In the Exodus story, when God sends Moses back . . .

In the Exodus story, when God sends Moses back to Egypt to demand that Pharaoh free the Hebrew slaves, God tells Moses, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.”  What follows are Ten Plagues—each one increasingly more severe—all because Pharaoh keeps flip-flopping.  He agrees to release the slaves one moment and then changes his mind the next.

Now, according to the story, the reason for this indecisiveness is because Pharaoh’s heart has been hardened.  But wait a minute.  Didn’t God harden Pharaoh’s heart?  Is it really fair that God would cause Pharaoh’s stubbornness, and then turn around and punish him for being so stubborn?  I thought God was supposed to be just.  If you ask me, it hardly seems just to inflict double-digit plagues upon Pharaoh and his fellow Egyptians, when God is the one who hardened Pharaoh’s heart in the first place.

This aspect of the story has always been a little troubling for me, and I suspect for many of you as well.  However, I recently came across an article by Erich Fromm, the renowned psychologist, which helped me to view this story with fresh eyes.  According to Fromm, during the first five plagues, the Bible speaks of Pharaoh as hardening his own heart.  The way the story reads, Pharaoh’s heart “remained hardened,” or “was hardened,” or “he hardened his heart.”  It’s only during the last five plagues that the Bible specifically speaks of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart.

In other words, at the beginning, the decisions that Pharaoh makes are entirely his own.  He could have decided to allow the Hebrew slaves to go, but each time he chooses otherwise.  And every time he repeats that choice, it becomes a little bit less of a free choice and more of a habit.  In effect, the more he hardens his heart, the more rigid and unfeeling it becomes.

The only reason that God gets mentioned in terms of “hardening Pharaoh’s heart” is because God has constructed the human heart in such a way that, when we repeatedly do something, whether for good or for ill, it slowly but steadily becomes a part of our character.  As Fromm explains, “Every evil act tends to harden a person’s heart—that is, to deaden it.  The harder it becomes, the more likely a person’s behavior will already be predetermined by his or her prior choices.  Eventually, the heart becomes so hardened and so dead that the possibility of behaving differently no longer exists.”

That’s a pretty bleak picture of the human condition; and to be honest, I’m not sure that I entirely agree with Fromm’s assessment.  After all, the good news of the gospels is that repentance—a change of heart, if you will—is always possible.

Still, I do agree that consistently choosing cruelty over compassion tends to harden one’s heart, making heartfelt acts of compassion in the future less and less likely.  Of course, the opposite is true as well.  By acting compassionately, over and over again, it eventually becomes second nature for us—as natural as the beating of our own hearts!