Will Stephen Fry get an invitation to the Chief Rabbi’s next Chanucah bash — “Latkes and lox and bagels and blintzes. Hurrah,” he twittered after last year’s do?

Possibly not, I think, after his contribution to Channel 4’s programme on the Ten Commandments on Sunday. They were “the hysterical believings of a group of desert tribes,” he said. “Those desert tribes have stirred up more misery for mankind than any other group of people in the history of the planet and they are doing it to this day.”

Arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens was no more flattering to our ancestors, dismissing biblical Judaism as “savage” and “evil”.

But the word of the Lord did have a doughty defender in the programme’s presenter, Ann Widdecombe, shown reflecting on the awesomeness of it all at the top of Mt Sinai.

If it had been she rather than Moses carrying the tablets down the mountain, there’d certainly have been more than a few trembling Israelites.