My research has primarily focused on warfare in the ancient Near East and the implications of that context for understanding the Old Testament. When I was asked to write an essay for a book that focused on courage and cowardice in ancient warfare, the idea came to me to think about the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as a type of courage in battle. This article is the result, as I argue that we can understand more about YHWH’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart based on ancient Near Eastern warfare rhetoric. Here are the bibliographic details of the essay (along with the link to the Amazon page for the book that provides more detail about the book as a whole):

Trimm, Charlie. “Praising Courageous Enemies in the Ancient Near East as the Background to Hardening Pharaoh’s Heart.” Pages 337–57 in Brill’s Companion to Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Warfare. Edited by Jenn Finn. Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World 12. Brill, 2025.

In the ancient Near East, courage in battle was a highly prized virtue and one of the most common ways for a king to describe himself. For example, Ramses II describes how he fought for two hours in front of his troops without even wearing armor: “His Majesty took up his coat-of-mail to wear it, (only) [after] His Majesty, L.P.H., had spent two hours (already) standing and attacking the town of the Hittite foemen, in front of his troops and chariotry [without] a coat-of-mail upon him.” In contrast, kings often described their enemies as fearful and prone to flight. Sargon II describes the ideal enemy response to the arrival of an Assyrian king: “Having seen the cloud of dust (kicked up) by my expeditionary force, Ullusunu, the Mannaean, went out from his city and in fear stayed in hiding on a rugged mountain.” This depiction of courageous kings and fearful enemies characterizes the vast majority of ancient Near Eastern martial literature. However, surely in reality kings would at least sometimes have faced courageous enemies. The mere fact that battles happened indicates that many enemy kings did not just automatically flee. The reliefs of battles are even clearer, as they visually depict enemies fighting against the kings. But how would a king describe such a worthy adversary? The main way that kings handled this courage of the enemy was to ignore it. However, in a few places, ancient Near Eastern kings provided hints about these courageous enemies.

I distinguish here between two phases of conflict to clarify how kings talked about courageous enemies. The first phase is the lead-up to the battle, generally while the king is still in his home country. Referring to courageous enemies in this phase is more common because kings tended to only fight foreign nations when they had a reason to do so: only rarely would they attack a foreign nation just because it was there. Or to put it in blunter terms: they needed a good reason to fight a foreign nation. And the easiest way to justify war was for a foreign nation to attack or provoke the king in some way. The second phase of conflict is on the battlefield itself. Examples of kings describing their enemies as brave in this stage of the conflict are very rare because kings liked to portray their enemies as cowards in battle. While it might be permissible for a foreign king to be courageous at a distance, they must become cowardly as soon as they have entered the presence of the powerful king. As Merneptah says about himself, “Every foreign country is possessed by fear, (just) at the sight of him.”

However, in a few cases kings would describe the courage of their enemy fighting them. But the main reason to do so was to demonstrate how much more powerful the king was than the enemy. Here is an example from an Egyptian Pharaoh. In the major battle at Qadesh against the Hittites, Ramses II recounts the large number of kings who allied with his enemy: “Their rulers were there with him, each man with his forces; their chariotry was vast in extent, unequaled; they covered hill and valley, they were like the locust-swarm in their multitude.” Ramses II then fought gloriously in the middle of the fray: “Then His Majesty set forth at a gallop, he plunged into the midst of the forces of the Hittite foe, he being entirely on his own, no-one else with him.” In reporting this battle, Ramses II goes further than other Pharaohs in glorifying himself because he maligns the courage even of his own troops, not just the enemy’s troops. For example, he describes himself as the “rescuer of his infantry on the day of battle.”

The article has many other examples like this of ancient Near Eastern kings praising their enemies only to emphasize their own power as greater. I argue that when ancient Near Eastern kings praised the courage of an enemy, it was done to glorify the victorious king even more than usual: if he can defeat such a courageous enemy, then he must be even more courageous. For the Hebrew Bible, rhetorically glorifying an enemy’s bravery – like the ancient Near Eastern kings did on occasion – was not sufficient to demonstrate the extent of the power of Israel’s god. According to Exodus, the solution was to actively strengthen an opponent before and during combat to prevent him from surrendering. Reading the strengthening of Pharaoh’s heart in this light demonstrates YHWH’s goal as a theological truth. If Pharaoh gave up too quickly, questions would remain about the true extent of the relationship of Pharaoh’s and YHWH’s power. If Pharaoh had continued to resist just a little longer, would he have been able to defeat YHWH? The strengthening of Pharaoh’s will negates any such questions because it shows that nothing remains in Pharaoh’s arsenal to possibly defeat YHWH. Other texts demonstrate that Israel is far from invincible without YHWH empowering them. However, this story brackets out questions about Israel’s power as it emphasizes YHWH’s power: YHWH is definitively more powerful than Pharaoh.