Have you ever actually read the Bible? I mean, sat down and read it, as a book, from start to finish. It’s strange – deeply, unsettlingly weird. And it’s at its strangest at the start and at the end: in the books of the Torah, and in particular the book of Genesis, and in the Apocalypse of the world’s ending amid a welter of lambs and dragons and incomprehensible imagery. (Actually, there’s one other area where it is particularly weird, but repetition has dulled its strangeness, and that is in Jesus’ teaching. Hearing the Sermon on the Mount again on Sunday, I was struck again at how, by any human standards, what Jesus preaches is completely mad. I mean, if someone hits you, offer him your other cheek to strike again! It is the madness of a view to the uttermost depths of humanity.)

Anyway, the temptation with the story of these patriarchs is to see them as all too modern. But they weren’t. The world of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was almost incomprehensibly different from our own. From the brilliance of the stars in a sky of crushing darkness, through to the caprice of kings unbound by any sorts of laws and the walking of a world thick with gods and demons, it was a time utterly unlike our own, rule bound, desacralised era. The physical and the spiritual were bound so tightly together that an oath before God might be made by cupping one’s testicles, the seed of the future – or having someone else hold them as pledge and troth! It was a world so strange as to be all but incomprehensible.

But people are people, whatever the gulfs of culture. What Buechner does here is hold in creative tension the chasm and the closeness, making these strange people, the fathers and mothers of nations, understandable without ever minimising the huge gulf in understanding that separates them from us.

The Son of Laughter of the title is Jacob, son of Isaac, for Isaac means Laughter. Jacob means Heels but he is renamed, in the course of the book and the Bible, Israel, which means he who wrestles with God. No more apt description of the Jewish people has ever been written: for they are the people who wrestle with God. The struggle continues.

Most Biblically-inspired literature is full of pious platitudes. Son of Laughter is full of the fierce strangeness of the book that inspired and informs it. So, if you can’t bring yourself to sit down and read the Bible, read Son of Laughter for an insight into the fractured, fracturing meeting point of the human and the divine.

In the book, Jacob’s name for God is the Fear. That is the beginning of wisdom.