Does the idea that God won't override our free will come from the Bible, or is it inferred from God's "hiddenness"?

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This is a really good question. The Bible contains many examples of God overriding people’s free will in order to make them do bad things, but God never overrides free will to make someone do good things.

This presents an interesting conundrum, that in my estimation can only be resolved by thinking really deeply about just what God is and what He’s trying to do. A simplistic reading will conclude that God is no better than the acts He makes people do.

But this is where I want to start invoking Eastern spirituality. It’s kind of weird to think about this considering that Christianity is the quintessentially Western faith, but the Hebrew religion was thought to to be an Eastern creed.

Eastern spirituality was always, curiously, collectivist rather than individualist. Your goal was to try to merely exist in a hostile world where God’s love was often harsh and capricious. This required submitting your ego and goals to those of a collective.

This put the Hebrew faith closer to more Eastern religions like the Babylonian creeds than to Eastern faiths like the Egyptian, or the precursors to Greek pantheonic religion, the Mycenaean cults. In general, the East was more populous and therefore warlike, while the West had fewer people and more material abundance per capita.

This affected their religious beliefs. Judaism emerged from Canaanite religion, and the Canaanites were a very very warlike people. The farmland was exceedingly rich, and relatively large armies could be fielded. The Old Testament chronicled the mentality of these people. Along with all of these warlike peoples were an aristocratic priesthood whose jobs were to try to get them to fight less and work more.

The priesthood had the unenviable task of helping these people at the same time make sense of their belligerent natures, and at the same time promoting peacefulness. This eventually culminated in the Torah.

The history of the Torah is interesting. Hebrew spirituality was a very diverse thing. Many prophets, many priests, many different views. You can see the artifacts of this diversity in the different narratives in Genesis. You had the earlier Yahwist, who had God create man of dust, and the later Priestly writer, whose God breathed man into being.

It turned out that the Babylonians, who were vilified in later books of what is now the Old Testament, were the ones that gave the world the Torah. At the time of the Torah’s creation, what we now call Israel was a vassal territory of the Babylonians, who carted the intelligensia of Hebrew society off to Babylon so they wouldn’t become agents of chaos threatening Babylonian rule in Israel.

The Babylonians needed the Israelites to have a more legible religion, so it would be easier to rule them. So they commissioned the canonicalization of Israelite beliefs into a singular collection of literary works. If they had not done that, then it’s quite likely that Christianity, and therefore the modern world, would not have emerged. We know now that devolution without subsequent synthesis ultimately diminishes power rather than increases it.

The Torah eventually spawned the Old Testament thousands of years later as a result of another key threat to the Jewish way of life. The Old Testament is the Torah, re-contextualized to give an ending to the story of Adam’s fall from grace in Jesus the Christ. Many many things were changed and reinterpreted to drive this conclusion.

If you could understand what the Israelites were dealing with, namely the Romans, then you can understand why they settled on Jesus as the culmination of their story. And if you understand the dynamic nature of the Israelite religion, then you can understand why the changes and re-contextualizations and revisionism weren’t considered to be a perversion, except by the most conservative Jewish factions, even though such things these days definitely are.

The old Jewish faith was one of farmers sacrificing significant portions of their flocks to a capricious God in order to absolve them of sin. For many practical reasons, it would never have survived Roman conquest. It was evolve, or die. And the Israelites would never die, they were way way way too smart for that. It’s just a question of the best way to survive and thrive.

So far, I’ve been talking around the question of free will rather than directly at it, seemingly going off-topic to discuss history and whatnot. But really, I’ve been giving more and more context towards the Hebrew attitude towards free will. This was a people that could not control their destiny, they had to accept whatever foreign rulers told them to, and all they could do was to create subversive literature so that they could perpetuate their values and culture in the face of foreign attack. It’s a pattern that continued in the history of the Jews until the establishment of the modern nation of Israel so that the Jews could have a land and a political state of their own.

When you look at the arc not just of the Torah, but also of history, you can see that the deity of the Hebrews / Jews intends people to develop their free will, not just to grant it to them. This sentiment is continued and developed in Christianity, which expects you to exist in constant submission to the holy figure of Jesus, considered to be the physical incarnation of God Himself.

I personally am greatly sympathetic to the old Israelites, and also sympathetic to the views of modern Christians, whose views on religion represent a true evolution of old agrarian ideas. We would not have the modern world without Christian free will. But it’s good to respect ancient Israelite diversity of belief. You see many many parallels in Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, whose soteriology is almost as evolved as Christianity’s.

Now that was a rambling answer, but I hope it’s useful.