[1] Given Crumb's past body of work, and his professed rejection of religion, many assumed when the book was announced that it would be a satire or otherwise profane or subversive send-up, and were surprised or disappointed[2] to find it "straight-faced".

Holed up in a shepherd's hut in the south of France (where he and his family live), his wife Aline would bring him baskets of food.

[6] Drawn in his signature scratchy, obsessively crosshatched drawing style, Crumb avoided doing a satirical or psychedelic take on the work, as would have been expected.

Reviewers have called the style "humanizing",[3] with a "human-looking deity" with "enormous, hairy, veiny hands";[7] unlike much later Christian art, which Europeanized the characters from the Old and New Testaments, the characters in Crumb's book are "plac[ed...] squarely in the Middle East — and populat[ed...] with distinctly Semitic-looking people".

[3] The clothing and sets in the book were based on stills from classic Hollywood movies,[note 1] as "there's not a lot of documentation about how people dressed and lived in ancient Mesopotamia.

Crumb originally intended to do a sendup of the Book of Genesis, but "I fooled around in the sketchbooks with those ideas and I just, I didn't like how it was working out so I just decided to do a straight illustration job of it.

"[11] Chester Brown wrote "Robert Crumb is probably the world's greatest living cartoonist, and his The Book of Genesis (2009) might be his masterpiece.