“And Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land.”
Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his country. The summary verse closes the narrative of the nine plagues with the same pattern that has repeated through them all: signs performed, heart hardened, refusal confirmed. The phrase all these wonders is the bibliographic annotation of an extraordinary sequence — staff-serpent, blood, frogs, gnats, flies, livestock disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness — nine demonstrations of divine sovereignty over every domain of creation, witnessed personally by the most powerful ruler in the world. And he would not let them go. The final plague has been announced. The Passover is about to be instituted. The night that changes everything is one chapter away. The hardening that closes Exodus 11 is the last hardening before the break.
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