The biblical pattern is not about ascending or escaping embodiment (a Greek idea) but about God drawing nearer to us ("to draw near" is the Hebrew definition of the word "sacrifice"), grounding spiritual growth in humility and presence (a Hebrew idea). God descends to take on the body of a man. Throughout the biblical narrative God always descends. 

In Genesis God separates and brings Order to the abstract realms and fills them with vulnerable, naked human bodies in the midst of everything. This is a picture of a universal being filled with particulars: and the point of the abstraction is to get to the particular, and to ground it, not to negate it. This descent is mirrored in the Incarnation, where God humbly takes on human form, emphasizing intimacy with humanity rather than escape from it – an immensely subversive idea in human history (Philippians 2). This Incarnation is congruent with the pattern of everything that happens before. God in the scriptures becomes ever more intimate with human beings as the story continues – the symbol of spiritual growth potential in all of us. "Heaven," as Chesterton said, "is under the earth." 

God is the ground of being, countering the modern notion that we should ascend as much as we can because if not it'll end in tears and annihilation. The Biblical story contradicts this. 

There is also a reversal of perspective: for the first time in history the Bible takes things from the side of the victim. The reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in other myths. The story of Cain and Abel is told in sympathy with Abel, whose murderer founded the first city in the history of the world (an inverted parallel of the story of Rome's Romulus and Remus). The Exodus would normally be told from the point of view of the Egyptians. The shame of being nailed to the Roman cross is transformed into the glory of God and a new moral ethic that two millennia later has produced a world that no longer glorifies the mighty's oppression of the victim. Living in this world, we find this natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death. Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the story, he has truly killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible for the plague that ravages Thebes. Casting him out isn't merely permissible but a religious duty. The Bible radically inverts this ancient perspective. 

A subtheme of this reversed perspective recurs frequently in the early books of the Bible: the passing over of the firstborn son, who normally has the legal right of primogeniture, in favor of the younger one. The firstborn son of Adam, Cain, is sent into Exile, and the line of descent goes through Seth. Ham, the rejected son of Noah, is not said to be his eldest son, but the same pattern recurs. Abraham is told to reject his son Ishmael because a younger son (Isaac) is to be born to him. Isaac's eldest son Esau loses his birthright to Jacob through some rather dubious maneuvers on Jacob's part, some of them backed by his mother. Jacob's eldest son Reuben loses his inheritance for the reason given in Genesis 49:4. Joseph's younger son Ephraim takes precedence over the elder Manasseh. The same theme is extended, though not essentially changed, in the story of the founding of Israel's monarchy, where the first chosen king, Saul, is rejected and his line passed over in favor of David, who is practically his adopted son (I Samuel 18:2).