Does God Change His Mind ? Ibn Ḥazm on Exo­dus 32 – 33

Ibn Ḥazm (994 CE – 1064 CE) was a Mus­lim schol­ar of great repute from Cor­do­ba, dur­ing the Mus­lim Spain era. He is wide­ly regard­ed as the ​“Father of Com­par­a­tive Reli­gion”. In his cel­e­brat­ed mag­num opus enti­tled Kitab al-Fasl fi al- Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-Nihal, he pre­dat­ed mod­ern Bib­li­cal tex­tu­al crit­i­cism by sev­er­al cen­turies and as Krentz admits, Ibn Ḥazm’s crit­i­cisms gen­er­al­ly rep­re­sent­ed the first, albeit rudi­men­ta­ry, sys­tem­at­ic his­toric crit­i­cism of the Bible.¹ He had demon­strat­ed his prowess in Bib­li­cal tex­tu­al crit­i­cism by giv­ing many exam­ples of inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions in the Bible.

The fol­low­ing bib­li­cal con­tra­dic­tion is tak­en from the book Mus­lim Under­stand­ing of Oth­er Reli­gions : A Study of Ibn Ḥazm’s Kitab al-Faṣl fī al-Milal wa al-Ahwāʾ wa al-Niḥal, and, inshāʾ Allāh, it will form part of an ongo­ing series repro­duc­ing Ibn Ḥazm’s crit­i­cisms of the Bible and Chris­tian­i­ty, togeth­er with fur­ther elab­o­ra­tions on our part to refine his argu­ments and strength­en the case against the Bible.²

Does God change His mind ? Accord­ing to Ibn Ḥazm, Exo­dus 32:10 – 14 and 33:3 – 14 ascribe al-badāʾ (change of mind) to God, and this presents a prob­lem for the nature of God and His attrib­ut­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly His all-know­ing­ness. In Ibn Ḥazm’s usage, al-badāʾ does not mean igno­rance, but the appear­ance of a new deter­mi­na­tion after a pri­or one has already been declared.

We quote Exo­dus 32:10 – 14 as follows :

“…now there­fore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may con­sume them ; but of you I will make a great nation.” But Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, ​“O LORD, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy peo­ple, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great pow­er and with a mighty hand ? Why should the Egyp­tians say, ​‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the moun­tains, and to con­sume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy peo­ple. Remem­ber Abra­ham, Isaac, and Israel, thy ser­vants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, ​‘I will mul­ti­ply your descen­dants as the stars of heav­en, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descen­dants, and they shall inher­it it for ever.’ ” And the LORD repent­ed of the evil which he thought to do to his people.

Yet in anoth­er pas­sage, it seems that there was a dif­fer­ent agree­ment. The fol­low­ing pas­sage is from Exo­dus 33:3 – 14 :

“And I will send an angel before you, and I will dri­ve out the Canaan­ites, the Amor­ites, the Hit­tites, the Per’izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb’usites. Go up to a land flow­ing with milk and hon­ey ; but I will not go up among you, lest I con­sume you in the way, for you are a stiff-necked peo­ple.” When the peo­ple heard these evil tid­ings, they mourned ; and no man put on his ornaments.

For the LORD had said to Moses, ​“Say to the peo­ple of Israel, ​‘You are a stiff-necked peo­ple ; if for a sin­gle moment I should go up among you, I would con­sume you. So now put off your orna­ments from you, that I may know what to do with you.’ ” There­fore the peo­ple of Israel stripped them­selves of their orna­ments, from Mount Horeb onward.

Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it out­side the camp, far off from the camp ; and he called it the tent of meet­ing. And every one who sought the LORD would go out to the tent of meet­ing, which was out­side the camp. When­ev­er Moses went out to the tent, all the peo­ple rose up, and every man stood at his tent door, and looked after Moses, until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pil­lar of cloud would descend and stand at the door of the tent, and the LORD would speak with Moses. And when all the peo­ple saw the pil­lar of cloud stand­ing at the door of the tent, all the peo­ple would rise up and wor­ship, every man at his tent door.

Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his ser­vant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, did not depart from the tent. Moses said to the LORD, ​“See, thou sayest to me, ​‘Bring up this peo­ple’; but thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt send with me. Yet thou hast said, ​‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now there­fore, I pray thee, if I have found favor in thy sight, show me now thy ways, that I may know thee and find favor in thy sight. Con­sid­er too that this nation is thy peo­ple.” And he said, ​“My pres­ence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

When one com­pares the above pas­sages side by side, the inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions between espe­cial­ly Exo­dus 32:10, 32:14 and 33:2 – 3 on the one hand and Exo­dus 33:14 on the oth­er, clear­ly rais­es many prob­lems of the­o­log­i­cal and moral con­cern from the Bib­li­cal con­text. In this case that was quot­ed above, in spite of God’s deter­mi­na­tion to pun­ish the Israelites for their idol­a­trous con­duct, He did not exe­cute pun­ish­ment due to the inter­ces­sion of Moses who had ​“remind­ed” God of His promise made with Abra­ham and the patri­archs for their descen­dants. This Bib­li­cal pas­sage seems to implic­it­ly sug­gest that this ​“reminder” had made God realise his ​“wrong” deci­sion and have Him repent­ing for it. Such an obvi­ous ​“error” or even to imply such a thing is hard­ly befit­ting any per­son of integri­ty, let alone God, the Almighty.³

