WHEN GOD SET ABOUT CREATING THAT incomparable work we now call the Bible, there was a great and understandable curiosity among the heavenly host about its content and its form. God had never composed a work in writing before. Speculation was, of course, rife, all the possible categories of literary composition were created by the angels as they waited expectantly for the publication of God's magnum opus.

Some said that it would be a poem of epic scope, some said it must be a template for history, because what God writes or speaks must become manifest in one of the realms of divine potentiality. Some said that they had overheard God laughing and assumed a great comedy was being written.

There were others--and some of these were closest to the heavenly study to which God retired to write-- who claimed they sometimes heard God groan and more than once sob aloud and weep. Therefore, they said, it must be tragedy. Some claimed that whatever it was it must be called a fiction for anything that proceeded from the cosmic mind was a figment of God's imagination and was, ipso facto, unreal, while there were, of course, others who took the opposite tack and said God was the very soul of science and that any composition must spell out the laws of the universe....