Lecture 13: Interpreting Exodus: Pharaoh's Heart, the Bridegroom of Blood, the Plagues, and the Date

The lecture, section by section

1. Three phrases, one hardening

   What English renders as the hardening of Pharaoh's heart translates three Hebrew expressions: to be strong of heart, the predominant phrase, to be heavy of heart, and to be hard of heart. The heart here is not the organ but the center of the person, will, thinking, and emotion, so the hardening is Pharaoh's settled resistance: his will and mind fixed against releasing Israel, however the signs intensify.

2. Who is the subject?

   Trace the verbs and a coordination appears. Yahweh is the predominant subject: the programmatic statement of Exodus 4:21, I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go, is repeated in chapter 7 and again at the sea in chapter 14, where Yahweh strengthens Pharaoh's heart and the hearts of his soldiers behind him. Three times Moses states plainly that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. And many texts name no agent at all: his heart was hardened. Both things are asserted, and neither cancels the other.

3. Sovereignty that violates no will

   Of the four positions on offer, a mere figure for stubbornness, God's chosen means of humiliating Pharaoh and Egypt's religion, Yahweh confirming what Pharaoh had already determined, and an emphasis on divine sovereignty, Essex takes the last. The narrative is framed at beginning and end by Yahweh's declaration that he will do it; Israel was meant to hear the outcome as God's sovereign design. Yet nowhere does the text present a Pharaoh who longs to relent and is prevented: God does nothing against Pharaoh's volition. Pharaoh is fully responsible, and within God's predetermined plan he could do nothing different. Divine sovereignty in no way negates human responsibility, and, as Essex warns the class with a smile, do not become semi-Pelagian as early as Exodus.

4. The battle of wills, and its end

   The hardening drives the story to its conclusion: a contest between the will of God and the will of Pharaoh that ends in Pharaoh's humiliation at the sea, the loss of his army, and the loss of his labor force. Israel passes from a malevolent master to a benevolent one, out of Pharaoh's service into Yahweh's.

5. Israel, my firstborn

   Just before the strange night at the lodging place, Yahweh gives Moses his message for Pharaoh: Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my son go that he may serve me, and if you refuse, I will kill your son, your firstborn. The sentence prepares for the tenth plague, and it sets the theme for what follows immediately: the death of a son as judgment for resistance to God's will.

6. The bridegroom of blood

   Exodus 4:24 to 26 has drawn dozens of interpretations; Essex gives his own. On the way to Egypt the Lord met Moses and sought to put him to death, judgment, because Moses' own son was uncircumcised. Circumcision is the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, and the father's obedience in it displays the father's faith; yet here is Moses traveling as Yahweh's agent to fulfill that very covenant, Genesis 15 in motion, without having shown his faith in it at home. Zipporah's acting, rather than Moses, implies Moses lay incapacitated; she circumcises the boy, touches him with the foreskin, and calls Moses a bridegroom of blood, words of repulsion at the rite, which may be why it had been left undone. God relents, and Moses can now represent the covenant he bears the sign of. Afterward, chapter 18 shows, Zipporah and the sons returned to her father in Midian and rejoined Moses only after the exodus.

7. Not intensified nature

   Were the plagues natural phenomena turned up loud? No. The first plague resists the reading at once: the Nile became blood, the text says, not something blood-like, and the water in vessels with it. And the tenth defies it absolutely: no natural process selects the firstborn of man and beast in every house in one night. Different explanations have been offered; the text presents supernatural action.

8. Three cycles of three, and then the tenth

   The plague narrative is patterned as deliberately as Genesis 1. Three cycles of three: in the first, Aaron's staff; in the second, no staff; in the third, Moses' staff or hand. The warnings cycle too: plagues one, four, and seven announced to Pharaoh in the morning; two, five, and eight with a warning but no time or place; three, six, and nine with no warning at all, for God owes Pharaoh no notice. Each cycle carries its stated lesson: that you may know that I am Yahweh; that I am in the midst of the land; that there is no one like me in all the earth. And after nine lessons Pharaoh still refuses, until the tenth breaks him, and then seller's remorse sends his army into the sea, removing Egypt's power to strike Israel for a generation. A patterned narration, and a history.

9. The plagues as de-creation

   The plagues also read as judgment in the shape of creation reversed: waters breaking their boundaries, the land overrun, and at the ninth plague the light itself withdrawn, Genesis 1 running backward over one land. What the flood was to the whole world, the plagues were to Egypt, the covenant regularity of Genesis 8 locally suspended in judgment. As for the popular chart matching each plague to a specific Egyptian god, Essex counsels care: the text plainly shows Yahweh's superiority over Egypt's impotent gods in general, but the plague-by-plague correlations rest on extra-biblical material. Possible, yes; certain, no.

10. The date: one verse and simple arithmetic

    Among those who believe an exodus happened at all, the debate is early date against late: 1446 BC or roughly 1260. The early date rests on Scripture's own statement in 1 Kings 6:1, that Solomon began the temple four hundred eighty years after Israel came out of Egypt. Kings gives regnal numbers throughout, and no one doubts any of them, until this verse; there is no reason to start. Solomon's fourth year is 966 BC by broad agreement; add four hundred eighty and the exodus falls at 1446, add the four hundred thirty years of the sojourn and Jacob's descent lands at 1876, and the whole chronology of the Old Testament hangs together. Essex is cheerfully dogmatic: he will die for a fifteenth-century date, and expects Moses' millennial seminar on the Pentateuch to vindicate him.

11. The route: strong on when, careful on where

    On geography Essex holds the traditional southern route: from Goshen at the delta's eastern edge, the crossing at one of the great Bitter Lakes, waters some fourteen miles long and three wide, ample to drown an army, and Sinai at the southern tip of the peninsula. The Hebrew text never says Red Sea; it is the Sea of Reeds. Northern, central, and far-southern proposals exist, and the itinerary of place names Israel later recorded can rarely be pinned to the map today, so he holds the route with a lighter grip than the date: the when is stated in Scripture; the where is reconstructed.

12. Preaching the two halves of Exodus

    For the preacher, Exodus divides by literature. Chapters 1 through 18, with the golden calf narrative of 32 through 34 and the tabernacle construction of 35 through 40, are historical narrative: everything said about preaching Genesis narrative applies. Chapters 19 through 31 are legal literature, and the course defers the great question, the law's relation to the Christian believer, to the end of the Torah, where it belongs.

1. Pharaoh was fully responsible, and within God's plan he could do nothing different. How do you hold divine sovereignty and human responsibility together without letting go of either?

2. Moses was carrying God's mission abroad while neglecting the covenant sign at home. Where is the same gap possible in a believer's life, and why does God take it so seriously?

3. Nine plagues were theology lessons Pharaoh refused. What is the difference between being shown who God is and submitting to him, and where have you seen knowledge fail to become surrender?