Most of the early leaders among the Jews were individuals whose confrontation with idolatry began from a position of weakness: The false gods wielded state authority. They commanded armies and police, gave orders, and were obeyed. And where there was no hope of military resistance, the role of the Jew was to fight by other means. The biblical account of the story of the Jews therefore closes with the repeated disobedience of Mordechai and Esther, through which the Jews are saved from annihilation – much as it begins with the disobedience of Shifra, Pua, and Jocheved, through which the Jews were saved from enslavement to Pharaoh. In between, the narrative depicts over a thousand years of nearly continual willingness to abrogate law and state authority in order to do what is right.

Remarkably, this message of Jewish resistance to state idolatry and injustice has been consistently misread or ignored by those who have sought to characterize the Bible as a book of submission. Such interpretations are invariably built around Abraham's supposed willingness to sacrifice his own son Isaac at God's command. This reading distorts the story of Abraham at Moria, which is not concerned to demonstrate Abraham's obedience, but rather his faith that “God will see to the sheep for an offering,” and so deliver the boy. But in any case, the call to serve God, which is surely an authentic biblical teaching, does not turn the Bible into a book of submission before human authority. Indeed, it is the exact opposite. For God's will in the Bible can be considered equivalent to what today is referred to as the higher law or universal justice. To equate obedience to the dictates of justice with obedience to injustice is to miss the point of the entire Bible, which is that the individual must obey only the dictates of moral truth, even (and especially) when these violate the laws of the state.