And Pharaoh's Heart Hardened
A Brief Exegesis on Power and Exodus
Few biblical characters stand out for their obstinance in the face of the divine more than Pharaoh. Pharaoh within the Judeo-Christian tradition has stood for oppression, tyranny, and domination. He’s one of the earliest unjust masters of the Hebrews and his legacy casts a long shadow across their history.
One thing which has always stood out to me (and many other commentators) is the “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart. Not just his hardening, but the one who hardens Pharaoh’s heart. The wording God uses telling Moses how He will free his people — how God will harden Pharaoh’s heart — never sat right with me when I was young. It was in fact one of the many marks I held against God in my repulsion towards Christianity. God seemed more like a puppet master rather than a loving father. Why would God make Pharaoh unwilling to let his people go?
One would be forgiven reading the story as that of an omniscient toddler having a temper tantrum giving himself an excuse to exhibit his power against a despotic ruler. The Egyptian people must suffer God’s plagues of frogs and boils and locusts while their ruler, the only one who can stop the ruin, is unable to because his will has been fixed in place by the cosmos for God’s splendor. This all seems to be part of a perverse drama for God’s entertainment.
The story of Exodus is fortunately more complex than that. There are many ways in which one can approach Exodus. Volumes have been written on the burning bush, the plagues, and the baby in the reeds. During my days of unemployment I’ve been doing more reading of the scriptures and have had many thoughts on Exodus. The story has resonated with my readings of Marx, black radical politics, and virtue-ethics. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is a commentary on what happens to the human being when they ignore their essential being of being powerless and how that turn from reality withers our capacity to make moral choices.
The Weakness of Moses
Our character study of Pharaoh must begin with Moses. By far the greatest difference lies in the condition of their hearts. We can understand their hearts by how both react in their first encounter with God.
Moses first encounters God in the form of a burning bush crying for him “Moses, Moses!” (Exodus 3:4). Biblical scholar Ellen F. Davis suggests that the lack of punctuation in the Hebrew frames God almost as calling for help — as though he’s crying for Moses to share with him the burden of the oppressed.1 Moses turns from the ordinary business of life towards God’s cry. This is one of the most important signs that Moses’s heart is open. It is open not only to God, but also the cry of his people, ignored and unheard by the Egyptian aristocracy.
Of course, Moses’s heart is not completely open. Moses fears returning to Egypt and confronting the ruler of the civilized world and fears that God’s power will not be enough against Pharaoh. He furnishes four objections against God’s command that Moses lead his people out of Egypt. His objections range from the serious (“Who am I [a member of an oppressed and poor people] to bring your people out”) to the frivolous (“I am a terrible public speaker.”) Assurances from God himself are insufficient to prod Moses forward.
I find it interesting that the writer(s) of Exodus avoid framing the relationship between God and Moses as simply one between an obedient slave and his master. Instead, there’s give-and-take, a compromise. God not only must assure Moses that he is capable of what must be done but even says that Aaron can speak on his behalf. This is a relationship founded not on obedience but trust, a partnership between man and God. This theme of partnership comes up again and again in God’s dealings with the Jews in the Wilderness. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The Brittleness of Pharaoh
Contrast Moses’s encounter with God with that of Pharaoh. The first thing Pharaoh says when confronted by Moses and Aaron’s claims that they are God’s emissaries demanding he let his people go is “Who is the Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord.” (5:2) Unlike Moses, Pharaoh does not know God nor does he have any desire to. He can’t afford to know God. Pharaoh states bluntly that the Israelites have grown so numerous that they have become Egypt’s primary labor force (5:5). Indeed out of spitefulness for the unknown god Pharaoh commands the Israelites’ slave-drivers to wring even more work out of his slaves (5:6-14). When Moses heard God cry out for him, he dropped everything to see him. When the Jews cried out for Pharaoh’s mercy, he told them to get back to work (5:15-17).
What explains these differences of heart? I believe some of it has to do with Pharaoh’s social position as Pharaoh. In the world of the Near East, the king was considered not only the undisputed ruler but also god of his people. And Egypt was the mightiest civilization in the known world. Pharaoh can’t fathom another being more powerful than him beyond the actual gods of Egypt. The notion that an old man of a conquered people could “command” him to release his civilization’s primary labor force — upon which all Egypt’s riches are based — on behalf of a god of whom he’s never heard would not only be laughable but inconceivable. It would be analogous to a freedman at the height of the Cotton Kingdom demanding President John Tyler to abolish slavery and cede all planter land to the slaves.
There’s a reason why we only know Pharaoh not by his name but by his title. Pharaoh’s wealth, his sense of personality, is tied up entirely in his wealth and power over others. To cede his wealth would be tantamount to ceding his personhood. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened because it has to be hardened in order for him to live with himself. Pharaoh’s heart hardens in order to muffle the cries of those he oppresses. He cherishes his power more than he fears God.
But now look at Moses’s position. Moses is identified with the outcast and the marginalized of Egyptian society. Moses’s heart is open and therefore sensitive to the sobs and sighs of his people. And because his heart is open to their cries it is also open to God. Hence why Jesus says “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). We even find secular grounding for this reading in Marx’s analysis of the proletariat as the Universal Class whose suffering and position within the reproduction of society aligns their emancipatory interests with the general interests of mankind as a whole.2 But again, we get ahead of ourselves. Just keep in mind that Moses has a clearer sight and mind than Pharaoh.
