Commentaria in Exodum
Where note: This name Elohim is then wont to be limited by additions, lest the true God be understood: for when it is put absolutely, it is given to the true God alone; so Psalm 81:1 says: “God hath stood in the congregation of gods, and in the midst judgeth gods”: gods, that is, judges; for the true God, who is the supreme judge of all, is judged by no one; and verse 6: “I have said: You are gods,” as if to say: Not in truth, but by my communication and naming you are gods. Hence Christ citing this place, John 10:35, says: “If he called them gods, to whom the word of God was spoken,” as if to say: If they are called gods who are gods only by participation and naming, how much more am I God, who am God by nature?
See here how much God exalts His friends.
Truly Philo, book 1 On the Life of Moses: “Since all things of friends are common, God communicates His power and wealth with the Saints.” They said, he says, of Abbot Macarius the Great, that as God protects the whole world and bears the sins of men, so he was a kind of earthly god among the brethren, covering their faults, and the things he saw or heard as though not seeing and not hearing. In like manner be thou also an angel, nay a God, among thy brethren and companions.
Learn here that the glory which is sought and received from men is vain, but that which is sought and received from God is true. Whence St. Chrysostom, hom. 2 on the epistle to Titus: “I do not forbid,” he says, “that glory be sought, but I would have that sought which is true, which is from God, whose praise is not from men, but from God. Let us look to one thing only, let all our intention be directed to it, namely by what means we may deserve to be praised by the mouth of God. If we look intently at this, we shall always esteem all human things as nothing. This man or that praises thee not, thou losest nothing thereby; and if anyone blame, it hurts thee not at all. For whether praise or blame, it has gain or loss only from God.” Then he teaches that contempt of human praise makes us like God. For as He was glorious from eternity, and is always infinitely glorified by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and therefore needs not the praise of men.
Hence Moses, on account of his virtues and wonders, was called God by the Egyptians, as St. Cyril relates, book 1 Against Julian, and St. Justin, in his Hortatory Address to the Gentiles, after the beginning, and Eusebius, book 4 On the Preparation for the Gospel, before the end, and adds that he was called Mercury for his understanding and interpretation of the sacred writings. The same relates that he was also called Musaeus. See here in Moses how true is the old saying: “A good prince is the living image of God on earth.”
THE GOD OF PHARAO.—In Theodoret it is wrongly read “God of Aaron”: for so we already read in him, Quest. 18: “How was Moses God of Aaron himself?” and he answers: “As God commanded Moses, so Moses commanded Aaron himself; whence Aaron also is called the Prophet of Moses.” But a manuscript codex of Theodoret reads Pharao for Aaron, and Theodoret seems to have written it so altogether. Some smatterer, however, because Aaron is subjoined as prophet of Moses, substituted Aaron for Pharao in the preceding words also; but wrongly.
Note: Moses was God, not only of Pharao, but also of Israel; but in different ways: for he was God of Pharao by chastising him; of Israel by protecting, leading, ruling, sustaining it; for what Eliseus says of Elias, 4 Kings 2:12: “My father, the chariot of Israel, and the driver thereof”: this you may say more truly of Moses. As therefore God sitting on the Cherubic chariot, Ezech. 1, is the driver of the world.
AND AARON THY BROTHER SHALL BE THY PROPHET.—As thou art now appointed by me God, not by nature but by participation, so thou shalt have a like prophet, that is, interpreter and mouthpiece, not one who is properly a prophet, that is, to whom God immediately reveals the future, but one to whom thou revealest what thou understandest from me, that by him as interpreter thou mayest speak them before Pharao, as is just now explained; so that the Hebrew nabi, that is, prophet, alludes to the root naba, which signifies to speak;
30, 39; he calls prophets the heralds of the word of God, and prophecy preaching, as I said there; where also I brought various significations of the name prophet. From this place therefore it cannot be gathered that Aaron was properly a prophet, though this is gathered from other places, namely from chap. 4, verse 27, where God revealed to him the return of Moses, saying: “Go to meet Moses”; and 1 Kings 2:27, the Lord says to Heli the pontiff, descended from Aaron: “Did I not plainly reveal myself to the house of thy father?” Rupert well says: “Since Pharao is not worthy, O Moses, to speak with thee who art appointed his God, Aaron shall be thy prophet, to pronounce the plagues which thou shalt cause, or as thy minister to bring them: after the example, namely, of Me, who do not speak to men by Myself, but through My prophets command what is to be announced to them or done by Me; and these two men so acted, the one having the power in speech, the other exercising the power in working the signs before Pharao.”
