‘God certainly does not exist, and anyway it's all His fault’. That aphorism sums up the contradictions at the heart of this fascinating but rather unfocused collection of essays. The words are borrowed from the late Tony Judt and appear in an epigraph to the concluding essay, by Howard Wettstein, ‘God's Struggles’. Judt was not a practising Jew when he wrote those words (and had not been for a long time), but Wettstein is. That an atheist should be cited by a believer is apt for a book which consists of scholarly debates about the eccentric and irascible sadist (for one contributor at least) who is the God of the Bible. The participants in the original Notre Dame conference came from various backgrounds, so that atheists were pitted against theologians, biblical experts against professors of philosophy. The book is not entirely free of theological jargon (‘the reflexive collation of the ontological and the economic’, p. 299) nor of editing errors (Judt's words appeared in a tribute to Leszek, not Leslie, Kolakowski), but for the most part it provides a feast of intelligent and challenging readings of the Hebrew, and to some extent the Christian, Bible.

‘How might one even begin to come to terms with divinely mandated horror?’ is the way that Wettstein's essay formulates the issue. Unlike some of the participants, he is neither inclined to minimise the problem nor to explain it away. Some take the view that since God has granted the gift of life he can justifiably withdraw it at will (p. 233) and, after all, being with God in Heaven is likely to be better than life on earth. Others (Eleanor Stump in particular, but also Richard Swinburne) write about the need for Israel to learn gradually how to behave in light of its peculiar dispensation (being Chosen), and this takes rather a long time. The Canaanites are destroyed, or moved out, not so much because of their own behaviour as because of the way Israel refuses to learn its lessons. Questions of genre (allegory, stylised quasi-history for example) supervene for some contributors and require a reading which does not go looking for historical fact: God does not require the destruction of the Amorites or Canaanites and the rest but rather wants readers of the narrative to destroy sin in their own lives. Others argue that the Conquest, especially the elaborate story told in the Book of Joshua, should be read in the context of the Babylonian exile: it is thus projecting an ‘ideal’ representation of Israel's history and should not be taken literally.

Surprisingly few of the contributors (Gary A. Anderson, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Christopher Seitz) take into account the question of the historicity of the Conquest itself, but then that is largely because the point of the volume lies in debating what the Bible says about God, and so it will not make much difference whether the commands to destroy the Amalekites, women and infants too, is an accurate reflection of what the ancient Israelites actually did. The Christians among the contributors wriggle even more uncomfortably than their Jewish counterparts in their efforts to defend a perfect and omnipotent God. He after all is the one who, according to the New Testament, prepares eternal damnation for many of us, in whose new improved world the Law is even more stringent because inward and about desires as much as acts, who mandates the gory scenes of the final judgement, and who requires his own son to suffer a long and painful death. More than one of the Christian participants has honest trouble, for example, with Augustine's assumption that the rock on which the enemy babies are bashed is actually the Rock, Jesus Christ.

The intensity of the discussions and the powerful emotions evoked by several of the topics make the volume at times hard to put down. The author of the first essay, Louise Anthony, sets the tone for the non-believers. She is outraged that Moses is denied entry to the promised land because he has the temerity to strike a rock when God had told him simply to speak to it (p. 39). In a witty essay, she shows that what really matters to God is not adultery and murder but whether the deed is authorised. Nathan the prophet tells David, who has committed both sins, that because he admitted his guilt God has ‘put away his sin’ and vacated the death sentence. ‘Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die’, as the text of 2 Samuel 12:14 says. Anthony adds: ‘Adultery and murder are one thing: dissing the Lord is serious’.

