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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · September 3, 1867

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. XXX, No. 12

Infidel Objections to the Bible Answered. No. 11.

God Hardened Pharaoh's Heart.—But I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.—Ex. iv, 21. And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.—Ex. ix, 12.

Pharaoh Hardened his Own Heart.—But when Pharaoh saw that there was respite, he hardened his heart, and hearkened not unto them.—Ex. viii, 15.

On this point Bishop Horne remarks:—

“The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. iv, 21; ix, 16;) has been a fruitful source of malignant cavil with the adversaries of the Bible; some of whom have not hesitated to affirm that this single chapter is sufficient to destroy the authenticity of the entire Scriptures, while others, more decently and speciously, assert that a just God could not punish the Egyptian monarch for a hardness of heart of which he himself was evidently the cause. This is the objection in all its force. Let us now see how little foundation there is for it.

“When we meet with an assertion apparently contrary to all the truth and equity in the world, it is but common justice to any writer, human or divine, to suppose that we mistake his meaning, and that the expression employed to convey it is capable of an interpretation different from that which may at first present itself. We cannot, for a moment, imagine, that God secretly influences a man’s will, or suggests any wicked, stubborn resolution to his mind, and then punishes him for it. We are therefore to consider, by what other means, not incompatible with his nature and attributes, he may be said, in a certain sense, and without impropriety, to harden a man’s heart.

“There are many ways by which we may conceive this effect to be wrought, without running into the absurdity and impiety above-mentioned. The heart may be hardened by those very respites, miracles, and mercies, intended to soften it; for if they do not soften it they will harden it.—God is sometimes said to do that which he permits to be done by others, in the way of judgment and punishment: as when his people rejected his own righteous laws, he is said to have ‘given them’ the idolatrous ones of their heathen neighbors, ‘statutes that were not good.’—The heart may be hardened by his withdrawing that grace it has long resisted; men may be given up to a reprobate mind; as they would not see when they possessed the faculty of sight, the use of that faculty may be taken from them, and they may be abandoned to blindness. But all this is judicial, and supposes previous voluntary wickedness, which it is designed to punish.”—Bishop Horne’s Letters on Infidelity, Vol. vi, p. 481.

“Further, no person who candidly peruses the history of the transactions with Pharaoh, can deny that what the Almighty did to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, had a tendency to soften rather than to harden his heart; especially as it was not until after he had seen the miracles, and after the plagues had ceased, that he hardened himself, and would not suffer the Israelites to depart. The threatened plagues were suspended on a condition with which he refused to comply, and then only were they inflicted. It is, moreover, well known that Hebrew verbs in the Hiphil conjugation signify to permit or to suffer to be done, as well as to cause to be done: hence nothing more is meant, than to leave a man to the bent and tendency of his own disposition. Thus Pharaoh was left, and he is said to have made his own heart stubborn against God. HE sinned yet more and hardened his heart. The proper rendering therefore of Ex. iv, 21, is—I will permit his heart to be so hardened that he will not let the people go. So in Ex. ix, 12, it ought to be translated, Yet the LORD suffered the heart of Pharaoh to be so hardened that he hardened not to them. And a more literal rendering of Ex. ix, 15, 16, would remove the discrepancy which seems at present to exist in our common version which runs thus:—‘For now I will stretch out my hand and smite thee with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth. And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.’

In the original Hebrew, the verbs are in the past tense, and not in the future, as our authorized version improperly expresses them, by which means an apparent contradiction is produced; for neither Pharaoh nor his people were smitten with pestilence, nor was he by any kind of mortality cut off from the earth. The first-born, it is true, were slain by a destroying angel, and Pharaoh himself was drowned in the Red Sea; but there is no reference whatever to these judgments in the two verses in question. If the words be translated as they ought, in the subjunctive mood, or in the past instead of the future, this seeming contradiction to facts, as well as all ambiguity, will be avoided. For if now I HAD STRETCHED OUT (Hebrew had sent forth), my hand, and had smitten thee and thy people with the pestilence, thou SHOULDEST HAVE BEEN cut off from the earth. But truly on this very account have I caused thee to subsist, that I might cause thee to see my power: and that my NAME might be declared throughout all the earth, or, in all this land.

“Thus God gave this impious king to know that it was in consequence of his especial Providence, that both he and his people had not been already destroyed by means of the past plagues; but that God had preserved him for this very purpose, that he might have a further opportunity of showing Pharaoh his power in the remaining plagues, and of manifesting that he, Jehovah, was the only true God, for the full conviction of the Hebrews and Egyptians.

“Lastly, our authorized translation of Ex. vii, 13, (and he [that is, God] hardened Pharaoh’s heart) is incorrect. It ought to have been, AND THE HEART OF PHARAOH WAS HARDENED, as the original is rendered by all the ancient versions, without exception, and by the most judicious modern translations. The same phrase is correctly translated in our authorized version, in Ex. vii, 22, viii, 19, and ix, 7.

“The objections, therefore, which the opponents of the Bible have raised against it from the passages we have been considering, are thus proved to be utterly destitute of foundation.”—Introduction, Vol. i, p. 558.