This book examines God as a fictional character in a fictional book, just like Dumbledore or Eragon.
I've learned a lot about the Bible and it's mithology. I really recommend this book to someone with an open mind. It is really interesting to see the Bible God from a different angle.

Jack Miles’ God: A Biography is a rather unusual and paradoxical work. It’s so because this isn’t about a person, but the Creator of the Universe. This Supreme One, who is unlike any other, is still portrayed as having human qualities. God isn’t only anthropomorphized, but Miles presented this character as a combination of multiple personalities – Creator, Destroyer, Warrior, Advocate, Deceiver, Trickster, Father, Woman, Protector, and Friend.
Because of these combinations God often acts indecisively, erratically, prone to moodiness, and after he created mankind in Genesis, took it upon himself to destroy their descendants in an awful flood. This Creator-God saved Noah and animals by showing a sign of a rainbow never to destroy the world again. But God later showed up as a warrior as he led the Israelites out or Egypt from the clutches of the Pharaoh. But later he was vindictive when he punished them with years of wanderings in the desert with death and destruction.
The redactors of the Tanakh were caught up in a polytheistic worldview when they endeavored to show the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as monotheistic. This appeared to be the reason why Jack Miles’ God had multiple personalities. God had no other lives than to live through mankind who was the key to his existence. He didn’t realize when he told them to be fruitful and multiply that this blessing would fly in the face of what he himself envisioned. This book by its literary interpretation has brought to light original ways how believers and unbelievers alike could interpret the Hebrew Bible. Miles’ project was central in understanding the Hebrew text as opposed to the Christian Old Testament that is arranged somewhat differently.

Interesting and unique book about the « profile »/« personality »/ description of god based on an analysis of Tanakh (Jewish bible). Must read book.

I was excited about the idea that this was going to be a book analyzing the God of the Old Testament/Hebrew Tanakh as a literary character, which is exactly what the author, Jack Miles, promised he was going to give me. It didn't turn out that way, however, and even though I enjoyed learning a lot about the Old Testament, its historical context, its major figures, and the many deities who were amalgamated over time to become God, I can't help being very disappointed that Miles never really achieved his goal and that his editors let him publish a book where a thesis very clearly and explicitly articulated is never properly met. The reason I say this is because Miles never ceases defining God as a split personality. Of course there is plenty of historical proof that Elohim and Yahweh, etc. were initially separate deities, which goes a long way toward explaining why God can sometimes command two opposite things at once or repent his actions immediately after he has performed them, but if one really tries to think of God as a character, which is what Miles says he is setting out to do, I don't understand how it can be acceptable to say that his contradictions merely prove that he has more than one personality. If Hamlet or Captain Ahab were reduced by a literary critic to split personalities, people would immediately be annoyed that that critic was being lazy and unperceptive. The best characters (and many of the most intriguing real people -- look at any U.S. president) are often defined by their contradictions, because big, interesting personalities are usually inscrutably complex personalities. If I felt that Miles had treated God as that kind of character instead of continually reminding his readers that God is referred to by two different names in thus-and-such passage in the original Hebrew, I wouldn't feel like he totally failed to accomplish his supposed goal. To the very end of the book, he doesn't treat God the same way a critic would treat Ahab or Hamlet, but keeps defining him as a "fusion character". His final chapter even has a section called "Imagining the One God as Many". He just seems to miss the fact that God's unpredictability and inconsistency of character are exactly what make God such a great literary figure (singular).

The book was incredibly well researched and very clearly and carefully written, but I just can't escape feeling like Jack Miles failed to do what he set out to do and then published the book pretending to himself that he had. I wish somebody else would write the book that was promised.

Margaret Atwood recommended this book during an interview with Tyler Cowen, and I think it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a year.

Miles guides us through the Tanakh from start to finish, interpreting what we can know about God the literary character – his motivations, his realizations, his changing relationship with his creations – based what he does and how and to whom he speaks.

Perhaps the results are familiar to someone versed in these books, but they were illuminating to me, as I’ve never read these books and only had a pedestrian understanding of the character.

