From a contemporary religious perspective this episode seems bizarre. Personal encounters and dialogues with a deity are no longer part of everyday experience and may be viewed with suspicion. Modern religious encounters can take the form of prayer, which the faithful might claim are often answered, but they are not answered by an audible voice making promises. Abraham and the other patriarchs belonged to an archaic period. Their stories contain many puzzling contradictions when measured against certain features of contemporary religious belief. For example, the God Abraham is talking with does not appear to be omniscient. If He is omniscient, He is deceptively hiding this fact from Abraham and the whole conversation is a sham. An omniscient God would know exactly how many righteous individuals there are in the city. He would not need to "go down to see." Likewise, Abraham's God does not seem to be omnipotent. If He were omnipotent, he would pluck the wicked from the city and punish them while leaving the righteous be. An omnipotent god would not need to tolerate collateral damage. He would use smart bombs instead of blockbusters.

Omniscience and omnipotence make justice a trivial task. Without them, though, justice becomes an interesting challenge. The Arguing-Abe episode should perhaps be read as a record of how the ancients began to grapple with questions of retribution, responsibility, and acceptable error in the execution of justice. Viewed from this perspective, the episode appears to be strikingly modern. Abraham, through his questioning, intends to determine the disutility of punishing the righteous. A modern decision analysis would of course require information about the size of the city, call it N. With this information, and the number of wicked people being N - the number of righteous, one could estimate an indifference point. One could determine a proportion of righteous that would make the prospects of killing all or none equally attractive (or equally aversive).

Abraham does not frame the problem in proportional terms. Perhaps such thinking was not available in archaic times. Alternatively, Abraham's focus on the absolute number of innocent victims might be a shrewd psychological device. The prospect of saving 10 innocent individuals is more salient, vivid, and emotionally evocative than the prospect of saving 1% of some population of unknown size. Besides, unless the city is very small, the absolute numbers Abraham gets to use are larger than the numbers he would use if he did a conversion to proportions.

It so happens that Abraham's calling attention to the potential demise of innocents establishes a loss frame. God must consider the loss of good people. In human psychology, losses are highly aversive, more aversive that gains (here: the desired destruction of bad people) are pleasurable. Focusing on losses, Abraham can gamble that even small numbers seem intolerably large.

If we contemplate the possibility that Abraham relies on psychology to make his case persuasive, we must concede that his God is not only not omniscient and not omnipotent, but that He is also not fully rational. He apparently does not possess clearly articulated preferences and He yields to subtle social influence. This is not unusual for the God of Genesis, but nonetheless intriguing from a contemporary religious perspective.

Treating God as if He were human, Abraham shows his skill as communicator and negotiator. The most salient feature of his strategy is its sequential nature. He coaxes agreement with a proposition that seems hard to deny. Killing 50 righteous would be an outrage. Then he whittles away in steps of 5 and then 10 until reaching the final number to 10. To students of social psychology, Abraham's strategy is a clear case of the "foot-in-the-door" technique. Compliance with a risky targeted request (save 10) is more likely obtained if it is preceded by a less demanding request (save 50). Abraham shows himself a masterly practitioner because his strategy involves 5 steps with a total of 6 concessions. He offers nothing in return other than God's gratification of living up to his own self-image as the guarantor of justice. Abraham brings forth the central role of God' self-image by diminishing his own role. He carefully avoids any reference to his potential self-interest (i.e., saving his relatives), he emphasizes his own insignificance ("dust and ashes"), and he acknowledges God's authority while at the same time subtly inducing compassion with the mortals. In short, Abraham plays a whole hand of cards, with the most critical ones being self-herding (multi-step compliance) and self-image maintenance (please act in accordance with your own reputational ideal stated elsewhere).

After almost four thousand years, Abraham is still a great teacher.