Exodus 10:1-13:17
A Heavy Heart
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 advisers, so they will continue in their stubborn refusal to let the Israelites depart.
But stubbornness is probably not the intended meaning 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 to be heavy on something so as to impede its proper functioning, especially with regard to bodily parts. Thus, toward the end of his life Jacob’s eyes “grew heavy” [kabedu] 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”; both words mean to impede the bodily organ’s proper functioning. In fact, Pharaoh’s heart was said to be heavy long before God did anything to him (see Exod 7:13-14). What God did subsequently was simply to keep Pharaoh’s heart from understanding what was really going on.
All this does seem to fit well with the context of the exodus. God made sure that Pharaoh just didn’t realize what was going on. Perhaps he thought that the Nile did not so much turn to blood as to be filled with red algae (as some modern commentators have likewise suggested), so that the water just looked like blood. The algae would then have caused the frogs to flee the Nile’s banks and fill the Egyptians houses, where they died, bringing on an infestation of lice-like vermin; and so on. In short, Pharaoh just didn’t understand the true cause of these happenings; he thought it was just a string of bad luck. This is not to say that God did not aid in this state of affairs. He did keep Pharaoh’s heart undiscerning, but this is somewhat different from making him stubborn.
As to why He didn’t cause Pharaoh to understand things earlier—that is, before the last of the ten plagues—as many commentators, ancient and modern, have suggested, those plagues afflicted not only Pharaoh but all the Egyptians, because all had been complicit in the enslavement and mistreatment of the Israelites for more than 200 years. All ten plagues were their necessary punishment.
One last point, a matter that often confuses native speakers of modern Hebrew. In this week’s reading, Pharaoh keeps refusing to shalleaḥ the people. To modern speakers this sounds like the common word for “send,” sheloaḥ. But why would the Torah be speaking about sending the Israelites anywhere? Wasn’t the whole point just to let them go? After that, they’ll go wherever they go.
Actually, shalleaḥ is an intensive form (the pi‘el) of the root sh-l-ḥ. It doesn’t mean “send” so much as “send forth” or, more simply, “let go.” In other words, it doesn’t tell you where the object of this verb is going to end up, only that it is being released or set free. That’s why “Let me people go…” is an altogether accurate translation shallaḥ et ‘ammi.