What Does Exodus 7:3 Mean?
And I will stiffen Pharaoh's heart and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.THE KEY
God multiplies the signs while actively making Pharaoh’s heart hard, so revelation and resistance rise together.
THE MEANING
God’s agency stands inside Pharaoh’s resistance: God says he hardens Pharaoh’s heart even as signs and wonders multiply in Egypt. The verse lets these acts coexist without claiming that greater display produces immediate openness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a greater display of God’s power must make every heart receptive; here, signs multiply while the heart is hardened.
THE ROOT
אַקְשֶׁה
ʾaqšeh
GROWS FROM
קשה
קשה (qashah) means to be hard, difficult, or severe; in the causative form used here, it means to make hard or difficult.
“stiffen” in this verse is ʾaqšeh. The Hebrew אַקְשֶׁה (ʾaqšeh, “I will make hard”) makes God the active agent in Pharaoh’s hardening. The same root appears in קָשֶׁה (qāšeh, “hard” or “difficult”) and קְשֵׁה־עֹרֶף (qesheh-ʿoref, “stiff-necked”), linking the heart’s hardening with the language of resistance becoming fixed.
ALSO GROWS
qāšeh: Hard, difficult, or severe.
קָשֶׁה
This adjective shares the root’s consonants and shows how hardness can describe difficulty or severity, as well as Pharaoh’s resistance.
qesheh-ʿoref: Stiff-necked; hard-necked.
קְשֵׁה־עֹרֶף
This phrase uses the same adjective from קשה, extending the image of hardness from the heart to the neck and naming stubborn resistance.
THE PATTERN
Scripture holds divine action and human resistance together without treating signs as a guarantee of receptivity.
And Pharaoh's heart was gripped, and he did not hear and respond to them, as the LORD had said.But though he had done so many signs before them, they did not lean their weight on him.So then he shows faithful love to whom he wills, and whom he wills, he hardens.THE THREAD
So cut the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stiff-necked.The phrase “be no more stiffnecked” uses the same קשה root as “I will harden” here. The agency shifts sharply: in Exodus God names himself as the one hardening Pharaoh; in Deuteronomy the people are told not to harden their own necks.
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