A good God is hard to find 
James Francken
Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The oldest sections – parts of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers – are more than three thousand years old and there are commentators who believe that they may have been written by a woman, a highly placed figure in the court of King Solomon. Jenny Diski’s latest novel is a third-person account of misadventure in Genesis: Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s central character is God and Diski lets her deity have a point of view. In extended monologues, God looks down on the world, judging the ‘happy, human family’: ‘What sensitivity. What development. What drivel.’ When God talks about himself in the Bible, his sex is ambiguous: metaphors compare him to a mother and a father, a husband and a wife. In Only Human, God is more revealing; by turns patronising, chippy, complacent and withdrawn – God is a man.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
James Francken, a former assistant editor at the LRB, works at the Daily Telegraph.
print layout
tell a friend