Pride is an attitude that we willfully and purposefully choose to take on. We can choose to exalt ourselves and we can choose to humble ourselves.
Moses did not understand the nature of our Lord because the Truth about Him was never known by any man until He manifested Himself in the flesh as our LordJesusChrist.
Moses did not understand that our Lord can see the end from the beginning - that He is omniscient. So, when the Lord told Moses that Pharoah would harden His heart, Moses took it to mean that the Lord would harden Pharoah`s heart. How else could He know what Pharoah would do?
Pharoah was full of Pride and his Pride caused him to reject Moses` call for release.
When a person operates in Pride they are resisted by God and so become self-destructive.
When a person resists God their Heart automatically hardens.
As in similar instances where God is attributed with a direct action that forces an individual in a certain direction, the reality is that the person`s SelfWill developed attitude toward God has a predictable pattern of behaviour.
The original Hebrew word that was translated here as `harden` actually means `strengthen`. So, the point was that the Lord had given Pharoah the strength of will, the SelfWill, to come against Him.
In other verses where Pharoah`s heart was hardened we see that Pharoah hardened His own heart: Exo 8:15 Exo 8:32 Exo 9:34.
So, who was actually responsible for Pharoah`s hardened heart? The Lord or Pharoah?
The answer is: both -> The Lord gave Pharoah SelfWill -> Pharoah`s SelfWill hardened his own heart