It is some­times argued that the threat of destruc­tion in Exo­dus 32:10 should be under­stood as mere­ly con­di­tion­al, since Moses was told to ​“leave” God alone, imply­ing that inter­ces­sion could avert the out­come. Yet this does not remove the under­ly­ing dif­fi­cul­ty. The nar­ra­tive still por­trays God as announc­ing one course of action, receiv­ing an argu­ment from Moses, and then declar­ing a dif­fer­ent one. The text does not mere­ly describe the unfold­ing of a fixed decree, but depicts Moses’ reminder of the patri­ar­chal covenant as the deci­sive fac­tor that pro­duces a new divine determination.

This is rein­forced in Exo­dus 33:5, where God says, ​“that I may know what to do with you,” lan­guage that express­es delib­er­a­tion rather than the exe­cu­tion of a set­tled plan.⁴ This lan­guage does not describe the exe­cu­tion of a set­tled decree, but the sus­pen­sion of one while a deci­sion is being weighed.

Like­wise, Exo­dus 33:3 and 33:14 place side by side a with­draw­al of divine pres­ence and its sub­se­quent restora­tion. Whether framed as con­di­tion­al or not, the text presents God as revis­ing an expressed inten­tion in response to human inter­ven­tion, which is pre­cise­ly the insta­bil­i­ty Ibn Ḥazm iden­ti­fied. A con­di­tion­al warn­ing still pre­sup­pos­es a fixed out­come in the absence of inter­ven­tion ; Exo­dus, how­ev­er, depicts the inter­ven­tion itself as gen­er­at­ing a dif­fer­ent divine outcome.

Hence, the impli­ca­tions of Exo­dus 33:2 – 14 com­pared to oth­er Bib­li­cal pas­sages on the char­ac­ter­is­tics of God as dis­cussed by Ibn Hazm are manifold :

(1) God is por­trayed as revis­ing an announced inten­tion in response to human argument ;
(2) God is por­trayed as issu­ing state­ments that are not nar­ra­tive­ly stable.

With the prob­lems that are evi­dent in Exo­dus 33:2 – 14, one must either agree to the above accu­sa­tions against God or admit that this is an inter­nal con­tra­dic­tion, which do not agree with pas­sages con­cern­ing God and His char­ac­ter­is­tics in oth­er parts of the Bible. Most cer­tain­ly, in this case, Ibn Ḥazm’s crit­i­cism of the Bible with regard to God con­tra­dict­ing Him­self is thus not with­out basis and here, the Bible con­tra­dicts itself internally.

Con­clu­sions

The jux­ta­po­si­tion of Exo­dus 32 and 33 pro­vides a clear exam­ple of the inter­nal ten­sions that Ibn Ḥazm iden­ti­fied in the Hebrew Bible. His argu­ment does not rest on philo­soph­i­cal spec­u­la­tion alone, but on direct com­par­i­son of bib­li­cal pas­sages that present incom­pat­i­ble descrip­tions of God’s will. For Ibn Ḥazm, this is strong evi­dence that the bib­li­cal text, as it stands, can­not be ful­ly rec­on­ciled with a coher­ent doc­trine of divine perfection.

The issue is not whether God is mer­ci­ful, but whether the text depicts divine deter­mi­na­tion as nar­ra­tive­ly reversible. These inter­nal ten­sions con­firm Ibn Ḥazm’s judg­ment that the Hebrew Bible con­tains bib­li­cal con­tra­dic­tions that can­not be rec­on­ciled with a coher­ent doc­trine of divine perfection.

And only God knows best ! 

Last Updat­ed on Jan­u­ary 14, 2026 by Bis­mi­ka Allahu­ma Team

1. Edgar Krentz, The His­tor­i­cal Crit­i­cal Method (Fortress Press, 1975), p. 41[⤶]
2. See Ghu­lam Haider Aasi, Mus­lim Under­stand­ing Of Oth­er Reli­gions : A Study of Ibn Hazm’s Kitab al-Fasl fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-Nihal (Adam Pub­lish­ers, 2004), pp. 92 – 114 for a sum­ma­ry of Ibn Ḥazm’s major crit­i­cisms of the Pen­ta­teuch.[⤶]
3. Ibn Hazm Kitab al-Fasl, pt. 1, pp. 163 – 164 ; Ghu­lam Haider Aasi, ibid., p. 105[⤶]
4. Exo­dus 33:5 in Hebrew reads : וְאֵדְעָה מָה אֶעֱשֶׂה־לָּךְ (veʾedʿāh māh ʾeʿĕśeh-lāk), lit­er­al­ly ​“so that I may know what I will do with you.” The verb וְאֵדְעָה (“that I may know”) express­es pend­ing deter­mi­na­tion rather than the exe­cu­tion of a set­tled deci­sion.[⤶]