I was stunned by the Old Testament lesson for this morning, where it says the Lord changed his mind about the disaster he planned to bring upon his people. I have read that passage before, and there are many others just like it in the Old Testament. But I guess I never paid much attention to them. I thought that they were simply vestiges of a more primitive stage of religion, and something that we in the modern age need not take seriously.

But then I read a book a few weeks ago by Richard Friedman, a professor of Jewish studies at UCSD, in which he makes a point that we ought to take such passages seriously as revelation, and not just vestiges of an outgrown phase of religion, or unimportant details in the story, but the very heart of the story. It says this is the kind of God that we hav…