The Paradox of Pharaoh’s Heart: Free Will, Divine Intervention, and the Path to Redemption

January 22, 2025
Seaside Pier and Mountain Views at Eilat's Red Sea Coast (Shutterstock.com)
Seaside Pier and Mountain Views at Eilat's Red Sea Coast (Shutterstock.com)

Have you ever felt trapped by your own past decisions? Perhaps it was a small habit that grew into an addiction, or a series of white lies that spun into a web of deception too tangled to unravel. At what point do our choices stop being choices and become chains? This age-old question of free will and moral responsibility comes into sharp focus in one of the Bible’s most perplexing narratives: God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart during the Exodus from Egypt.

The biblical text repeatedly highlights this tension. At times, we read that “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened” (Exodus 7:13), or that “he hardened his heart” (Exodus 8:11), suggesting his own stubborn choice. But God had already declared:

Indeed, as the story goes on the text repeatedly attributes the hardening of Pharoah’s heart to God.

This progression raises profound questions: How could God command Pharaoh to free the Israelites while actively hardening his heart against doing so? Was Pharaoh truly deserving of punishment if God prevented him from making the right choice? The seeming contradiction tests our understanding of free will, divine justice, and the consequences of our moral choices.

Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), one of Judaism’s most influential philosophers and legal scholars, addresses this paradox head-on. He explains that Pharaoh’s initial choices to oppress the Israelites and reject divine authority were made entirely of his own free will. The hardening of his heart came as a divine punishment for these freely chosen actions. According to Maimonides, when someone commits severe transgressions, one form of divine justice is the withdrawal of the opportunity for repentance. This punishment ensures that the sinner will face the full consequences of their earlier choices. In Pharaoh’s case, his previous cruelty and defiance of God led to this severe decree.

Rabbi Obadiah Sforno (1475-1550), the great Italian biblical commentator, adds another crucial dimension to our understanding. He argues that God’s intervention actually served a deeper purpose. Rather than forcing Pharaoh’s hand, the “hardening” prevented him from making a false repentance out of mere pragmatism. By strengthening Pharaoh’s resolve to resist the plagues, God ensured that any eventual change of heart would come from genuine moral recognition rather than simply seeking relief from punishment. This interpretation suggests that divine intervention was actually preserving the authenticity of Pharaoh’s moral choices instead of negating them.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and leading Jewish philosopher, brings these insights together with a powerful observation about the nature of freedom itself. He suggests that true freedom isn’t a static state but a dynamic process that we either cultivate or diminish through our choices. Pharaoh’s story demonstrates how the repeated choice to enslave others ultimately enslaved him to his own corrupt values, creating a prison of his own making. Each choice to ignore moral truth made it harder to recognize that truth in the future.

The lesson for us today is both sobering and empowering: While we always retain the fundamental capacity to choose, each moral decision we make either strengthens or weakens our ability to make similar choices in the future. Just as an athlete’s training decisions today affect their performance capabilities tomorrow, our moral choices shape our future capacity for ethical decision-making. True freedom isn’t just the absence of external constraints but the positive capability to choose what’s right ā€“ a capability that, like any skill, must be developed through consistent practice.

In the end, Pharaoh’s hardened heart serves as a powerful reminder that while the door to change is always open, walking through it becomes increasingly difficult the longer we wait. The time to exercise our moral freedom is always now, before our hearts become hardened by habit and our choices limited by the momentum of our past decisions.

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Shira Schechter

Shira Schechter is the content editor for TheIsraelBible.com and Israel365 Publications. She earned masterā€™s degrees in both Jewish Education and Bible from Yeshiva University. She taught the Hebrew Bible at a high school in New Jersey for eight years before making Aliyah with her family in 2013. Shira joined the Israel365 staff shortly after moving to Israel and contributed significantly to the development and publication of The Israel Bible.

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