So, let it be, and the God of the Exodus will transform the world into the world that fully manifests God's reign. These questions touch upon a mystery of the Exodus narrative that gets concentrated in the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. A powerful narrative, a narrative that shows us the power of God, should accomplish in fact and in the telling what it promises before and after being told. Tellers and hearers of the Exodus narrative, as Ricoeur has noted in his work on parable and narrative, are shaped by the world of the story. In reading a narrative our identities are implicated in and emploted by the narrative through our identifications with the characters in the plot.
Plot shapes character and the characters shape the plot.
So, reading Exodus, we become both Moses and Pharaoh and are implicated in the intrigue between them and God. We can not, nor should we resolve the tensions in the Exodus narrative, because our problem with the hardening of Pharaoh's heart is the problem we discover when we recognize our opposition to the ways that God manifests God's name in and for our lives. We would prefer to be a Moses, reluctant, at our worst, perhaps manipulative, formed in Egypt by a royal theology, representative but not paradigmatic of the way this ideology hardens our heart to the purposes of God. We would prefer to be the among the people who are finally conformed to the will of God. However, in our heart of hearts, we know that however much we are open to the manifestations of God's name, we are curved in on ourselves.