Dara Horn, whose acclaimed novels some of you must have read, has a suggestion. While reading up in preparation for her family's Passover seder, she writes, she came across an ancient Egyptian myth of a “heart-weighing ceremony” in which each human heart is weighed against a feather when its possessor dies. Only he whose heart's evil does not outweigh the feather is admitted to Paradise.
This leads Horn to make her suggestion. “I have often been bothered,” she writes in a letter,
by the recurrent mention in the biblical story of the exodus of va-yikhbad lev Par'o, traditionally translated as “Pharaoh's heart was hardened.” Literally, the Hebrew says that his heart “grew heavy,” but since in English a heavy heart is associated with grieving, one can see why English translators would have chosen a different term. However, it occurs to me that having a “hardened heart” or being “hard-hearted” is wrong here, and has led English readers to misunderstand a fundamental part of the exodus story.
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