Moses and his nasty god

Dear George

It has been some months since I've addressed you. Forgive my long absence. In the meantime many awful things have happened in the world – the bombings in London and Egypt, the famine in Niger, just to mention some of the most recent items to hit the headlines. All of which might make a fellow wonder about the existence of a just god.

I myself have been reading a modernised version of the bible, Testament, based on the text of the Revised English Bible, with the boring bits removed, and I have to say that reading it makes me wonder even more about said god.

How much do you Christians concern yourselves with the inconsistencies involved in taking over, or trying to take over a god who seems to have been invented by a particular group of people, not easily identified from the Bible, but calling themselves Israelites, descendants of Jacob, whom their god renamed Israel? This god, whom you would describe as your god, is described here as coming down to his people in the form of a cloud and saying ‘The Lord, the Lord [he likes to give himself capitalised airs], a God compassionate and gracious, long-suffering, ever faithful and true, remaining faithful to thousands, forgiving iniquity, rebellion and sin but without acquitting the guilty, one who punishes children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for the iniquity of their fathers!’

This self-aggrandising, pitiless god strikes me as having been drawn from the countless fulminating tyrants prevalent at the time, and still prevalent today. A jealous, an unpredictable god, god, a god to fear and placate. At around this time, this same god gets into an argy-bargy with Moses, who manages to dissuade him from entirely wiping out his soi-disant chosen people, because they built a golden calf to worship instead of him. Eventually, the god changes his mind and picks out some Levites to put a ‘mere’ three thousand of the ‘worst offenders’ to the sword. It seems to me that Saddam didn’t need to study Stalin during his apprenticeship in state terror, all he had to do was read certain passages of the Old Testament. I’d love to know how you manage to reconcile this character with the perfect, all-loving being you now claim to be your god. Surely an explanation is in order.