Three-agent Universe (7) Intense Battle

A casual reading of the Old Testament would suggest that the only problem that God had to deal with was the persistent disobedience of the Israelites, and the only risk faced by the Israelites was that the God who had rescued them would get grumpy with their bad behaviour. The reality is that the season of the Patriarchs and the Exodus was a time of intense spiritual warfare. There were as many evil spirits active in the world then as there are now, but they were concentrated more intensely because they were spread over a much smaller population.

At the same time, God's ability to intervene on earth was severely constrained because he had given humans authority over the earth and they had unwittingly submitted it to the spiritual powers of evil.

The authors of the Old Testament held a two-agent world view, so they assumed that every spiritual intervention in the world was caused by God. They did not understand that the spiritual powers of evil were actively manipulating the events that they described.