Miles’s early passages about an inscrutable, ironic, and likely bluffing Abraham are fascinating, especially in light of other readers like Kierkegaard’s Fear and Suffering. Another early example of this contrarian reading is God’s interaction with Cain:

… it is crucial to note that the condemnation does not arise from Cain’s having broken any commandment of the Lord. The Lord has given no command not to kill. After the murder, when he says to Cain, “Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!” it is as if he has at that moment discovered that murder merits condemnation. There is a groping and tentative quality on both sides of this relationship. The metaphor – “your brother’s blood cries out to Me” – may bespeak agitation rather than moral condemnation. Something is wrong, but does the Lord yet quite know what it is? The Lord acts and then infers his own intention from what he has done.

As he is going through the entire Tanakh, there are simply too many great passages to detail here, but Miles gives a serviceable summary about halfway through:

After each of his major actions, he discovers that he has not done quite what he thought he was doing, or has done something he never intended to do. He did not realize when he told mankind to “be fertile and increase” that he was creating an image of himself that was also a rival creator. He did not realize when he destroyed his rival that he would regret the destruction of his image. He did not realize that his covenant with Abraham, the reconciliation of such contrary urges within his own character, would require him, precisely because he had so effectively made Abraham into a great nation, to go to war with Egypt. He did not realize when he went to war with Egypt that his victory would leave him with an entire people on his hands and would require him to become a lawgiver for them and conquer a land for them to live in. He did not realize when he gave them the law that where there is law, there can be transgression, and that, therefore, he himself had turned in implicitly unbreakable covenant into an explicitly breakable one. He did not realize when he began to withdraw from his alliance with Israel, after Israel’s first, minor infidelities, that the aftermath would be the rise of a king, David, whose charisma would draw the Lord almost despite himself into a quasi-parental relationship with his semi-abandoned ally. He did not realize when his erstwhile ally deserted him wholesale and he made Assyria and Babylonia the tools of his vengeance that the was creating a new international role for himself. He did not realize that once they had inflicted his punishment for him, his feelings… would also be those of a grieving husband for a battered wife…The inference that one might make looking at [Genesis through the Twelve Minor Prophets] from the outside is that God is only very imperfectly self-conscious, and very slightly in control of the consequences of his words and actions. Even from inside that history, his own inferences come one at a time, often gropingly after the fact

As Miles puts it near the end of his biography: “The Lord God, at the start of the Tanakh, is a being in whom self-ignorance is joined to immense power… key among the things he does not yet know is that his ignorance of himself has something to do with his will to create.” After God’s long self-discovery comes his climactic fall during the Book of Job. This is where Miles is at his most engaging. Miles reads Job’s challenges to God, God’s blustery responses, and Job’s resulting resigned silence as a total inversion of the traditional interpretation of the text, and one far closer to
Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. than I originally suspected.

The half dozen examples that Miles provides to support his reading of Job are too long to cover exhaustively here. To choose probably the most important one, Miles attacks head-on Job 42:6, which most people cite as Job’s recantation that justifies the entire common interpretation. In the original Hebrew, this verse is actually very ambiguous. Miles translates Job 42:1-6 as “Then Job answered the Lord: “You know you can do anything; nothing can stop you. You ask ‘who is this ignorant muddler?’ Well I have said more than I knew, wonders quite beyond me. ‘You listen and I’ll talk’ you say, ‘I’ll question you and you’ll tell me.’ Word of you had reached my ears, but now that my eyes have seen you, I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.”

What conclusion does Miles hammer us with?

Morally, Job has held out until the very end, treating the Lord’s speeches from the Whirlwind as his last trial. And thus, to return to the original puzzle, when the Lord praises Job at the end of the book, he is praising both Job’s earlier stubbornness with his human interlocutors and his final, utterly consistent, stiff-necked recalcitrance before the Lord himself. Job has won, the Lord has lost.

This moment ultimately neuters God, in a fascinating show of what Nietzsche would disdain as the winning out of Job’s slave morality, but which most people would simply see as Job’s dignity.

