Quick! Duck!

The ancient Near Easterners also assumed that once an angered deity departed, he or she would do so using a flurry of curses. Since this is a typical reaction among outraged human beings, there is no reason to believe that the deities behaved any differently. Accordingly, like their human counterparts, if a deity did utter imprecations, it was more than likely that he or she delivered them in a gust of multiple expletives. True anger never allows for only one malediction. A deep seated fury is hot and vociferous. It naturally produces many curses.— Cursed Are You!, page 227

<idle musing>
And, as always, we reason from the given—what we see around us—to the divine. The given is what we know, so we figure that the divine must be like what we already know. Makes sense, right?

Well, it does unless there is divine self-revelation, that is. No wonder we see curses thrown at us in Genesis 3. No wonder we end up with a mad god who needs to be placated. No wonder we can't fathom a doctrine like theosis. No wonder we can't fathom the incarnation as emptying. No wonder we can't imagine any method other than coercive violence and war to be effective. No wonder...and the list goes on and on.

We end up huddling in our little walled city, scared to death of everything. We use any means we can to protect ourselves. Any means that is except embracing a loving God who willingly died so that we might really live. That is unfathomable, too good to be true. But it is true...

Well, that rabbit trail went a long way from the angered deity throwing curses, but I think it illustrates the radical difference between a monotheistic viewpoint with an all-loving deity and a polytheistic outlook that by necessity is always looking over its shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to fall...
</idle musing>