New Atheist Richard Dawkins thinks lowly of God:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Ever since Marcion, even Christians have struggled to reconcile the Old Testament portrait of Yahweh with the New Testament portrait of Jesus.
In God Behaving Badly, David T. Lamb rehabilitates God’s “bad reputation.” More than that, he argues that “Yahweh and Jesus”—the divine names of the Old and New Testaments, respectively—“while they have distinct personalities, are both God and are essentially one. And most importantly, both are characterized by love.”
Lamb structures each chapter around a contrast. Is God angry or loving, sexist or affirming, racist or hospitable, violent or peaceful, legalistic or gracious, rigid or flexible, and distant or near? In each case, he argues that Bible readers can choose to “ignore,” “rationalize,” or “work to understand” the Bible’s diverse material. His book models the third option. Lamb acknowledges some measure of truth to both points of the contrast, if only at the level of appearance. But he also argues that the latter is the one that predominates Old Testament teaching.
For example, he says this about the angry/loving contrast:
Yahweh does get angry—but always legitimately so—over evil, injustice and oppression…he’s slow to anger and…what primarily characterizes him is love.
For another example, he says this about the stubborn/flexible contrast:
Yahweh is both stubborn and flexible: stubbornly inflexible about his commitment to bless his people, which is good news, and graciously flexible about showing mercy to repentant sinners, which is great news.
I highly recommend this book to students, laypeople, and pastors as an excellent introduction to how to understand the Old Testament portrait of God in light of the questions raised by New Atheists and struggling Christians. It includes discussion questions for each chapter, making it a perfect text for book clubs, small groups, and Sunday school classes.
Readers interested in the subject matter should also read Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan, which provides more in-depth replies to New Atheist criticisms of the Old Testament God. You can read my review of that book here. You can watch my interview of Paul Copan here.
P.S. If you found this review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
GeorgePWood.com 
“Yahweh does get angry—but always legitimately so—over evil, injustice and oppression”
Like having the Amalekites wiped out for an offense that took place 400 years prior, for when Samuel sends Saul to wipe them out he says “the Lord has remembered what Amalek did when they refused to let Israel pass through their land when they came out of Egypt–therefore, go and wipe them out, leave nothing breathing.” How very legitimate a complaint. The problem is not that Yahweh is a monster, but that the Bible is not the inerrant and absolute word of God. There is a lot of human opinion, bad human opinion, in there. To take it all as God’s words directly to you leads to the absurdity that God is an inhuman monster.
“he’s slow to anger and…what primarily characterizes him is love.”
Like in Psalm 50 where he says he will not require any sacrifices, actually making fun of them Himself, and concludes rather with “he who offers praise glorifies Me, and to him who orders his life aright I will show the salvation of God.” This really leaves Christianity out in the cold with Judaism as the legitimate religion, since Christianity requires an implacable God who cannot be satisfied sans a perfect human sacrifice. But if God can forgive without any sacrifice, as Psalm 50 indicates…if he can forgive the sins of the man who merely praises him and orders his life aright without sacrifices, then there was no need for Jesus to die on the cross as a sacrifice for sin. There was need for him to die as a martyr, but not as sacrifice. The LOVE that characterizes God in the Old Testament makes this plain: Christianity is based on an unloving theory that takes the sacrificial passages in the Torah to the extreme and doesn’t accept the corrections of the prophets and the Psalms with respect to the nature of God and what he requires. Further, whereas Judaism acknowledges that Gentiles who live a good moral life (or as they would put it, “keep the 7 laws of Noah”) will be saved, Christianity on the other hand (unlovingly) asserts that all Gentiles (and Jews too) who don’t believe in Jesus (and believe in him exactly right, i.e. believe in the proper formulation of the Trinity) will burn in hell for all eternity. If then, Yahweh is as loving as you claim, then Christianity is false and Judaism true: Christianity requires Marcion being right in order for it to be legitimate. Especially since Micah 5 is about Zorobabel, Isaiah 7-8 is about Mahershalalhashbaz, Jeremiah 34 is about Assyrian captivity not Herod killing babies, Hosea 11:1 is about the Exodus not Jesus’ baby vacation in Egypt, and “He shall be called a Nazarene” doesn’t exist in the Old Testament (these are all OT prophecy fulfillment claims made by Matthew in his first two chapters). Further, Paul clearly twists Psalm 32 in Romans 4, and the gospel writers have trouble determining how many donkeys are prophesied that the coming king will ride on, for Mark and Luke both understand the “a donkey, a colt, the foal of an ass” as referring to just one animal, for they understand the Hebrew parallelism, but Matthew takes the passage as referring to TWO animals, not understanding the parallelism, and thus showing that he was inventing the narrative from the passage, and how literally so, since he makes Jesus ride on two donkeys! Go back to Judaism already and quit playing games with Paul’s damnable heresy of justification by faith alone before you wind up in hell burning next to the false-apostle and heretic, the apostle of the heretics, the gnostic-apostle.