Still within the narrative of Moses being sent by God to deliver the Israelites, Exodus 4:21 records the Lord’s word to Moses: “… but I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.” The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is often a difficulty for modern Bible readers. If God can harden Pharaoh’s heart, then He can control human free will. In other words, God could design some people with soft hearts to be saved and others with hardened hearts to be destroyed.
It must be understood that debates like this arise from a modern premise about free will. At the time the book of Exodus was written, the doctrine of free will did not exist. To understand the writer’s intention, we need to approach the ancient way of thinking about God and His actions. In the context of the Ancient Near East—the background of the book of Exodus—any deity was understood to rank higher than human beings. Therefore, a deity was considered more powerful, and one expression of that power was the ability to “control” human actions. In Egyptian mythology, the gods Amun and Ra were described as those who “plant will in the heart of the king” or “strengthen the king’s heart to act.” In Babylon, the god Marduk was often said to “set the mind” of a king to go to war.
From an ancient perspective, the concept of a deity directing a human’s heart was entirely acceptable. But from a modern perspective, it is clear that a king’s decision to wage war comes from his own ambition for power and domination. Therefore, the examples from Egypt and Babylon—which parallel the text of Exodus—are intended to emphasize divine authority above human authority. The core message is authority, not the doctrine that God manipulates someone’s inner state. If God were to “harden” or “soften” a person’s heart absolutely, then human response to God could no longer be called love but coercion. In the case of Pharaoh, his hardness of heart did not arise because God forced it to be hard, but because he had long lived in wickedness, and his heart had become dull.
Thus, the statement “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” is better understood as an affirmation of God’s authority over Pharaoh. It is as though God were saying to Moses: “Even though Pharaoh will reject you in the hardness of his heart, know that I am more powerful than he is. I am in control of the situation.” God exercised control not by “tampering with” Pharaoh’s inner being, but by performing miracles that would eventually compel Pharaoh to acknowledge the reality of His power. And indeed, the end of Pharaoh’s story is his surrender before the power of God. He was struck blow after blow through the plagues God sent. The hardness of heart that he had accumulated little by little—through a lifetime of wicked and cruel choices—left him powerless to change before the calamity came.
Negatively, we can say that Pharaoh was a man who was deeply committed—but committed to the wrong thing. Yet, on the whole, this becomes a valuable lesson for us. If Pharaoh’s hardness of heart was built through a chain of small wicked choices, then we, too, can make the exemplary commitment through a chain of small righteous decisions. We can “harden our hearts” to obey God amid wickedness, by storing up—little by little—choices that align with His will. In the end, everything returns to the choice we make today: Are we storing up thoughts and actions that are right, or the opposite?