Israel Was Part of The Ancient World

The [Mesopotamian ancient texts] serve as sources of information for us to formulate the shape of each culture’s ways of thinking. In most areas there is more similarity between Israel and its neighbors than there is between Israel and our twenty-first century Western world… The views of deity in the ancient world served as the context for Israel’s understanding of deity. It is true that the God of the Bible is far different from the gods of the ancient cultures. But Israel understood its God in reference to what others around them believed… We simply recognize the common conceptual…