God is both omniscient and not omniscient.

The apparent-ignorance texts belong to a recognized literary category: anthropomorphic/anthropopathic narrative accommodation, in which the narrator depicts God's knowledge becoming dramatically and relationally manifest within the unfolding story for the benefit of the human characters and readers, rather than reporting an actual epistemic deficiency being remedied. 'Now I know' (Gen 22:12) uses the Hebrew yada' in a performative, covenantal-relational sense — 'now it is manifest/demonstrated' (the same usage appears in Amos 3:2, 'you only have I known among all the families of the earth,' plainly not a claim of God's prior ignorance of other nations, but of covenant intimacy) — best read as marking the completion and public demonstration of Abraham's tested faith, not new information reaching God. 'I will go down and see' (Gen 18:21) establishes a due-process/judicial-investigation motif that models fair judgment for human judges reading the narrative, a deliberate literary device, not a claim about God's epistemic location. God's question to Adam, 'Where are you?', functions the way a parent's question to a hiding child functions — inviting confession, not seeking geographic information. Philosophically, the classical (Boethian/Thomistic) doctrine holds that God, as timelessly eternal, knows all truths — including temporally indexed ones — not successively as they occur but in a single eternal 'present' (Boethius, *Consolation of Philosophy* Bk. V; Aquinas, *ST* I q.14). It is worth conceding honestly that a minority tradition within Christian theology, open theism (Clark Pinnock, John Sanders), reads texts like these more literally and argues God's knowledge of future free contingents is genuinely open — this is a real, debated minority position within the bounds of some Christian traditions, not proof of scriptural self-contradiction. The majority classical position, however, has strong independent textual (Isa 46:9-10, 'declaring the end from the beginning') and philosophical grounds for full omniscience, with the apparent-ignorance texts explained by accommodation rather than by limiting God's actual knowledge.

Divine simplicity and timeless eternity coherently ground a complete, unchanging knowledge of all truths while still allowing the text to narrate God's dealings with creatures in vivid, temporally-structured, relationally engaged language — precisely because Scripture is written by and for temporal creatures, not because God is Himself temporally limited. This combination (full transcendent knowledge plus genuine relational engagement in the narrative) is a mark of theological sophistication, not incoherence.