And from the ground God the Lord caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad. (Genesis 2:9)
Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked... (Genesis 3:7)
“Now the Human knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain…” (Genesis 4:1)
Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16)
A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. (Exodus 1:8)
And the Lord continued, “I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters; yes, I know their sufferings. (Exodus 3:7)
But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go.”
I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name the Lord. (Exodus 6:3)
Thus says the Lord, “By this you shall know that I am the Lord.” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood (Exodus 7:17)
But I know that you and your courtiers do not yet fear God the Lord.” (Exodus 9:30)
You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9)
AI models need "training" to get off the ground, but their magic happens at the inference stage. We can call training the a priori knowledge and inference a posteriori knowledge. One is pre-fit, the other malleable and responsive to experience. The first runs on pre-existing data, the second on synthetic data. To get good, self-driving cars need to master not just the abstract rules of the road but the tacit rules that help us manage edge cases: what to do when a pedestrian pops out of nowhere, how to steer when visibility is limited, what to do when a lane is closed.
This training/inference split shows up all over Genesis and Exodus. Take Eden - the first humans had some baseline knowledge, but they didn't really know anything until they ate from the tree. That's when the text says "they knew they were naked" - their first real inference from experience rather than pre-loaded info. Then Adam "knows" Eve - again, not abstract knowledge but intimate experiential knowing. The Bible keeps using this word "know" to flag moments where someone gains real understanding through experience rather than just having information dumped into their head.
Look at Jacob's "surely God was in this place and I didn't know it!" moment. Jacob grew up hearing about God from Isaac and Abraham, but he needed his own direct encounter to really get it. Same thing with that new Pharaoh who "didn't know Joseph" - he had all the historical data about Joseph saving Egypt, but without the lived experience of the relationship, it meant nothing to him. It's like how AI can have perfect recall of its training data but still miss the meaningful connections that come from real-world experience.
So too, God doesn't pre-load the human being with certain types of knowledge but requires experience to teach. Instead of pre-training the Israelite to come already with a knowledge of the Exodus, God requires the Israelites to endure hardship. Only on that basis will we "know the feelings of the stranger." The Egyptians, likewise, will only know the Lord by watching their civilization crack under the pressure of plague. There's no way to give them this knowledge from first principles. Each plague is like another training example, building on the last one. That's why the text keeps saying "that you may know" before each one - it's not just punishment, it's education through experience.
Pharaoh's hardened heart represents the tension between training and inference. To know God requires one to infer by "softening the heart," i.e., changing what one has taken to be ground-truth in the training phase. The whole Exodus story is structured around this kind of knowing through experience. Even when God tells Moses that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew God as El Shaddai but not as YHWH, it's saying they missed something you can only get through lived experience - in this case, the experience of liberation.
This privileging of experience over perfect pre-loading explains one of the story's most puzzling aspects: why God chooses Moses, a man who struggles with speech, as leader. Moses's stutter would seem to disqualify him if leadership were about having the right training data - smooth speech, charisma, confidence. But Moses brings something more valuable: the lived experience of straddling worlds. Raised as an Egyptian prince, he chooses to identify with Hebrew slaves. He experiences exile as a shepherd, encounters God in the wilderness. Like an AI that performs better on real tasks despite having fewer parameters than its competitors, Moses's leadership comes not from perfect pre-training but from rich experiential data that lets him navigate between Egyptian and Hebrew, divine and human, slavery and freedom. His speech impediment might even underscore the point - God values experiential wisdom over polished presentation.
But why does the Exodus need to be experienced at all? And more puzzling - why does an all-powerful God desire experience? The answer might lie in the nature of relationships. Knowledge-through-experience creates bonds that purely abstract knowledge can't match. When you experience something with someone, you form a connection that mere information can't replicate.
This might explain why God desires experience despite being all-powerful. An omniscient God could simply know everything about human suffering through perfect computation. But the text suggests something different: God wants to experience suffering with Israel, to form a bond through shared experience.
The leitmotif of "knowing" dominates the Exodus narrative. Everything happens so both Israelite and Egyptian will know God. Clearly, this type of knowing differs from the philosopher's contemplation of God as first cause. That's why Pesach isn't just about remembering facts but about creating an experience that converts historical data into living knowledge, generation after generation.
So important is experiential knowing that God even says "I know their sufferings," suggesting that up until a certain moment, God had "training" knowledge of the plight of the people, but not "inference" knowledge. God, too, is transformed by experience. An eternal unchanging God needs no covenant and thus no inference. Such a God is just a self-trained being with infinite computational power. But the God of Israel, the God of history, needs real world data to learn.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
This beautiful piece inspired me to consider the differences between English and Hebrew for learning something by heart. Fuller training of AI would do well to recognize this distinction between rote learning (which in English we call “learning by heart” but in Hebrew is “בעל פה”, literally “by mouth”) and more fully learning something “by heart”. Moses needs to go beyond speech to learn “by heart”. In Hebrew “by heart” can be literally translated as “בעל לב” - but idiomatically in Hebrew this means to do something with kindness and sensitivity, i.e., “with heart” in English. This requires interaction with and appreciation of others.
To train AI in this way after initial model building may require actual experience in the world, but this real-world approach would be orders of magnitude slower than initial training, and so likely not scalable. Hence the move to automate real-world reinforcement learning by simulating that AI’s experiences, at least as an initial bootstrap.
An alternative scaling approach to trying to stuff experiential learning into a single grand AI’s “heart”, may be to scale this by letting billions of AI agents bloom, each with their own “learning heart”. This latter approach seems to be the one our own Creator took.