A view common to nearly all commentators on the Book of Job is that, one way or another, the Lord has reduced Job to virtual silence. Unnoticed is the fact that from the end of the Book of Job to the end of the Tanakh, God never speaks again. His speech from the whirlwind is in effect his last will and testament. Job has reduced the Lord to silence

After Job, God enters a steady decline. My Miles’s account, this decline terminates in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where God ceases to be an active character for good, transitioning from a “demonstrated” reality to an “attributed” reality much more in line with how God is treated today. The preceding books, in particular Ester and Daniel, show a God steadily giving the plot’s impetus to other characters (e.g. the very secular Ecclesiastes 9:11-12). In doing so, Miles identifies a character arc for God that is “more poignantly real” than most literary characters.

Nothing that literature contrives, after all, is so artificial as its endings. Real lives never end with artistic finality. Either they are rudely interrupted as Ecclesiastes says, or they end in a slow fade that has none of the rounded perfection of a well-wrought last page. Real lives end, we might say, just as God’s life ends: a supreme effort falls slightly short (the voice from the whirlwind), a long period opens in which one has progressively less to say, and the devotion of one’s friends is slowly overtaken by their silence.

Going back over my bookmarks, there’s just too much here to get down. This is one of those rare books that has fascinating ideas on every page. I’m absolutely reading it again, probably after I’ve bothered to read the original :-P

This book is amazing. It really opened my eyes. It's written by a former Jesuit named Jack Miles. Who is brilliant. This was given to me by a friend late in high school, while we were both struggling with our Catholic backgrounds. It deals with God as a literary character, and what his choices would mean if the Old Testament were analyzed simply from the perspective of literary criticism. I think it's fascinating and erudite. It is guaranteed to give you a few more questions about religion than you had before starting it. Everything is seen in a different light.

I would recommend having some basic religious education in the Judeo-Christian form, otherwise a lot of this is not going to make sense. But I would absolutely and completely recommend this to both Christians and Jews alike, or anyone who's had some measure of bible study. To say it is worth the read is obviously underestimating it.

There is a great scene in the Broadway musical "Book of Mormon" where, at the climax, the young Ugandan protagonist is frustrated to learn not all of the stories she's heard from the Mormon missionaries are literal truth. Especially the one about Bobba Fett. One of her older village-mates admonishes her, saying "there's no such place as the fabled Salt Lake City - it's a metaphor!"

The Bible, it would seem, has been interpreted and taught in every possible context through history. Miles takes the approach of literary criticism, and specifically only for the character of God. He acknowledges early on that taking only one of these approaches (literary, religious, literal - or metaphor, like SLC) is a product of our modern minds, since the Hebrew Bible is a combination of the three and maybe can only be grasped by the authors and their ancient contemporaries:
"The unique power of this classical Hebrew narrative is that it deliberately does that which tends to make us impatient. Taking the Tanakh on its own terms, everything in it really happened (history), its outcome is of enormous personal consequence for each reader or hearer (religion), and, page by page and sometimes line by line, it has the unmistakable confidence and artistic panache of a living literature (fiction). There is no reversing the evolution of the modern mind. We shall never know this unity again."

So given that we're starting at a disadvantage, who does Miles find God to be? Though he never says it outright, my reading is that God is who the Israelites made him to be as they evolved through time. In the beginning he is a peerless creator who is surprised by the actions of his own creations. For Abraham and the Jews in Egypt, he is a god of fertility, then war, then law. Then David and Solomon come along and God is a father, more concerned with justice and mercy. To the prophets he is a contradiction, to Job he is an adversary, and to the latest authors (chronologically speaking), he is a distant, silent partner, looking on from heaven. Miles addresses this theme many times, and in the epilogue he briefly retells the Tanakh as the story of multiple gods. The retelling reads more like a traditional mythology, with interactions not between the split personalities of God but between a number of gods, each reflecting different aspects of a single personality and also the Assyrian, Caananite, Babylonian, and even Persian gods that surrounded Hebrew culture.

