Two entangled bodies are cupped in the hand of a divine sculptor – a hand carved by other hands, from marble quarried by yet more hands. Nicks and scuffs melt seamlessly into polished expanses where the resistant material has been abraded into compliant smoothness, so that it is impossible to tell where one body ends and the other begins. God's hand is sinewy, with pads of flesh, nubs of knuckle, and clipped fingernails. His palm is a womb for the foetal furling of Adam and Eve's limbs; they are chips off the old block. Their amniotic intimacy evokes the human DIY project, when two people become ‘one flesh’ and have children.

Yet Eve's angular elbows and braced back suggest a tenderness stretched taut; we cannot tell whether she is pulling Adam close, or pulling away towards greater definition. The cover image of this book is creation, but not as Genesis has it. Here, Adam and Eve are conceived together, her shape and face defined before Adam’s, whose features and fingers are as yet whorls in the grain. The marble is the crystallisation of heat, pressure, and the powdered bones of prehistoric sea creatures – the fossils that at least one Victorian believed ‘God hid … in the rocks’ in order to tempt geologists into rejecting Genesis's account of creation. Auguste Rodin's hand of God is an unruly technics, caught in the act.

It is the product of technical processes which give shape to raw material, and it depicts those processes in action. But ‘depicts’ is not quite the right word. The sculpture is also an exegesis: it mobilises and interrogates a scriptural tradition. For Isaiah and Jeremiah, God is a potter; for the psalmist, ‘my frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth’.