On the Hardening of Pharoah's Heart

Exodus 14:4: "Then I will harden Pharaoh's heart, so that he will pursue them; and I will gain honor over Pharaoh and over all his army, that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD."

Romans 9:17-18: "For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth." 18So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires."

Here is a solid non-Calvanistic treatment of these difficult passages. As I've mentioned in other postings, I reject as non-scriptual interpetations that erode as individual's free choice, recognizing that such freedom is integral both to morality and to who God is. References to predestination are, in my view, akin to how I raise my children-- by guiding and encouraging them, I predestine them to be good students and good citizens. But, ultimately, the choices they must make are outside of my control. To the commentary in the link, I should also note that the Bible makes a distinction between the heart and the mind and also the will and soul. Moral choices involve an interplay between heart or emotions, mind, will or predisposition, and soul or sense of ethics. The resolution of a moral choice is not merely an act of the heart.

I think this is an example of the usual desperate straw-clutching that apologists indulge in when trying to make an old legend fit their preferred beliefs.

If the author did not want the reader to think that God actively hardened Pharaoh’s heart he could have simply said that God did nothing to stop Pharaoh from hardening his heart. Of course this leads to further awkward questions.

Why did God sit passively by and let Pharaoh harden his heart when at other times he seemed to have no problem with interfering with people’s free will to either avoid something nasty or often to cause something nastier?

One is also led to ask, if Pharaoh was entirely responsible for hardening his own heart, why mention God’s non-participation in this process in the first place?

In passages like this, I agree that there may be special pleading and tailoring to fit a preconceived notion. Another example is Isaiah 40:22, where God "sitteth upon the circle of the earth" is somehow the earth is made to mean a sphere. Having said that, I think there is also a kind of interpretation that goes in the other direction, in which the critics deduce absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods from the Bible because they choose to read it as or more literally that the fundiest fundamentalist. Thus, for example, rather than appreciating the powerful stories of moral choice in the Garden of Eden, human pride in the Tower of Babel, brotherly hate in the Cain and Abel, and so on they fixate for example on whether Genesis 1:19 "means" a 24 hour solar day. Critics also in my view look a factual discrepancies as some kind of blemish on the credability of the Bible, for example, in Ezra 2:15, 454 of Adin's offspring returned from Babylon, whereas according to Nehemiah 7:20, 655 of Adin's children returned from Babylon. This kind of fact checking proves nothing more except the obvious: that copyists made errors. It says nothing about the intrinsic truth of the Bible. So what is the truth of the Bible? What you see of the Bible depends on where you stand. If you start with the assumption that the Bible is filled wth lies, you will see nothing but lies. If think that the Bible is true, then you will find truth. To ask whether the Bible is true or false is akin to asking whether or not the following is true or false:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

These are questions that cannot be answered, except in the context of how one feels and looks at life.