Let My People Go

Exodus 7-13: What Pharaoh Couldn't See

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Ten plagues, and Pharaoh never once asked the right question.

He asked Moses to make the plagues stop. He asked his magicians to replicate them. He negotiated terms — go worship, but don't go far; take the adults, but leave the children; take the people, but leave the flocks. He bargained, stalled, promised, and broke every promise.

But he never asked: What does God want from me?

That absence — the question he could have asked but didn't — is the heart of the Exodus story. Not the plagues themselves, but what they reveal about the human capacity to harden against something that is plainly true.

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The Hardening

Modern readers often stumble on the phrase "the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart." It feels theologically unfair — as if God arranged Pharaoh's resistance to make the plagues necessary. But read the text carefully across all ten plagues and a different picture emerges.

In the early plagues, Pharaoh hardens his own heart (Exodus 8:15, 8:32, 9:34). The Hebrew verb is kābed — to make heavy, to be stubborn, to refuse to feel what you know you should feel. It's an active choice. Pharaoh sees the frogs die and the lice multiply and the livestock fall, and each time he chooses to treat his hardened heart as a policy rather than a problem.

Only in the later plagues does the text shift to God hardening Pharaoh's heart. The pattern the Joseph Smith Translation and LDS scholarship have long recognized is this: God confirms and strengthens what Pharaoh has already chosen. Spiritual hardening, sustained long enough, becomes character. You are not simply choosing against God each time — you are becoming the kind of person who does.

Elder David A. Bednar's 2006 conference address "And Nothing Shall Offend Them" describes this process from the opposite direction — hearts softened through repeated righteous choices until compassion and faith become reflexive. The principle is symmetrical. Character, in either direction, is the sum of habitual choices.

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What the Plagues Were Doing

The ten plagues were not random demonstrations of divine power. Each one targeted something Egypt worshipped.

The Nile turned to blood — the Nile was sacred, the source of Egypt's life and Pharaoh's wealth. Frogs associated with the fertility goddess Heqet. Darkness for three days — the sun god Ra was Egypt's supreme deity. And the death of the firstborn struck at Pharaoh himself, who was considered a living god and whose firstborn was heir to that divinity.

God was not simply coercing release. He was methodically dismantling every competing claim to deity in the most powerful empire on earth. Each plague was, in effect, a theological argument. This is what your gods are worth when I am involved.

Modern revelation echoes this pattern. The Lord does not simply defeat opposition — He teaches through it. Doctrine and Covenants 122:7: "Know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." Joseph Smith received that promise in the misery of Liberty Jail. The principle behind it appears first in Egypt.

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Passover: The Most Forward-Looking Meal in History

The tenth plague and the institution of the Passover (Exodus 12) are among the most theologically loaded passages in all of scripture. The instructions are unusually specific: a lamb without blemish, slaughtered at twilight, its blood applied to the doorposts with hyssop, eaten in haste with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, every household, every year, forever.

The specificity is not accidental. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:7: "For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us." The Passover wasn't just about Egypt. It was a rehearsal. The lamb without blemish, the blood on the door, the death that passes over the marked household — every detail would someday describe something else entirely.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has observed that the Passover is the hinge on which the entire Old Testament swings. All of Israelite worship, sacrifice, and law was oriented toward the same future event. By the time Christ stood in the upper room celebrating Passover with His disciples, every person at that table had spent their entire life practicing a meal whose meaning He was about to complete.

When He took the bread and said "This is my body" and the cup and said "This is my blood," He was not introducing a new symbol. He was revealing the one that had always been there.

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For Our Day

The Exodus narrative sits underneath far more of our theology than we often recognize. Baptism as a crossing of water. The sacrament as Passover fulfilled. The temple as tabernacle made permanent. Covenant renewal as the mechanism by which scattered Israel returns.

We are, in LDS theology, the ongoing story of Exodus — a scattered people being gathered, a covenant people being remembered, a generation being prepared for a promised land we can see but have not yet fully entered.

Pharaoh's question — the one he never asked — is worth asking for ourselves: What is God trying to teach me that I'm treating as a problem to be managed rather than an invitation to change?

Come Follow Me manual, Week 12: Exodus 7-13