I think the point of the story is that ancient Jews began to appreciate the existential horror of a transcendent supreme being. Monotheism is subversive, so Jews felt they had to live apart from mass societies, to sacrifice themselves as God's chosen ones, as though they were in quarantine, to wrestle with and to contain the unpleasant reality that nature might be guided by a tyrant, that is, by a deity that's necessarily inhuman, relative to our self-serving preoccupations.