The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know… - Jacques Berlinerblau

Let us never underestimate the motivational force that the belief in Scripture’s divine proximity has upon exegetes. They open the book having already invested their faith in the proposition that it is underwritten by God.

That God is quoted verbatim, that God is said to be speaking (when, in fact, he is being spoken for) points to either the remarkable arrogance of the biblical contributors or their unshakeable conviction that their access to the deity was total.
The fateful, and perhaps even unwitting, manipulation performed by the Hebrew Bible is to have convinced its readers that what stands in front of them is not a hodgepodge of texts worked over by countless men position across time and motivated by mundane political and theological interests. Instead, it presents itself as a self-evident treasury of the actual words, though, actions, political opinions, and future aspirations of Yahweh. From early on, apparently, interpreters wholly swallowed this argument.

[The "New Atheists"] fail to recognize that mocking religious people in public is entirely inimical to the goals they wish to achieve.