Submission
now would have meant prudence, not penitence; and it was against
prudence, not penitence, that he was hardened. Because he had resisted
evidence, experience, and even the testimony of his own magicians, he
was therefore stiffened against the grudging and unworthy concessions
which must otherwise have been wrested from him, as a wild beast will
turn and fly from fire. He was henceforth himself to become an evidence
and a portent; and so "The Lord made strong the heart of Pharaoh, and he
hearkened not unto them" (ix. 12). It was an awful doom, but it is not
open to the attacks so often made upon it. It only means that for him
the last five plagues were not disciplinary, but wholly penal.

Nay, it stops short of asserting even this: they might still have
appealed to his reason; they were only not allowed to crush him by the
agency of terror. Not once is it asserted that God hardened his heart
against any nobler impulse than alarm, and desire to evade danger and
death. We see clearly this meaning in the phrase, when it is applied to
his army entering the Red Sea: "I will make strong the hearts of the
Egyptians, and they shall go in" (xiv. 17). It needed no greater moral
turpitude to pursue the Hebrews over the sands than on the shore, but it
certainly required more hardihood. But the unpursued departure which the
good-will of Egypt refused, their common sense was not allowed to grant.
Callousness was followed by infatuation, as even the pagans felt that
whom God wills to ruin He first drives mad.

This explanation implies that to harden Pharaoh's heart was to inspire
him, not with wickedness, but with nerve.

And as far as the original language helps us at all, it decidedly
supports this view. Three different expressions have been unhappily
rendered by the same English word, to harden; but they may be
discriminated throughout the narrative in Exodus, by the margin of the
Revised Version.

One word, which commonly appears without any marginal explanation, is
the same which is employed elsewhere about "the cause which is too
_hard_ for" minor judges (Deut. i. 17, cf. xv. 18, etc.). Now, this word
is found (vii. 13) in the second threat that "I will harden Pharaoh's
heart," and in the account which was to be given to posterity of how
"Pharaoh hardened himself to let us go" (xiii. 15). And it is said
likewise of Sihon, king of Heshbon, that he "would not let us pass by
him, for the Lord thy God hardened his spir