![]() God knows the hearts of humans and can anticipate their responses, a sobering thought echoed throughout the Bible (see Jeremiah 17:10). In Moses’ commissioning (Exodus 3-6), God first says he “knows” Pharaoh will resist the demand to let the Israelites go (Exodus 3:19-20), so God says that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 4:21 and 7:3). Otherwise you’ll short-circuit the experience the author wants you to go through. To answer this question you have to be patient, and read the story slowly and in sequence. Who is really behind all this evil? And what does this story tell us about God’s relationship to evil at other times in history, or in our own lives? God has to respond.Ī common question readers have about this story, concerns the repeated theme of Pharaoh’s “hard heart.” Sometimes we’re told Pharaoh hardens his heart against God, but other times we read that God hardens his heart. The Egyptian empire and its Pharaoh is the Babylon of Genesis chapter 11 on steroids. This is a horrific situation, and it’s the Bible’s diagnosis of the human condition in corporate terms. As the story develops, Pharaoh even places his own reputation and pride above the well-being of his own people. You get an Egypt building its wealth and security on the backs of an abused, oppressed, and enslaved Israel. Pharaoh is what happens when an entire nation redefines good and evil apart from God’s wisdom. He embodies the strange and tragic turn the human heart can take when one person or society places their own values and well-being above another person or society. This king, or sequence of kings, is the epitome of human evil. Rather, he wants us to see Pharaoh as an archetype of the pattern of human rebellion that began in the garden and culminated in Babylon (Genesis 3-11). ![]() The author doesn’t want us to focus on one single king. It raises the interesting question of why the author doesn’t actually name the Pharaoh who opposed Moses (was he Thutmose II or III, or Ramses I or II?). If you pay attention, you’ll see that this royal title refers to a sequence of Egyptian kings over many generations. Pharoah is not one single king in Exodus.
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