Heavy Hearted

 

In this week’s reading, the Egyptian king (Pharaoh) is frequently said to have “hardened his heart” in various permutations. An old tradition holds that this phrase means “to make stubborn.” Thus, God tells Moses to go in to talk to Pharaoh, but He warns Moses in advance that this will do no good. God has hardened the hearts of Pharaoh and his advisors—or elsewhere, simply has a hard heart— so they will continue in their stubborn refusal to let the Israelites depart (Exodus 8:11, 28; 9:7; 13:15 etc.).

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 “spirit” in English). As for the Hebrew roots “heavy” or “harden” (Heb. k-b-d or k-sh-h,), these sometimes mean “dull,” including with regard to bodily parts. 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, among other things, to make the bodily organ poorly functional, if at all. In fact, Pharaoh’s heart was said to be undiscerning long before God did anything to his heart (see Exodus 7:13-14). What God sometimes did subsequently was simply to maintain him in this same state of ignorance.

All this does seem to fit well with the context of the exodus. 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 subsequently 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 of course not to say that God did not aid in this state of affairs. He did go on to keep Pharaoh’s heart undiscerning, but this is somewhat different from making him stubborn.

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 of Hebrew, this sounds like the common word for “send,” shalaḥ. 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, in biblical Hebrew shalleaḥ is the intensive form (the pi‘el) of the root sh-l-ḥ. It doesn’t so much 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.

Shabbat shalom!