More surprising is the fact that the Jews’ constant experience of misfortune did not kill their faith in their own destiny. Instead it drove them to conceive of their God not simply as all-powerful, but as passionately concerned with their response to him, in anger as well as in love. Such an intensely personal deity, they began to assert, was nevertheless the God for all humanity. He was very different from the supreme deity who emerged from Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato: all-perfect, therefore immune to change and devoid of the passion which denotes change.
