We're on safe ground to presume that self-interest and hubris are at the core of the rebellion.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that's just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower.

Ruling the way God wants you to rule means fostering the ordered relationships he desires, not because he is a killjoy, but because that order maximizes human happiness and love for God. Part of that is worshipping only the true God and no other.

We're on safe ground to presume that self-interest and hubris are at the core of the rebellion.

If I were one of the gods who just wound up supervising humans, I'd want to influence the decision-makers to live according to the morals that Israel would eventually get in the Torah, and to teach those same principles to their people. I'd also want to make sure they worship no other god but the Most High.

How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.

We think "reading the Bible in context" means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we're looking at on the page. That isn't the case. While that's important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.