James,

Thanks for the comment. I mentioned E. Seibert in the review. His book, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God, is I feel a much more honest and interdisciplinarily rigorous treatment of the topic.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6188989-disturbing-divine-behavior

If you’d like to go even deeper, I can’t recommend Israel Finkelstein’s seminal text enough: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. It adapts a pro-archaeological perspective in approaching the biblical texts. In fact it is archaeology that has the deepest import for OT scholarship and that has led to the mainstream view that the Exodus and Joshua narratives are of dubious historicity, for example, and that the head patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are beyond hope of establishing historical credibility.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169479.The_Bible_Unearthed

More on patriarchal historicity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham#Historicity

If you want more from Lamb’s camp, you can try Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, though it is very much a rehash of the problems noted in this review. Copan ignores external evidences, except where it supports his case. At bottom, both Lamb and Copan suffer from a presuppositionalist agenda. They are both precommitted to rescuing the God of the Bible, rather than acknowledging there is a significant gap between the God of the texts and the God they have erected in their mind.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9612357-is-god-a-moral-monster

And you’re right. It is very disappointing to read a book that provides non- or ill-considered answers to grave questions and expecting the reader not to notice. There is serious scholarship that has examined these issues. And Lamb’s book doesn’t come within hailing distance.

Thank you for the thoughtful review. Though it sounds like we come from very different theological convictions (I am a Christian), I sympathize with many of the critiques you’ve offered in your post. There are few things more frustrating than buying a book that never really engages the questions it purports to answer. At the end of your post you allude to books that do a better job of addressing the ethical challenges of the Old Testament. Would you mind sharing those titles?

Kyle,

Thanks for your comment. I’m not sure I understand your question at the end. If you’re saying that language is important when communicating on these matters then I would of course agree. An ineffective communicator has little hope of getting through to someone.

Thanks for writing and engaging seriously w/a book which seems in your opinion to have done more harm than good for the atheist/monotheist debate. I too wish that we would do away w/simplistic answers to hard questions, or at least theologically shrouded answers that are really simply ours – or the authors – thoughts that are based on simple scriptures. The Bible is such an impressive, culturally, literarily diverse compilation of texts that it really takes someone who has committed their whole life to the academic study of it to form a theology that can answer some of Dawkins’ harder questions. I won’t attempt to answer any in this forum. For context of where I am coming from, and maybe helping those who read here to understand where the book’s author might be coming from I will simply say this. For those who think the Judeo-Christian canon is sacred, God-inspired, and true they will likely defend the author in this way, by quoting the text… 🙂 The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these (ie – children, in this example). Some of the theological and doctrinal concepts of the Judeo-Christian Scripture are not hard to understand, and certainly the Gospel of the Kingdom Coming is not. Unfortunately when it comes to seminary-trained Christians addressing some of the portions of the text that cause persons like Dawkins and others to question Yahweh’s moral fiber, we sometimes lean too much on simplicity, and struggle to enter theological debates whose terms we do not swim in… if that makes sense. As a writer, I understand your choice of words here… however, I would put forward that most might not. I think maybe this in and of itself creates some barriers to finding common ground from which to have a healthy, full debate on these important issues. Would you agree?