<[Not about Zionism and the modern nation of Israel - I'm on record about that already; no need to repeat here.

One needs to recall the nature of the stories about God as an aid in understanding his character. Most important: what comes to us as Torah began as a minimum of two varying oral traditions, each of which had generations of time to differentiate from the other in the separate Hebrew kingdoms of Judah and Israel, long after the events depicted. It was not until after the reign of David that the two were consolidated, sometimes merely by including both (for instance, the separate tellings of creation in Genesis, or the random alternate use of "Sinai" or "Horeb" for the mountain where Moses receives the Law), sometimes by combination; in either case, with a lot of heavy editing. [See also my post of a couple of weeks ago regarding Deuteronomy.]

An excellent overview of the 'forensic' scholarship used to deduce the history of Torah can be found in Harold Bloom's The Book of J - and see also this 1999 essay in the archives of The Exquisite Corpse. Bloom's thesis of Torah-as-literature examines the development of God as a character within a story, and it can at times be fascinating. By the way, God also acts more bizarrely than his seeming instructions for genocide in Numbers and Deuteronomy - try Genesis 4:24-26.

Among Jews, only the ultra-Orthodox still adhere to the belief that all of Torah was dictated by God on Mt. Sinai/Horeb and faithfully transcribed by Mosheh Rabbenu ("Moses Our Teacher") alone - including all of the events that had not yet occurred, although written in the past tense and the third person. Some of the rest of us recognize the passage of time, the change of culture, the historical imperatives.... and an interesting resemblance to the Anaeid, which provided later Roman emperors with an instant 'backstory', conveniently tying them to Homer's Hellas and Those Other Mediterranean Gods.