My Rabbi lent me the book, after a member of my Torah Study (don't worry I'm not that religious) group inspired me to read it. I'll admit due to my lack of training it was a slog to read, but worth the effort. And that is despite the fact that the book contains one serious omission. This omission is the silence as to the civil society that G-d created, and that we exercise literally every day. This society, probably the greatest that has ever been created, has been partially incorporated in Christianity and is the foundation of what has become the U.S., Canada, Australia and other "new world" societies.

Unlike Miles, I do not trace G-d progress from a roaring, false start to a fading conclusion. I agree that the Hebrews constantly back-slid into paganism. Our Cantor (basically a singing spiritual leader, but in this case beyond brilliant) posits, I think accurately, that in the Hebrews' early years there was "monolatry" or G-d being the first among other peer divine figures. As a history buff myself I trace the Hebrews' halting progress not to G-d's initial enthusiasm followed by loss of interest, as the successful creation of a society that decried "placing stumbling blocks before the blind", that mandated fair weights and measures, that directed leaving the corners of fields uncut and, most importantly for my profession, the periodic forgiveness of debts.

As a lawyer in that field I believe that the forgiveness was necessarily situational, based upon need and not occuring on a blanket basis. I see the seven years as a ceiling on how often a person or family could utilize the "debt holiday." That timeline was enshrined into bankruptcy legislation starting either in 1898 or 1938, and included in the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act. It was heartlessly extended to eight years by a cruel Congress, but the "seven" year figure was of Biblical origin.

On a positive note I learned a lot about the later books in the Tanakh (sp) that I didn't know. I found it necessary to read intermittently, indeed alternately with a book I am reading about John Adams' representation of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre, by Dan Abrams and David Fisher.

So I give it a "four" because of its uniqueness and novelty, despite my serious disagreement with parts of the book.

Worth yearly reread!

Examines God as a character, the protagonist of the Tanakh/Old Testament. God doesn't always come out great—he's whiny and capricious, and doesn't always know what's doing. Turning God into a protagonist makes the inconsistencies of the text into a dramatically conflicted character. The book doesn't answer the tensions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies it highlights, but offers a reading of them; probes them rather than resolves them.

Although Miles is clearly very intelligent and offers many interesting observations, the basic premise of this book is flawed. Miles is trying to construct a biography of God based on the Old Testament. The problem: the Old Testament is NOT a biography of God, it is the history of the Jews cobbled together from many different documents and different authors.

ممل وصعب ويبي هلبا صبر بس حبيته

Overall, it was a very good book. It managed to hold my interest all the way through. The premise is to tell the character development of god as a literary analysis of the TANAKH, the Hebrew Bible. The TANAKH has a different arrangement of the books than the Christian Old Testament. After the Deuteronomistic History comes the Prophets and then the rest of the books. It is a very interesting look at God as portrayed through time in the TANAKH. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even though, Jack Miles is an ex-Jesuit and a Christian, he leaves out any discussion of whether any of the Bible is true. He provides a strictly literary viewpoint. Occasionally, he makes reference to historians and theologians, but only to emphasize a point. As an atheist I like this approach. My sensitivities regarding my atheism were not impinged upon.

As far as biographies of God go you're stuck mainly with the Biblical 'true believer' sort or the Christopher Hitchens, it's all bullshit approach.

Jack Miles' attitude is refreshing and enlightening and moves in territory neither the 'new Athiests' and fundamentalists would even think about. Miles deals with the Jewish diety Yahweh as the main protagonist of the book called the Holy Bible. It's a brilliant approach and lets the Almighty 'talk' for himself. His words are the ones in the Bible. But rather than describing an all powerful all omniscient God, Miles sketches out a character that changes, gets pissed off, is jealous, has some attitudes we would call neuroses. And a character that is in the process of self discovery.

This approach allows for a dynamic, even 'human' God. It also explains the contradictions many critics of the Bible struggle with.

Miles is not an apologist for any style of Christianity. I'm not sure he is even one. His point is to use the tools of literary criticism and character analysis scholars use on secular literaure.

I've read this numerous times as well as the sequel Lamb of God which does the same with Jesus.

Not for the feint of heart. Turgid, verbose and self conscious. I have read many academic books way above my IQ and education but most I could at least decipher major point. This guy is just a pedantic academic.

Mentioned in a tweet during the final episodes of SPN, I was curious if there was some connection. Some vague possibilities but I'm halfway through and have quite enough 'bible as literature'. I really don't want to slog through this any more than I already have. I may not be religious but I know how this story ends...

Thought-provoking.

There are different ways of approaching the Bible and the picture of God it portrays. One is to see it as full and perfect revelation... ie the overall picture of God is perfect and complete all the way through (leaving it incumbent on believers to reconcile the apparent disparities).

Another is to see it as progressive - the work of humans seeking to understand the nature of God, sometimes misreading situations and implications but nonetheless slowly arriving at a clearer picture of the character and nature of God as the millennia roll by.