In spite of the high level of philosophical sophistication shown by several of the essayists, the book as a whole suffers from the lack of any clear definition of its goals or its general purpose. The word ‘evil’, for example, is never defined, nor did the organisers of the conference, and so the editors of the volume, apparently ever ask themselves whether they need to try for a definition. Marcion is mentioned more than once, not only as a stimulus to the formation of the Christian canon, but also for his key notion that the god of the Old Testament is not the same as the god of the New. But his views get little discussion. This allows the participants to avoid any unpleasant mudslinging between Jews and Christians, and the conference was convened, after all, at a leading Roman Catholic university. Only once does anyone quote Isaiah 45:7, and it is, once again, Howard Wettstein: ‘I am Y-H-W-H and there is none else:/ I form light and create darkness,/ Peace is my doing, and I create evil,/ I Y-H-W-H do all these things’. He explains that he prefers to cite the Tetragrammaton in this way because the form ‘the Lord’ obscures the fact that it is a proper name, and thus introduces what he regards as inappropriate distance and formality. Indeed his argument goes on to describe a god who is far from perfect, who is angry and resentful, who changes his mind, who is subject to flattery, who struggles.

With this kind of god, and even including the one portrayed in the Song of Songs (Wettstein stresses the erotic component), it is possible to have a personal relationship, ‘someone with whom we share our deepest longings, pains, and joys. There is also the suggestion of a certain longing on the part of God, for intimacy with His people, for sharing their love in the context of a transformed world’. Wettstein does not mention Kierkegaard but he is surprisingly one of only two contributors to spend time, as Kierkegaard did so movingly in Fear and Trembling, discussing the parallels between the Book of Job and the Akedah (God's command to Abraham to kill Isaac). Louise Anthony is the other, and she adds Adam and Eve to the paradigm.

The volume is introduced by the invocation of a quite different God, one who is ‘morally perfect and unconditionally deserving of devotion, obedience, love, and worship’. Therein lies the problem. For this same God condones and even commands such ‘moral atrocities’ as slavery, rape, genocide and child sacrifice. If these ‘texts constitute divine revelation’, as the authors rather awkwardly put it, how can that God be worshipped? The time is ripe for a reappraisal both because of terrorist attacks performed in the name of God – which seems to mean Islamist attacks, since Samson is never mentioned – and because the so-called ‘New Atheists’ like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens have made much of the way ‘the sacred texts of the great theistic religions’ glory in such violence (p. 3). A few participants add that global politics should also be considered in this light – or darkness. In an essay simply entitled ‘What About the Canaanites?’ Gary A. Anderson discusses the way the Bible has authorised the murderous activities of the Puritans in New England, the Boers in South Africa, settlers in Australia, as well as right-wing Zionists and their Christian allies in Israel. But he continues that, since God promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, they have a providential or ‘supernatural right’ to it.

The helpful introduction contains brief abstracts of each of the essays as well as a useful list of the various options and strategies for dealing with these problematic texts.

Since this is a book constructed largely by philosophers of religion, it is perhaps to be expected that there are few considerations of the kind that have been common in the scholarly worlds which generated those magnificent compilations usually known as ANET (Ancient Near Eastern Texts) or ANET2. Indeed the editors admit that ancient near eastern culture in general, especially literary styles, are areas that need what they call ‘further research’. Even more striking is the absence of any real discussion of what constitutes the authority of scripture or religious tradition. Throughout the volume, however, if the idea that only part of a divinely inspired text should be authoritative for either belief or practice is raised, it is immediately rejected, virtually without discussion (e.g. 181). And exactly how a text gets to be regarded as divinely inspired in the first place is not considered, even though one fine chapter (by Evan Fales) is called ‘Satanic Verses’ (without actually naming Rushdie or the whole issue of Satanic interference with inspiration on which Rushdie's book turns). Rarely is it even allowed that the Bible is actually more like a library, consisting of books which conflict with each other. In Richard Swinburne's fine essay on the history of interpretation, this idea, that the Bible is a patchwork of passages from different centuries and cultures, and has thus been variously and not always literally interpreted, somehow and rather desperately requires that the whole Bible be regarded as inspired (p. 213).

The title for the original conference, though not retained for the book, contained a tag from Isaiah 55:8: ‘My ways are not your ways’. That motto was taken to mean what one sceptic calls the ‘Higher Ways Objection’ although in its original context, as Edwin Curley points out (p. 68) the statement simply means that God is more forgiving than men usually are. The change of tone in the new title certainly makes for a more eye-catching concept.