I wrote about this in a comment on your earlier post, “The Work of Cain” on 2023-06-01.
Other examples which seem to me like a God learning on the job are when in Genesis 18:20–33 Abraham dickers with God about how many righteous must be found in Sodom in order to spare the city and negotiates God’s first offer of fifty all the way down to ten. In 18:33, when “the LORD went his way…”, one can imagine Him muttering, “Remind Me not to haggle with that guy in the bazaar”.
Or consider when the burning bush commands Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt in Exodus 4:10–16 and Moses doesn’t want to take the job, angering God. But Moses negotiates Him down until He appoints Aaron to be Moses’s spokesman in Egypt.
This is a unique characteristic of the God of the Old Testament—you can negotiate with Him, and He can be swayed by arguments made by His creatures. How different from the slaver god of Islam, for example!
There’s the old joke about the Ten Commandments:
When Moses got down from Mt Sinai, he was perplexed seeing his people going out of hand, so he said : “I’ve got some good news … and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”
This is much funnier than the Mel Brooks version of the Fifteen Commandments in History of the World, Part I.
