One of the most perplexing details of the Book of Exodus is that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. In the middle of the Ten Plagues, after Pharaoh has reneged on freeing the Israelites from slavery multiple times because of his own hard heart, the Torah slips in this detail – God is now hardening Pharaoh’s heart.
I’ve always read this as Pharaoh being stuck in a pattern. After imposing cruelty after cruelty, after refusing to listen to reason from Moses and Aaron, and after not being swayed by plagues one through five … it seemed to me that Pharaoh is not even paying attention anymore. Moses and Aaron can plead all they want, God can send any manner of destruction from the heavens, it won’t matter. Pharaoh has tuned out.
I recently learned a new interpretation based on the Hebrew root word kaveid, usually translated as hardened, but which also means heavy.
In the Egyptian death ritual, the actual heart of the deceased was placed on a scale to determine if the person would enter paradise. The heart was believed to record the person’s actions in life and could be weighed at the end of life to determine the person’s virtue.
Putting aside the scientific questions of a heart recording deeds and the weighing of a heart, the Torah is speaking in language the ancients would have understood. They would have known about Egyptian death rituals and the consequences of a heavy heart.
Perhaps Pharaoh’s heart was not hardening – by himself or by God – but it was becoming heavy and weighing down the scales of Pharaoh’s life.
I am drawn to this reading because I like the complexity of our biblical characters. Pharaoh is not a simple villain. In fact, Jewish tradition rehabilitates Pharaoh and places him in the Jonah narrative as the King of Nineveh who actually repents and saves his people from destruction. Once his heart was hard and heavy. In the next incarnation, Pharaoh leads others to redemption.
So Pharaoh, along with our Jewish biblical ancestors, shows self determination in his life choices. The Torah is revolutionary in giving this freedom and responsibility to each individual human being. Life is not governed by remote gods from afar but by the choices we make each day, each moment in our lives.
At the High Holy Days we conjure this image of a scale weighing our deeds and God sitting in judgment. But more important than being judged by God, is our personal spiritual awareness that our choices matter. Big and small choices, daily and long haul decisions do reflect where we are going in life and what kind of person we are.
This was true for Pharaoh and it is true for us.
Shabbat Shalom & Love,
Rabbi Amy