jankp's Full Review: Jack Miles - God: A Biography
Structurally at least, looking at the Hebrew Bible rather than the Christian Old Testament, we read a divine comedy with God (or Lord God) as the main protagonist, according to the former Jesuit Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography. In this unique brand of biblical criticism, we study God only as a literary character, as the focal player in this ancient text whose actions or nonactions, words or silence, are the means by which we attempt to understand God’s motivations. Miles uses the Hebrew Bible, which finds God moving from action to speech to silence, rather than the modified Christian Old Testament that oddly has God following an action-silence-speech pattern.
Without delving too far into the reasons for the editing of the Hebrew Bible by a Christian, unlike the author, I will just suggest that it helped to link the New Testament with the Old. Miles isn’t interested in preaching to us and simply addresses this to nonbelievers and believers alike. God’s “story,” in the order of the Tanakh and with scripture quoted throughout mostly from the 1985 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, also does not argue a historical perspective.
What the author hopes to accomplish with this intimidating, 408-page (in a hefty hardbound book) mythobiography is to weave together the many facets of God’s personality and by doing so help us to more fully understand God’s role in the ancient Jewish script.
WARNING: Those of you who believe in a perfect, always loving, unchanging God should consider whether you prefer to maintain God’s image as you do and not be challenged by the following, protracted description of the book’s contents. This will probably offend you and ruin your image.
Contents
Keynote: The Image and the Original (our fascination with mirroring God)
1 PRELUDE: Can God’s Life Be Written? (Hebrew Bible vs Christian OT)
2 GENERATION:
Creator (Genesis 1-3) God wants an image so God can see himself. “Lord God” doesn’t know what to do or want.
Destroyer (Genesis 4-11) “I Regret That I Made Them,” Cain and Abel, flood
Creator/Destroyer (Genesis 12-25:11) God testing Abram’s faith, requiring the circumcision (power over his fertility)
Friend of the Family (Genesis 25:12-50:18) God’s domestication by Jacob, women and Joseph
3 INTERLUDE: What Makes God Godlike? (fascinating look at what we know of God's character so far in the story)
6 INTERLUDE: Does God Fail? (how can we explain God’s contradictions?)
7 TRANSFORMATION
Executioner, Holy One (Isaiah)
8 INTERLUDE: Does God Love? (no mention of love until the book of Isaiah)
9 RESTORATION
Wife (God becomes Israel’s wife after being her husband in Isaiah!), Counselor, Guarantor—Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Psalms, Proverbs (with Lady Wisdom)
10 CONFRONTATION
Fiend (Job) God tests Job with suffering and in the end is silenced forever. Riveting!
11 OCCULTATION
Sleeper, Bystander, Recluse, Puzzle (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes)
12 INCORPORATION
Absence, Ancient of Days, Scroll, Perpetual Round (Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah,
Chronicles (which ends as Ezra begins, thus making an unending round)
13 POSTLUDE: Does God Lose Interest? (after seeing the perfect image of God in Job, God no longer acts or speaks in human affairs)
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Books of the Tanakh (as the contents have followed)
Notes
Index
Comments
Two years ago or so I first picked up this book at the library, but within a few chapters I couldn’t see the point in torturing myself anymore. It sounded like a detailed list of reasons why God shouldn’t be trusted or the Bible even read. My Somewhat Helpful review, as correctly noted by lyagushka and now deleted, was much too premature for me to understand that God’s character in the Hebrew Bible had a beginning (infancy), middle (adulthood) and end (retirement).
I now believe Jack Miles’ mythobiography was so compelling (for the most part) that it taught me more about the Bible than even my year of graduate study did! I read passages that never interested me before because now I was pondering the dynamics of God as protagonist in them. Miles observes that much of the Bible is not even preached about because it would be scandalous and I must agree.
Though the prelude, interludes and postlude were all very thought-provoking, I didn’t really begin to be absorbed by the books until Isaiah when God became uncharacteristically poetic and loving. Job in a word was just tremendous. Miles’ well-researched interpretation of why God allowed Job to suffer so greatly, why God and Job spoke as they did and why God restored Job’s fortunes twicefold made for such suspenseful, hardhitting reading that gentle Christians should fear it like the plague.
Finally the incredible Esther begs to be mentioned, for its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible marks a paradigmatic change in God and also God’s Jewish people. God makes no appearance at all in the book! It’s as if God and therefore Jewish history has been forbidden to talk about, so we instead read about how they can defeat their enemies by themselves and this disrespect seems to be just fine with God.
1995’s God: A Biography quite simply is a difficult book to sum up in a few paragraphs and if I have made it sound like an insipid soap opera dishing out the dirt on God, please accept my frustrated apologies.
I believe Miles actually gives life to God by showing the creator’s honest-to-goodness complexities in interactions with the Jews. Miles points out the literary ambiguities as well as the literary effect on the reader, leaving me in the end with sympathy for a Hamlet-like God whose “character is contradictory, and he is trapped within its contradictions.” So is the Hebrew Bible a...tragedy? It might seem to be so for God because of how Job defeated him and left him silent, and Miles ends the book intimating that it may be an unresolved tragedy with occasional comic relief. Always quoting great writers, the author unsurprisingly turns to one to go out with.
“The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,” W.B. Yeats wrote. In its poignancy, the line seems quintessentially modern, but it has everything to do with an ancient buried memory of a God who needed to choose (his identity), but could not. That God is the divided original whose divided image we remain. His is the restless breathing we still hear in our sleep.
Thanks for reading (or rereading as the case may be)!
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