But if Miles stopped there, so might our whole notion of Western morality. While certainly the Bible and God the character is the product of (sometimes contradictory) ancient authors, he is also a stunning and enduring innovation. Miles only touches this briefly, but it is fully explored in Abraham: The First Historical Biography. Mesopotamian society worshiped a pantheon of gods, including a personal god to each individual. The personal god handled day-to-day errands, heard simple petitions, and could be bargained with. Bigger matters were naturally handled by bigger, less accessible gods. Abraham, whether real or metaphorical, founded Israel by taking the Ultimate God, the God of Heaven and Other Gods, the God of Right and Wrong, as his personal god. All other gods fell away.
And Israelite religious innovation continued beyond Abraham. Not only did they take the high god as their personal god, they did other new things with him. Miles points out they argued with him, mocked his abilities to keep promises (Abraham), tested him (Jacob), and complained (Moses). He responded by complaining about them and mocking them back. Clearly this is not a god appeased by animal sacrifice or orgy-worship, as other contemporary gods might have been. As already mentioned, God develops into all things to all people... a creator, a protector, a destroyer, a warrior, a loving father, a gentle lamb, etc. Then comes Job (perhaps the best chapter in Miles' book). After generations of evolution, what is left for God to do or become? He punishes Job for sport, and Job calls him out on it: "Forced to choose between justice and God, [Job] chooses justice, a choice that the Lord eventually concedes was the correct one." Miles continues later: "God's exposure at the end of the Book of Job ought to be the moment of truth that becomes the moment of death. Knowing himself to be what Job teaches him that he is, the Lord should find it impossible to go on; and this is almost what happens." Interestingly, the Book of Job is last time God speaks. Job and the Lord are perfect reflections of each other and they love each other; created in each other's image. They can't exist on their own and they acknowledge it; Job in his willingness to continue valuing Right despite all the Wrong he received, and God reversing all the Wrong for such an admission.
Miles points out the Bible is structured cyclically from a historic standpoint. Books and the end are believed to have occurred at the same time as those in the middle, such that they can be read on repeat without end. God and his people come to know each other, love each other, help each other, grow annoyed with each other, complain about each other, get angry, deliberately harm each other, challenge each other on the harm inflicted, realize they have done wrong when they ought to be pursuing right, and once again celebrate each other.
And isn't that what life is?

So is the Biography of God real or metaphor? Like Salt Lake City, I believe it to be both. Brilliant book and worth the biblical time scales it took to read.

Miles, a former Jesuit with a background in religious studies, takes a decidedly unorthodox approach. Instead of theological analysis, he treats the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a literary work, with God as its central character. Through meticulous examination, Miles reveals a God who is not a monolithic figure, but rather a complex personality shaped by his actions and interactions.

The book delves into the inconsistencies within the Tanakh. We see God as both creator and destroyer, a compassionate liberator and a vengeful judge. Miles argues that these seemingly contradictory portrayals depict God's character development. From the energetic creator in Genesis to the weary "ancient of days" in later texts, God, according to Miles, undergoes a transformation.

This literary approach has resonated with many. Miles' fresh perspective offers a deeper understanding of the Bible's narratives. By analyzing how God is portrayed, we gain insight into the theological and cultural context of the text. Furthermore, recognizing the complexities of the God character allows for a more nuanced engagement with the Bible's enduring themes.

However, critics argue that Miles' approach downplays the inherent theological significance of the text. They see his focus on inconsistencies as undermining the core message of the Bible. Additionally, some readers find the characterization of God as lacking the reverence traditionally associated with the divine.

"God: A Biography" is not for the faint of heart. It challenges traditional interpretations and compels readers to confront the complexities of the biblical God. Regardless of your personal beliefs, Miles' work offers a valuable lens through which to examine this foundational text and its enduring legacy.

A couple of opening statements. First, I think the reader needs to have a fair understanding of the Old Testament before starting. Otherwise, they may become lost in following some of the "action." Second, be prepared to have your views challenged if you are a fairly traditional believer. Miles definitely takes a tact that makes one view the Old Testament (actually the Hebrew one, which is arranged differently) in from a considerably different perspective. Examining the diety (or as Miles argues, dieties) from a literary perspective, Miles brings the reader to some quite different conclusions on the "character," actions, and "voice" of God. A highly thought-provoking book, well written, and worth some careful reading and consideration.

