"...not a world of belief in God but of knowledge of God."

"This is a world of upheavals of nature, of immediate proofs of divine presence. It is not a world of belief in God but of knowledge of God. Indeed, there is no world for "to believe" in biblical Hebrew. The word frequently translated as "to believe" means, in the original, something more like "to trust"; that is, it means that one can rely on this God to do what He said He will do, Hebrew: b'myn; e.g. Exod 14:31). It does not mean "to believe" in the sense of belief that God exists. God's existence is understood in these texts to be a matter of empirical knowledge, demonstrated by divine appearances and miraculous demonstrations. This, by the way, is what makes the stories of human rebellion in the Hebrew Bible so remarkable. It is not that humans doubt the deity's existence. The impressive thing is rather that, knowing that this God exists, they consciously rebel against His authority.
For the generation of the exodus, more than any other in the Bible, this is so:  the divine presence is depicted as a known, manifest fact. This generation of the Israelites is presented as having continuous miraculous evidence of the divine presence in full view at all times for forty years."

-- The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery, Richard Elliot Friedman, 1995, p. 14.