Pharaoh's Heart Hardens

Moses encounters Pharaoh in chapter 7 where we read, yet Pharaoh's heart became hard and he would not listen to them. This is not God's preferred method of redeeming the world but because a human being by their own free will is enacting such unrelenting evil, this is the only way for redemption. The Hebrew verb in this passage is in the state of tense, not the passive tense. It's ambiguous whose agency is active here. And as the plagues begin, we are not told that God hardened Pharaoh's heart, but simply that his heart was hard.