February 27, 2002

GOD By Alexander Waugh Review, £18.99; 350 pp ISBN 0 7472 7016 3

THE HEBREW GOD By Bernhard Lang Yale, £25; 260 pp ISBN 0 3000 9025 0

While other children clamoured for bedtime stories, Alexander Waugh was asking his father, Auberon, questions about God. The replies were unhelpful to a boy on a quest – as was the cheque-book journalism offered by Waugh the Elder on his death-bed; he wanted to pay Alexander the sum of his advance so that he could withdraw this book from publication.

That was the kind of gesture God Himself might have made. Indeed, it would have been worth God’s while to slip Alexander a winning lottery ticket to distract him from His biography. Unfortunately He can’t sue: every word is either His own, His prophets’, or His people’s. He may be The Word, but He no longer controls the press.

Waugh has stitched together a wide range of sources – the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, the Apocrypha, the Koran, the voices of mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Papal Bulls, Church Fathers, and more modern commentators, such as the Mormons’ Joseph Smith, to build a picture of a deity as maddeningly fragmented and multifaceted as a Cubist portrait. If God was going to sit for anyone, it should have been Picasso.

God’s infinite variety – or absurd contradictions – is playfully revealed by Waugh, who is funny without being cynical. The charm of this book is that Waugh loves God, even though he probably can’t believe in him. What might have been an exercise in cleverness is a deeply felt and genuine exploration.

Here are some questions you probably never asked about God: How does God get around? It appears that God is not omnipresent – He has to walk quite a lot (see The Garden of Eden); otherwise He can travel in a damp cloud or as a pillar of fire, but He likes to be carried – see The Ark of the Covenant. We are told that His throne has wheels on it, which suggests that the angels can push Him up and down.

Does God have any pets? Yes: according to the Book of Job, two; Behemoth, a kind of hippopotamus, and Leviathan, a cross between a dinosaur and a crocodile. He is fond of these pets, but prepared to crush their heads in when they irritate Him.

What makes God laugh? Book of Job again – seeing worms pop in and out of Job ‘s skin as he sits on a dung hill for 48 years.

Is God forgetful? Yes: He has to use a rainbow as an aide- memoire to stop Him flooding the earth by accident. He asks Moses to blow a loud trumpet now and again, to remind Him to think of Israel. (Num x,9)

Can God lie? No – but he can make other people lie, and is often to be found putting a “lying spirit” into the mouths of his his prophets and his enemies. Then he punishes them for lying.

Did God build Hell? The Hebrew word for Hell is Gehenna – a valley outside Jerusalem where Israelites used to throw their children into a perpetual bonfire as a sacrifice to the god Moloch. God tried to stop this, but it continued – and the notion of hellfire was born.

The God of the Old Testament is not a God of Love, but, as Waugh points out, God changes according to need, and a desert people in search of an identity needed a war-like vengeful deity, not a icon of forgiveness. It is only the Christian religion that reclaims God as Love – and even after Jesus, love was not as sexy as power. Crushing the Infidel has been a favourite sport of Crusaders, Inquisitors, Lutheran Reformers, and modern-day Fundamentalists everywhere. In Islam, the God of War is still preferred to the God of Love. This is more than a pity. It is a tragedy for humankind, whose own divided heart has been acted out on a grand scale by the God-images we have chosen. Seduced by love, we remain infatuated with power, and if love is as strong as death, we have yet to discover it. Waugh’s biography is a search for love – and strangely, the god he leaves us with, however impossible, remains attractive. He has his bad days, but so do we all.

Bernhard Lang’s The Hebrew God is more scholarly and schematic, but much less fun. This is not a criticism: Lang is a professor of Old Testament and religious studies, and he starts from the premise that as the Hebrew God is the most distinguished deity on record, we should have a good look at him. Lang follows the sacred writings of the scriptures and seeks to reconstruct the historical reality around them. So, when he addresses the question of Yahweh, as one of a number of deities becoming the supreme deity, he notes that it was common in time of war or crisis to worship only the god who offered the best chance of success. Yahweh was often successful. In some ways he was the model of the free market: bring your business to me and I’ll do a better deal than the competition. When the Israelites went back to their old gods, it was because they felt relaxed. Yahweh was always able to prompt another crisis – it might be called rigging the market – but it worked. May the best god win.

God may or may not exist, but we can’t stop thinking about him. His passage through time is a diary of ourselves. It may be nothing more, but in itself it is significant enough. Harold Bloom understood this complex longing and self-reflection in one sentence, when he translated God’s blessing to his Chosen People as this: more life into a time without boundaries. – Jeanette Winterson

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,923-219695,00.html