptian gods. There’s also something curious in what God promises to do:
And the Lord said to Moses, ‘When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.’ (Exodus 4:21 NKJV, my emphasis)
Church leaders and church ladies alike have been flummoxed by this perplexing puzzle: Why does God harden Pharaoh’s heart? If the Almighty has the power to alter Pharaoh’s feelings, shouldn’t he make him nicer, not more evil?
The answer is no.
God had to harden Pharoah’s heart to keep him from using contrition as a manipulation tactic.
Think of the classic domestic abuse dynamic. Women—and it often is women, but of course not always—remain with their abusive husbands not because they like the hurling force of his beatings but for the nice times, the heady intensity of all that spirit and energy turned into rushing love and promises and sweetness. Every single smack across a woman’s face was preceded by a few caressing strokes across her cheek.
It’s in our human nature to forgive and forget. Those in power—whether petty tyrant in the home or colossal tyrant over a kingdom—take unfair advantage of the human capacity to acquiesce, to relent, to let bygones be bygones.
If God hadn’t hardened Pharaoh’s heart, the Israelites would never have followed Moses.
They’d have remained enslaved forever.
In the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, notice how God instructs Moses specifically to take the long way out, as the shorter route is the scene of a war:
Then it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, “Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea. (13:17-18, my emphasis)
When faced with the possibility of being drawn into a war, the Israelites will return to slavery instead. Perhaps that’s understandable; war is hell. But then, as soon as circumstances on their journey got rough, they immediately wanted to go back to Egypt anyway…
Through Moses, God had performed divine miracles, delivering them out of the hands of Pharaoh. He had also orchestrated the ultimate act:
Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. (14:21-22)
All that still wasn’t enough for them.
God provides his people with water to drink on their journey, yet early on, they’re already doubting the mission, the “whole congregation” complaining and turning against Moses (16:2). They cry out:
Oh, that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger (16:3).
The children of Israel seem incapable of feeding themselves, so accustomed had they become to lives as slaves.
In a time period in which people naturally and routinely lived off of the land.
Now, yes, they were refugees and not settled people. But still. They’re saying here they’d rather have died as slaves with their bellies full than starve as free men and women.
Think about that for a moment.
The Israelites preferred slavery, where food is a given, to freedom, which means providing for themselves.
In Exodus, God is a generous provider, granting them manna (bread) from heaven and meat (quail) that wanders right into their campsite—food they don’t have to work to obtain.
The story goes on in that same seesaw manner, with God providing and the Israelites pacified for only a short time before they look for easy living again.
If God had not hardened Pharaoh’s heart, these people simply wouldn’t have followed Moses out of Egypt. If Pharaoh had relented with the beatings, increased their food rations, or eased up on their toil, the Israelites would have remained. If Pharaoh had simply held off from pursuing them across the Red Sea, maybe they’d have threatened to return even earlier. If God hadn’t rained free food down upon them, they might have gone back once faced with the need to fend for themselves.
After the dust settled on their exodus, they might have even felt bad for Pharaoh, thinking, he wasn’t such a terrible tyrant after all, right?
Maybe that’s why God took care of Pharaoh.
Did he die when the Red Sea rushed back in?
And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and when the morning appeared, the sea returned to its full depth, while the Egyptians were fleeing into it. So the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. Then the waters returned and covered the chariots, the horsemen, and all the army of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them. Not so much as one of them remained. (14:27-28)
Not so much as one of them remained. That seems to imply the Red Sea rushing back into itself killed Pharaoh along with his army. In the Hollywood version of the story, Yul Brynner as Pharaoh rides out with the troops, but ever the coward, he stops short of following them into the parted sea, proclaiming, “This is work for a butcher, not a pharaoh.”
That fits the fictionalized character created for the movie, and it’s not the only liberty Hollywood directors took with the story. However, Pharaoh’s death is a matter of debate among religious scholars, as both Biblical and supporting texts are ambiguous.
Let’s assume he did perish. Could we call that a just execution?
Larry Tauber of the Substack As a Jew... would say yes. He draws a parallel between the Pharaoh of Moses’ time and The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, eliminated by American forces this spring as part of Operation Epic Fury. Referring to the commentary of Rabbenu Bahya, Tauber writes:
Pharaoh […] had already committed such terrible crimes, most notably the decree that Hebrew infants be murdered, that he had forfeited the right to repent. At some point, evil crosses a threshold. In that spirit we might ask: if Hitler—may his name be erased—had suddenly repented at the end of the war after murdering six million Jews, could forgiveness have been granted? Some might say yes. Judaism does not.
That’s key: At some point, evil crosses a threshold. The Israelites may have been hardwired to accept their slave status in exchange for crumbs from Pharaoh’s table, and maybe he could have been redeemed in the midst of their tendency to acquiesce. But when Pharaoh ordered the slaughter of every first-born Israelite, he forfeited the right to repent.
Pharoah’s brutal decree had given birth to Moses’ origin story, for his mother saved Moses from the goon squad; she set him into a basket to float down the Nile. Pharaoh’s own daughter retrieved the infant Moses, becoming his surrogate mother.
The link between Moses’ salvation and the Israelites’ deliverance was Pharaoh’s evil.
God wasn’t going to let Pharaoh’s contrition keep the Israelites beholden to him.
It’s true whether Pharaoh’s contrition was something he would have authentically felt or just used as a ploy.
Think about our modern domestic abusers again. They might truly feel contrite and loving in the moments when they’re gentle, caressing, and kind. They might even switch so fully as to put their loved ones up on a pedestal, an experience that can feel dizzying, as it fools you. Imagine being elevated from slave to goddess in one swooping gesture.
What if Pharaoh instituted a “slave of the day” program, letting a slave chosen by lottery each day dine at his own table?
You can see how effective contrition can be at keeping chains in place.
So why didn’t God harden the Hebrews’ hearts instead? Why didn’t he turn them fully against Pharaoh, so they’d never, ever want to go back?
That would seem like exactly what the hurt person in the relationship needs to do in order to stop acquiescing. For an example, I turn your attention to this 1981 song by Quarterflash and its lyrics about a woman who hardens her heart and swallows her tears in order to leave a lover who’s hurting her. (It’s also a fabulous take on the surreal genre that is the eighties music video, complete with a flamethrower-wielding gentleman in a tux. 💖)
However, hardening the Hebrews’ hearts would have put the burden back on the victims to change on their own in the middle of the very circumstances that had conditioned them into dependency on Pharoah in the first place.
It was too much to ask, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Why not?
