Pharaoh’s Heavy Heart

Among the not-so-brilliant sermons I’ve heard over the years was one about this week’s Torah reading, Bo’. “The Almighty,” the rabbi began, “says to Moses, bo’ el par‘oh, ‘Come to Pharaoh.’ He doesn’t say ‘Go to Pharaoh’— bo’ actually means ‘come.’ He’s making the point that He is present even at the very embodiment of evil, Pharaoh himself; ‘Come here,’ he says to Moses, ‘I will be here to welcome you even here.’”

 

Truly a nice thought, but not entirely accurate. In many European languages, there is a handy verb like “come”— kommen, venir, venire, prixodit’ and so forth—that regularly describes movement in the direction of the speaker. So in a sense, when I say ‘Come here,” the here is unnecessary: come already indicates motion toward me. But Hebrew bo’ doesn’t tell you anything about the direction of the movement; it simply means “enter, go into.” So its opposite is the Hebrew verb yatsa, “exit, go out,” hence the biblical “Blessed are you when you go in, blessed are you when you go out” (Deut 28:6). In this week’s reading, all that God really says to Moses in this first verse is: “Go in to where Pharaoh is…”

 

The rest of this sentence raises another interesting linguistic question. God says, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his courtiers…” What does the Torah mean by saying that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart? A very old tradition holds that this phrase means “to make stubborn.” God tells Moses to go in to talk to Pharaoh, but He warns Moses in advance that this will do no good: He has hardened the hearts of Pharaoh and his advisors, so they will continue in their stubborn refusal to let the Israelites depart.

 

But this is not the only possibly understanding of Pharaoh’s “heavy heart.” To begin with, it should be pointed out that “heart” in Hebrew is, among other things, the organ of thought (more or less corresponding to the way we use “mind” or “brain” in English). As for the Hebrew root “heavy,” k-b-d, it sometimes means “dull,” especially with regard to bodily parts. Toward the end of his life, Jacob’s eyes “grew heavy with old age; he could not see.”  Isaiah says, “Make this people’s heart fat (sh-m-n), and make their ears heavy (k-b-d), and close up (sh-‘-h) their eyes, so that they won’t see with their eyes or hear with their ears or understand with their hearts” (Isa 6:10). Making someone’s heart “fat” is, like making someone’s ears “heavy,” to make it undiscerning.

 

And this does seem to fit well with the context of the exodus. Pharaoh just doesn’t realize what’s going on. He thinks (and some modern commentators have followed him in this line of thought) that the Nile did not so much turn to blood as to be filled with red algae, so that the water just looked like blood; this caused the frogs to flee the Nile’s banks; and so on. In short, he just didn’t understand the true cause of these happenings; he thought it was just a string of bad luck. This is of course not to say that God did not aid in this state of affairs. He did make Pharaoh’s heart “heavy” or “hard,” but that is somewhat different from making him stubborn.

 

One last point, a matter that often confuses native speakers of modern Hebrew: Pharaoh is refusing to le-shalleaḥ the people. To modern speakers this sounds like the equivalent of the common word for “to send,” lishloaḥ. But where and how is Pharaoh supposed to send Israelites? And who will there be on the other end to receive them? Actually, shalleaḥ is in a different form (the pi‘el) of this same root. It means something closer to “send forth,” that is, it doesn’t tell you where the object of this verb is going to end up, only that it is going out: shalleaḥ really means “release.” That’s why “Let me people go…” is an altogether accurate translation.

 

Shabbat shalom!