Art or Pornography?

If you feel called, as your 30s approach and your Web-design job has gone south, to illustrate the Book of Genesis using Legos, God will not make it easy.

There are about 2,800 different bricks, capes, bats, cats, arches, bridges, platforms and windows, etc., to create your masterpiece, but there is no supreme being in the Lego universe. Certainly not the fatherly Old Testament deity Brendan Powell Smith envisioned as he began to build the Garden of Eden in his California living room out of the interlocking primary-colored plastic pieces.

There's a white-bearded wizard in the toy-maker's castle series. But "for some reason, Lego has never come out with white hair," Smith said. "It was either God was going to be bald, and that didn't seem right, or I was going to have to take a white [Lego] space helmet, cut off the chin strap and use a hobby knife to create some bangs.

The result can be seen on Page 11 of The Brick Testament, an eccentric volume released by Quirk Books, the Philadelphia publisher behind the Worst Case Scenario series. Hands outstretched, Smith's plastic God is forming man from the soil of the Earth, or, in this case, from dimpled yellow and black Lego bricks.

Over 176 pages, Smith illustrates 10 stories from the Book of Genesis, from the creation of heaven and earth to the selling of Joseph to the Ishmaelites. The text comes straight from the Bible. The tableaus are deceptively simple - and devilishly ingenious, such as the Noah's Ark retelling, where you see characters' raised arms and heads resting on a blue ocean surface, and in the next scene, just a few hands and heads.