Hardening Pharaoh’s Heart

Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim 

In his Laws of Repentance (chap. 6) Maimonides mentions three possibilities of punishment: 

1) punishment during earthly life alone, 

2) during the afterlife alone, 

3) or punishment in both lives. 

Why? 

Sins vary in degrees of personal corruption and harm to others. At times, one can sin so grievously that he harms his eternal soul, compromising the level of his afterlife, described as “punishment in the afterlife.” Lesser sins result in earthly punishment alone, intent on correcting the sinner, with no loss of the afterlife. 

Maimonides then says severe punishment can be met with God withholding repentance, as was the case of Pharaoh, Sichon, the Canaanites and the Jews. God can remove the ability to repent. But God also restricts repentance by wiping out societies, as with the Flood and Sodom. In those cases repentance was removed through premature death. 

But let’s understand the first case of Pharaoh. Maimonides says the punishment is that the sinner “must die in the sins he committed of his own free will…he should expire in his sinful state.” What determines that repentance is removed…a point of no return? What is the justice in removing repentance?

As Creator, God determines what entitles man’s continued existence. Life is not granted unconditionally. This means that repentance is not always just. How so?

Maimonides says that a person can commit a quantity of sins, or one very severe sin, that removes his entitlement to repentance. Perhaps repentance is only for that which can be corrected, but some sins are too severe and cannot be corrected so repentance is not offered.

It would not be just for somebody to perpetrate tremendous evils and not have to pay a price for them. Maimonides says there's a certain amount of evil—too many sins or too grave a sin—to offer one forgiveness. The effects of the sins either on himself or others are too severe and irreparable that repentance can correct the evil. Something which is a lasting negative is not something that repentance absolves. Think of it as stealing $100 demanding repaying the $100. That is what is justly due,  and if one does not have the $100 to pay back, he cannot correct the wrong.

Maimonides says that when the person does proper repentance says, “yesterday he may have been despised before God, but today he is beloved by Him.” That indicates a complete removal of the evil. Ezekiel chapter 18 also states that God does not recall any of the sins of the sinner when he repents. But that is not always the case, there could be severe effects that can't be erased through repentance. The person can destroy somebody else's life, so how can repentance alone correct that? It can't and therefore there is no forgiveness. Repentance has to be suspended from being efficacious and even being performed. Meaning that repentance is only something which fully atones if the evil can be completely corrected. But if it cannot be completely corrected through repentance, perhaps this is why repentance is not allowed.