Mythology is the pre-scientific way of making sense of the world. Most ancient mythology was employed to make sense of the observed world – the movement of the sun across the sky, the change of seasons, the white stripes on a skunk.

The Hebrew mythology – uniquely – was employed to make moral sense of the world: the seeming inequities, the unfairness, the apparent moral randomness of fortune. That is its genius, in the original meaning of the word.

The Hebrew explanation was a mythology of disobedience. Beginning in the Garden, moral outcome is imaged as self-determined by obedience or its opposite, and therefore merited. At its heart, the mythology was thus a defense of the revelation, to the Hebrew, of the name of God.