Catholic Commentary
Divine Purpose: Signs for Memory and Knowledge
1Yahweh said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these my signs among them;2and that you may tell in the hearing of your son, and of your son’s son, what things I have done to Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them; that you may know that I am Yahweh.”
Exodus 10:1–2 records God commanding Moses to confront Pharaoh again, explaining that He has hardened Pharaoh's and his servants' hearts so His signs might be displayed throughout Egypt. God instructs Moses to tell future generations about these acts, establishing that knowledge of God's identity and power should be transmitted through communal memory and liturgical practice across generations.
God hardens Pharaoh's heart not to crush him arbitrarily, but to write divine power into human memory across generations—making suffering itself a sign that teaches the world who God is.
Exodus 10:1 — "Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants"
This verse opens mid-conflict, well into the plague cycle, and God's command "go in to Pharaoh" echoes the same divine commissioning of Moses that began in chapter 3. The phrase "I have hardened his heart" (Hebrew: hizzaqtî, from the root ḥzq, "to be strong, to make firm") is one of the most theologically debated statements in all of Scripture. Notably, here the hardening is attributed entirely to God — not as an arbitrary act of cruelty, but as the declared instrument through which God will "show these my signs among them." The Hebrew word for "signs" (ʾôtôt) is theologically loaded: signs in the Old Testament are not mere wonders but are revelatory acts, disclosures of the character and will of God. The plagues are therefore not punishments in the first instance — they are signs, a divine pedagogy addressed to Egypt, to Israel, and to all subsequent readers.
The inclusion of "the heart of his servants" is significant and often overlooked. The hardening extends to Pharaoh's entire court, suggesting that systemic resistance to God is not merely a personal failing but a social and institutional reality. Egypt, as a civilizational power, is collectively implicated.
Exodus 10:2 — "Tell in the hearing of your son, and of your son's son"
Here God explicitly turns from the immediate confrontation with Pharaoh to an intergenerational horizon. The verb "tell" (sapper, from the root spr) carries the sense of recounting, narrating, proclaiming — it is the language of liturgical memory. The doubling — "your son, and your son's son" — evokes the Passover haggadah tradition, the formal retelling commanded in Exodus 12–13, where children are explicitly to ask about the meaning of the rites. God's acts in history are not self-interpreting; they require transmission, witness, and communal memory.
The climactic phrase, "that you may know that I am Yahweh" (kî ʾănî YHWH), is a divine self-identification formula used repeatedly throughout Exodus and Ezekiel. It is not merely informational. In Hebrew thought, to "know" (yādaʿ) is covenantal — it implies intimacy, fidelity, and relationship. The signs, therefore, are ordered toward knowledge of God as person, not mere knowledge about divine power. This distinguishes Yahweh from the silent, coercive deities of Egypt.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the allegorical sense, Pharaoh's hardened heart prefigures the resistance of sin and worldly power to divine grace — a condition that, paradoxically, becomes the stage upon which God's glory is most luminously displayed (cf. Romans 9). In the anagogical sense, the Exodus signs point forward to the ultimate "sign" of the Resurrection, the definitive act by which God establishes his identity once and for all. The sacraments of initiation — especially Baptism and the Eucharist — are themselves the ongoing "telling" of what God has done, making present across generations the saving acts once performed in Egypt.
Catholic tradition brings several crucial lenses to bear on these two verses.
On the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, St. Augustine (in De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, ch. 23) argues that God does not inject evil into the will but withholds the grace that would soften it, leaving the hardened will to its own sinful inclinations. This is not injustice but a permissive act that serves a greater providential end. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 79, a. 3) distinguishes between God as the per se cause of all good and the per accidens occasion of the manifestation of evil through the withdrawal of grace. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§311–312) affirms this perspective: God "can work even through moral evil… to bring a greater good." Pharaoh's resistance is not beyond Providence — it is within it.
On intergenerational transmission, this verse anticipates what Dei Verbum §8 calls the living Tradition of the Church: "the Church, in her teaching, life, and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes." The command to tell sons and grandsons is the biblical DNA of catechesis. The Catechism (§1363) teaches that liturgical anamnesis (memorial) is not mere recollection but a true making-present of saving events — exactly the logic God encodes here.
On "I am Yahweh", the Church Fathers read this formula as a prototype of Christ's "I AM" declarations in the Fourth Gospel. St. Cyril of Alexandria sees the entire Exodus as a typos of the Incarnation: just as Yahweh revealed himself through signs in Egypt, Christ reveals the Father through his signs (miracles) in the Gospels. The divine name is not an abstraction; it is a relationship offered to those who will receive it.
These verses challenge contemporary Catholics on two fronts. First, they confront the temptation to demand that God act only in ways we find immediately comprehensible or comfortable. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is deeply unsettling — yet God declares it purposeful. Catholic spiritual life must reckon honestly with the reality that suffering, resistance, and prolonged struggle are sometimes the very theater of divine revelation. When prayers seem unanswered and obstacles persist, the question is not "Has God abandoned me?" but "What is God making visible through this?"
Second, and more practically: verse 2 is a direct command to catechize. Every Catholic parent, grandparent, godparent, and teacher is addressed here. The obligation to "tell in the hearing of your son, and of your son's son" is not optional piety — it is the very mechanism by which faith survives across generations. In an age when religious identity is increasingly privatized and faith transmission is in sharp decline in many Western Catholic families, these words carry urgent weight. The Sunday dinner table, the bedtime prayer, the explained Crucifix on the wall — these are the "telling" that God commands.