Pharaoh cannot apprehend the enormity of what he’s dealing with. He’s being unreasonable. But what is reason? Reason, simply, is nothing more than regard for and openness to reality.3 And what is this reality? The reality that he — like Moses and the people whom he oppresses — are, at the end of it all, powerless. The god whom Pharaoh meets and knows nothing of is not just Ra or Baal or Mithra, one of many exceptional beings occupying the same genus of godhood. He is Creator. A being so powerful no language is capable of properly describing him. He is who he is (Exodus 3:14). Moses’s heart is open and able to comprehend, however imperfectly, who he’s dealing with. Pharaoh, on the other hand, is unable to see reality for what it is because he clings to wealth and status.
Let’s take for instance God’s wonders and signs. It’s notable that God does not describe the ten plagues he visits upon Egypt as punishments, but as wonders and signs (4:5). The raining down of frogs and unleashing of locusts are in the same category as the burning bush. God above all desires to be known by us. But our sensitivity to his signs depends on our sensitivity to those around us. All it took for Moses to recognize God was a burning bush. But for Pharaoh, every sign God put forward — beginning with the transformation of Moses’s staff into a snake and ending with the death of every firstborn son of Egypt — only further hardens Pharaoh’s heart.
We must ultimately interpret the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as what happens to someone when they turn away from their fellow man. Love is the act of seeing someone as an equal — not an extension of your will, nor an alienated Other, but a separate sphere of consciousness whose hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties are just as real as yours. It’s a force that weathers hierarchy, inequality, and subordination. Love reveals that interiority that all people possess and unveils the hidden life. It closes the gap between you and the stranger and reveals both of you for what you are — made in the image of God.
Pharaoh damns himself by ignoring the Hebrew cry for freedom and takes his subjects down with him. The writer of Exodus makes explicit that Pharaoh’s administrators and the Egyptian people are not wicked. Pharaoh’s officials beg him to see that the ensnarement of God’s people is ruining the nation (10:7). But Pharaoh can no longer exercise the moral reason necessary to protect his people and tragically bears the ultimate cost for his ego — his first-born son.
Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites is two-fold. The Egyptians bear the cost of his pride. The objectification of the Israelites ultimately objectifies — hardens the heart — of the oppressors. The closest analogue to this two-fold alienation is American slavery. Southern planters reduced their slaves as mere “hands” in their account books. The planters objectified the slaves and disrespected their personhood at every moment of their bondage and it came with a terrible cost.
The south was engulfed in a pungent smog of paranoia and fear. Just as the Israelites heavily outnumbered the Egyptians, so too did the slaves outnumber whites in seventeenth-century Barbados and the nineteenth-century Mississippi Delta. This numeric gulf was bridged by white fantasies of bloody revolts, kidnappings, rapes, and barbarous cruelty.4 The planter elite, terrified of their slaves, could not imagine a south whose wealth was not built on their backs. Even worse, they couldn’t even entertain the possibility of what their slaves would do to them without shackles and chains to put them in place. And so, like Pharaoh, the planters confronted their fear by doubling down, expanding operations, and instituting harsher slave codes.
The Withering of Power
Aristotle writes in the Politics that a human without a community is like a hand without a body — a hand without a body is not properly speaking a hand; a person without a community cannot be a full human being. Humans as children need the security of love, the knowledge that whatever their mistakes or achievements, they are loved by others. That space is what allows one to grow into becoming a fully actualized human being. Without that love, fear — the absence of love — becomes an open maw within us. We try to satisfy the maw by indulging in the fear and further opening the chasm. The heart closes in on itself. It hardens.
Pharaoh was the most powerful ruler in the known world. Yet that power over others blinded him from reality: that he was only human. The refusal to grasp this simple idea has led so many powerful people to become inhuman. When we speak of people being made in the image of God we usually speak in the singular tense — man, not men, made in His image. This is because we are joined in a singular process. We are literally all in this together. When we abuse and oppress others we pervert our social nature and diminish our humanity.
Moses gains his humanity where Pharaoh loses his in his admission of being a single, powerless human being who owes everything to God and his community. Moses embraces God and community and comes out the better. He doesn’t need riches. The tighter Pharaoh clings to the sinews of power, the more he alienates himself from his closest advisors and the Egyptian people. The more signs God displays to Pharaoh that He Is in fact Who He Is, the further Pharaoh recedes into himself. Pharaoh is ultimately terrified of who he ultimately is without power over others. To admit dependence on God is tantamount to defeat in Pharaoh’s eyes, and defeat to the one gripped by fear might as well be the end of the world. Pharaoh’s fear and inhumanity cripples his moral agency and be the leader his people need him to be.
God is Love
The Sunshine Metaphor is a common metaphor that describes the contrast between Moses and Pharaoh. Moses’s heart is butter while Pharaoh’s heart is clay. When the sun shines on butter it melts, but on clay it hardens. This metaphor tells most of but not the whole story. For one of the ingredients that makes a man’s heart butter or clay is power. Power at once reveals and changes one’s heart. Powerless Moses found his sense of self-worth in his love for his people and God while Powerful Pharaoh identified himself with his power over others. Where the heart finds strength in acknowledging its weakness and leaning on others, it withers when turned inward and away. Moses could turn to God because he understood that God loved him despite his weakness; Pharaoh couldn’t because he thought love was something taken, not given.
We come back finally to why Pharaoh’s first word to Moses was that he did not know God. Pharaoh was not mocking Moses and Aaron — he was telling the truth. His heart hardened in the face of his slaves’ sobs of pain and sung laments. Pharaoh could not love his subjects. And as John says, ‘He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’
Davis, Ellen. Opening Israel’s Scriptures. Oxford University Press. 44.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. The Marx-Engels Reader. W.W. Norton Company. 64.
Pieper, Josef. The Four Cardinal Virtues. University of Notre Dame Press. 9.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press. 73-96.