This book by journalist Jack Miles, however, performs another move, flipping over that second approach so that God is trying to work himself out - ie figuring out, from creation onward, as he goes along, what it's going to entail to be the God of humankind and specifically Israel. Working out what it might mean to be God to something that he has made in his own image. That is, the book approaches God as a literary character undergoing character development brought about by the circumstances in which he finds himself in the story of which he is a part.

So, for example, because God promised land to Abraham's descendants he finds that he has to wrest that land from its current inhabitants, meaning he has to become a conqueror. He wasn't a conqueror before, he becomes one contingent on the (perhaps unexpected) necessity of the situation. This is an evolving God, responding to situations, altering course, and becoming who he is through his interrelating with humanity, various actions and circumstances.

(This approach seems vaguely similar to 'process theology'... God in process. Keith Ward in 'God and the Philosophers' links process philosophy to Hegel, and of Hegel he says, "We might even say that, for Hegel, Spirit is incomplete and unknown to itself until it does realise itself in an objective universe.")

The net effect is a very human God, tumultuous and somewhat unstable (at least until he settles into his groove around Deuteronomy), but with his instabilities and developments enacted (or acted out) with divine omnipotence.

Well anyway, I confess that the approach of the book feels starkly irreverent (and wrong) to a person schooled from day dot, first of all to see the Bible as a sacred text and its main subject as someone beyond treatment as merely a literary character. And then to see the deity I've come to worship as being portrayed with a kind of strangely off-kilter but concerted bias as full of foibles... well, a number of 'bullshits', 'bollockses' and 'what a load of nonsenses' were uttered in the early stages of my reading. (Disclosure: I tend towards the second of the two approaches to the Bible that I mentioned above, but the first was my original home base.)

Apart from my natural discomfort at the book's critique of a closely held picture and understanding, too often I felt the author was performing a skewed reading (as all readings are) of the character and then presenting it in ways that misleadingly verged on definitive. The author works hard to mitigate any perceived positivity in God's character (even after the shift of Isaiah 40, when God appears as loving 'for the first time' - "God has been surprised into a new sense of himself " p245).

Though it's vitally important work to wrestle with the nature of God, to be unsettled by its portrayal, this book is largely pessimistic and at times unnecessarily so. Maybe even purposefully contrary to established Jewish and Christian understandings (I guess for the sake of having something 'new' to say). It's also sometimes weirdly and sporadically psychoanalytical, in the Freudian vein. The reading experience wasn't helped by a somewhat dry writing style and passages that boringly reiterated biblical narratives with which I'm already over-familiar (that second complaint isn't entirely the author's fault).

By degrees, though, I relaxed a bit and allowed for the framework of the book (its main 'conceit', to use the literary term), let the book be what it is and allow the author to make his point. I was able to enjoy the journey a bit more and get a bit more out of it.

It's an impressive work in terms of scale. But sometimes I wondered if what I was reading wasn't a bit of a shambles. Even by the end, and taking the book on its own terms, I wasn't convinced that the project had been successful (Pulitzer Prize notwithstanding).

The narrative of the book follows the structure of the Hebrew Bible (what Christianity calls the 'Old Testament'), which ends with what Miles calls 'the books of silence' (the 'writings') - ie God makes his final big utterance in Job, and then more or less falls silent in such books as Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther. This allows Miles to chart the progression of the character of God from 'young' creator, through proactive intervener and speaker, to silent and distant ancient of days. Within that he has such headings as Destroyer, Liberator, Lawgiver, Conqueror, Father, Holy One, Sleeper, Bystander, Recluse, Puzzle.

The ordering of the Christian Bible, viewed through the same framework, would suggest a different narrative and character arc. The Christian Bible places the books of prophecy at the end of the 'Old Testament', the direct speaking of God building up to the revelation / incarnation of the Word / God in and through Jesus Christ. That narrative does not end in silence but in word become flesh allowing for such headings as Incarnate, Forgiver, Abba, Redeemer, Fellow Sufferer, Re-creator and such. Thus Christianity calls for a Part Two of the biography and maybe even a Part Three in the future. (And I see Miles went on to have a crack at that Part Two as well... 'promisingly' called 'Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God'... I assume with the same determination to say other than the orthodox - but I judge without knowing for sure.)

The author sets up this book as a work of literary criticism, not theology. But on the back cover, a reviewer states that it is "the most original and readable contribution to theology to come along in, well, a month of Sundays". So can a book examine the character of God without becoming theology or at least being implicit theology? I don't think so. And actually - as a side observation - that tells us something about what theology is - a literary form.

It all - theology 'proper', this book, and indeed the Bible itself - is an interweaving, a discussion, about who or what God is - a literary project in search of elucidation of the great known unknown. And that's all fueled by a deep fascination, if not hunger.

Misgivings about the end product of their endeavours aside, may people continue to write about God. May God long be the topic of conversation.

Fascinating concept - God as a literary character. Well delivered and lots of stuff in here to think about - whether you are religious or not.