Or how out the entire Bible just being made by humans, with human problems, human sin, and human misunderstanding?

Human understanding is not, per se, misunderstanding: that is to say, we don’t, necessarily, have an alternate complete meaning that is different from the true (also complete) meaning… we might have an incomplete understanding. This is not misunderstanding, unless we define it as complete…

As a child, I was always troubled by Exodus, “… I am a jealous God.” First, because jealousy is a human trait, and second, if there are no other gods to be jealous of (jealousy being a triangulation of relationships), what’s the big deal? I have no other analogy — and it’s a poor one — than the old Peanuts cartoons where the adult would say, ‘Wah wah. Wah, wah wah. Wahwa.’ And the children had to fill in the language with their own understanding. Something like this, I think, is what is at play. “I am a something-something-something God who cares that you do not worship a non-existent god, not just for my sake, but for yours.” And that term ‘something-something-something’ is more powerful and more dangerous than jealousy, but we have no other language for it… however incomplete the word might be.

The Genesis story of the binding of Isaac is similar. It will, depending upon the translation, say that God tempted/tested/proved/demonstrated Abraham: that is to say, showed how far Abraham was willing to go for his faith. Many people I’ve spoken with reject these sorts of definitions, saying God doesn’t test people because he already knows everything. But what if the object of the proving is not God’s knowledge, but our own? God may have wanted to show the entire world that faith can take you to some dangerous acts— like flying an airplane into buildings — and thought that was something we should know. Of course he already knew it and would later sacrifice his own son to demonstrate how far he would go to help us… but we seem to compartmentalize — using language — and think we understand completely.