Where note that Aaron was prophet of Moses not only because he was his interpreter with Pharao, but also because at his bidding he wrought signs and brought plagues upon Egypt, as is plain of the rod turned into a serpent in this chapter, verse 10; whence in chap. 19 [7:19] the Lord says to Moses: “Say to Aaron: Take thy rod, and stretch forth thy hand over the waters of Egypt, etc., that they may be turned into blood.” And chap. 8:5: “Say to Aaron: Stretch forth thy hand over the rivers, etc., and bring forth frogs.” And verse 16: “Speak to Aaron: Stretch forth thy rod, and strike the dust of the earth, and let there be sciniphs.” Aaron therefore brought the serpents, the blood, the frogs and the sciniphs upon Egypt, but by the command of Moses, as of his God commanding. Whence Moses, not Aaron, by praying to God recalled and stayed these plagues, as is added in the same places. Moreover the following plagues, as heavier, namely of the boils, chap. 9:9, of the pestilence, chap. 9:3, of hail, thunder and lightning, chap. 9:23, of locusts, chap. 10:12, of darkness, chap. 10:22, not Aaron but Moses alone inflicted on Egypt by stretching forth his hands.
Tropologically, these things Nazianzen, orat. 22, and his Scholiast Nicetas, aptly apply to two brothers, namely St. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa:
“Moses,” he says, “was the lawgiver of the Hebrews; so Basil was the lawgiver of the monks, the Nyssene most holy was after the pattern of Aaron. Basil was the prince of priests, the Nyssene was next to him, and as it were his tongue initiating others; both smote sin with ten plagues, divided the sea of vices; crushed the Egyptians, that is, heretics and demons; routed Amalec, that is, Julian, by the typical stretching forth of hands in the form of the cross; and fed the Israelites with heavenly bread and the water of heavenly doctrine, and led them to the heavenly kingdom.”
3. I WILL HARDEN HIS HEART.—Calvin on this place, as with a battering-ram, so defends his heresy of God actively and properly hardening, that he boasts he thereby lays low all the sophists: thus Calvin renders it, I will constrain his heart. The mind and sentence of Calvin, therefore, though, to conceal or rather to dress up so infamous a poison, he wraps it up, is that God hardened Pharao, not by infusing hardness into him, but both by delivering and handing him over to Satan, that he might harden his hard heart the more; and because by a certain hidden motion, surpassing our understanding, He governed his heart and hardened it to obstinacy: and yet that God was not the author of the sin, because He did this by a just judgment; for the hardness of Pharao was a sin, but the hardening was God’s judgment. So he. But this heresy, unheard of in all ages, is an execrable blasphemy, which Holy Scripture itself refutes, both elsewhere everywhere and here; for that Pharao was properly and directly hardened not by God but by himself and his own malice is shown: First, by the fact that God, having sent Moses to Pharao, ten times commanded the dismissal of the Jewish people; therefore He willed that he should let the people go, and did not will to harden him that he might retain them: for properly to will this is to will efficaciously that Pharao be unwilling to let the people go; but to will that he let them go, and command it, and again efficaciously to will the opposite, and so to harden, manifestly clash with each other. Again, if it was God’s will to harden Pharao, then Pharao, conforming himself to it, did not sin: for God’s will is the measure of all good will.
Secondly, God punished Pharao most severely for resisting; but God is not the author of those things of which He is the avenger, says St. Fulgentius, book 1 to Monimus, chap. 3.
Thirdly, Pharao himself little by little yielded to God, Moses and the Hebrews, when first he permitted them to go without their children and flocks; secondly, with their children but without flocks; thirdly, altogether with their goods: therefore he himself bent and hardened himself; nay Pharao himself was not so impious as to vomit forth the cause of his hardness upon God; but ascribes it to himself, Exodus 9:27 [10:16]: “I have sinned,” he says, “against the Lord.”
For when Calvin strives to free God from guilt, by ascribing the sin to Pharao and the hardening to God, he does it as impiously as unskilfully. For if the hardness of Pharao is a sin, why is not the hardening, which is the cause of the hardness, a sin likewise? For a cause impelling to sin certainly sins, John 8:34; Rom. 1:32; and most of all then, when it impels so efficaciously that the other cannot resist it.