text: A) he may have done it with certainty they would refuse. That doesn't make it right or commendable. Like other people in the scriptures he did a number of very stupid things that were nowhere close to God's instructions. 
  
  B) I have never seen anything in the Bible or a commentary on the passage that said it was "okay". Have you? There are many actions recorded in the Bible that are not there because they were right or pleasing to God, but because they are a part of Hebrew history that God inspired men to record. There is no way to read the events in scripture and assume because they were written down they were all good and worthy of praise and emulating.  The Bible includes the history of a people and unlike one might expect from religious writings, gives the good, the bad and the ugly.