I am in awe of this book. Miles's biography of Yahweh Elohim, as he appears in the Tanakh, is erudite, luminous, agile, and penetrating. If you're an apostate or any kind of non-believing fan of religion (e.g. me), you should read this book to love the scripture in a new mode. If you're a believer in any Abrahamic religion, you should read this book to see your God, as presented in human writings, with new eyes. A master class in narrative writing about histories, canons, and ideas.

a six-months-belated, incomplete review, in four parts.

1). so, my favorite video game of all time is pillars of eternity. I think it’s pretty neat. there are lots of things I love about it, but one of its most interesting themes, in my opinion, is the way the narrative handles its theology.

(I am about to spoil pillars of eternity here btw, assuming that most people don’t care, but it really is a wonderful game and you should play it if it appeals to you.)

you go through this whole story, right, the setup to which involves a lot of “gods messing around in mortal affairs,” and towards the latter half of the game–and in the dlc–you even get to converse with some of the gods personally. most of them are at best petty, at worst wholly immature. there’s this sense of frustration, yeah, when you finally have the opportunity to talk to them, after all this time dealing with the consequences of their actions, and the only thing you can get out of them (despite the richly varied dialogue tree) is a sense of self-righteous obfuscation. and then–

and then!

right at the end of the game, just before the climax, you discover something: there are no gods. not really. millenia ago, a technologically advanced civilization, tired of existential uncertainty and religious warfare, went searching for the true gods, to finally bring peace and coherence to their world. instead, what they found, devastatingly, is that no gods exist; the universe is existentially a vacuum, with no purpose or meaning or ultimate authority in sight. faced with this, these ancient people decided that, if such a truth became known, mankind would no longer be able or willing to live. so they took it upon themselves to use their technology and become “the gods”—read, very powerful and godlike beings—and then they brutally erased every trace of what they had done, so that future generations would believe their divinity to be authentic and immutable, the way they themselves would have wanted the gods to be.

when you finally realize this in the game, it’s not only a powerful moment emotionally, but it just makes so much sense. because by this point, you’ve come to understand that the gods are fundamentally—well, if not human, then very imperfect beings with very human flaws, which are magnified by the unimaginable power and temporal perspective they bear. because here’s the thing, right: when a human society is trying to imagine or create a god, when they're trying to design divinity, the only materials they have to work with are fundamentally human stuff. anything beyond humanity, beyond mortality, is intrinsically beyond the power of mortal human beings to conceive.

okay. that was introduction #1. scratch that for now. let’s move on to introduction #2.

2). you know that idea that a lot of poetry is about defamiliarization?

I know the bible. I went to catholic school for ten years. I live in america, in a red state (I know, f’s in the chat. I also accept formal condolences and hallmark sympathy cards). I’ve been stuck in a quasi-religious existential crisis since I was about fourteen, in the latter half of the catholic school years, when I realized that I wasn’t actually religious but I also realized that I kind of wanted to be. I have only “not being able to afford college in america” to thank for not having gone to school for biblical exegesis. so, like, to reiterate this–I know the bible, if not professionally, then pretty well, yeah?

and yet, somehow, god: a biography, by jack miles, still managed to defamiliarize the text for me, to such a degree that I felt almost as though I had never really, truly, read it before. in the iconic, immortal (and rightfully memed) words of anne rice: it’s interrogating the text from (what might initially seem) the wrong perspective.

it’s like this: a few years ago, I visited the ruins of pompeii, and from the crumbling town square, in the flatly suffocating heat, you could see the menacing, lopsided slope of mount vesuvius, like an animal crouching in the distance, rationally dangerous, but presently asleep. later that same afternoon–exhausted, heat-sick, probably dehydrated, and definitely not wearing the right kind of shoes–I hiked to the top of mount vesuvius itself, and what strikes me now is that, from the caldera peak, my gaze wasn’t drawn to the ruins of pompeii at all. instead, what captured my eye was the bay of naples, the tranquil blue of the glimmering waters, the winking glass and metal of the modern buildings below, and the yellow flowers which grew up and down the mountainside in between.

pause. record scratch. let's start again.

3). Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (neutrons or protons). The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or the absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.

is it appropriate, to parallel this with the kind of societal, cultural, and spiritual big bang that occurs (or once did) when disparate, conflicting elements of “god” are combined to form one shifting, inconsistent, unprecedented being? one erratic, unpredictable, incongruent mass, chemically unstable, and yet compelling, dynamic, moving, and in some strange way, comprehensible? not rational, but intelligible? an idea too complex to imagine, but not too convoluted to see?

4). I think that this book might be unreviewable, for the simple reason that–demonstrably–I could write a thousand different reviews of it, from a thousand different angles, and each one would only suffice to cover a portion of the whole, at least for me. I’ve started to write about this book so many times, and every time I write something different, but it still never feels right, you know? like, nothing I can come up with would encompass the scope of miles’s study here, and the richness it had and still carries for me. I think it’s great, and strange, and almost endlessly fascinating, sure, but what does that really even mean? if you have an interest in biblical exegesis, you should definitely read this, but it’s also wonderful as a purely literary critique. it’s food for thought about both our corporeal and our spiritual history. it’s probably, in a way, equally validating for both an atheist and a believer, and for anyone in between. it’s touching, and sobering. maybe most of all–it’s fascinating. and, like all great works which re-center the perspective from which we interpret the world, like the first aerial shot of a vast, sprawling city–it’s invaluable, and certainly unique.

I didn’t go into Jack Miles’ 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, God: A Biography, expecting to walk away — to be fair, when I grabbed it on my bookshelf, I walked into it expecting a different book, literally; maybe I’ll read that one next — feeling sorry for God, but I did. The literary God, at least, because Miles’ focus and analysis is literacy criticism. He is not concerned with God through the the lens of historic or religious scholarship.

As a literary figure, God simply wants to understand himself because unlike Greek mythology or polytheist religions, God has no comparable friends or lovers or anything of the like, so he creates humans in his image to understand himself, and everything he does, is, and thinks, is through this reflective image. He doesn’t even have his own “heavenly abode” that is free from his entanglement with humans. Over the course of the Hebrew Bible, or the Tanakh, God is learning what it means to be “godlike,” and he stumbles, creating his creation with no restrictions but to “be fertile and increase,” and then he restricts them, prohibits them, casts them out, and eventually, sends a flood to destroy most of his creation. He likes the people of Israel, then he punishes them, saves them, goes silent on them, etc.

Miles explained what happened in such a fascinating way: God created humans with the edict, if you will, to “be fertile and increase.” In this way, Adam and Eve, and their descendants, manifest a struggle between humans and God over God’s power that he didn’t realize he had until the moment it was taken away from him, like Cain murdering Abel. It wasn’t as if God created life with the prohibition against murder at the start.

Unlike man, God has no past and no desires other than to make man in his own self-image, Miles said. Since God does not, he relies on man even for the working out of his own intentions, and “is, to this extent, almost parasitic on human desire.”

“If man wanted nothing, it is difficult to imagine how God would discover what God wanted.” That’s a line I highlighted from the book (metaphorically, as I would never highlight in a book) because of how potent it is, albeit rather unfair. After all, humans wouldn’t be humans if they didn’t have desires, but the point is to elucidate God’s deficit and on that level, it works.

Interestingly, if God is understanding himself through humans, and he made humans in his own self-image, then is God also female? Surely, because he didn’t just create a male, he created a female (Eve). The following sentence uses Miles’ emphasis:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

That’s compelling! As Miles called it, from the standpoint of literary criticism, this is an “inexpungable characterological fact, that the human male alone is not the image of God, only the male and the female together.”

And of course, there is Job. Job, who it could be argued, as I think Miles did convincingly, “bests” God, as far as that goes, by sending God into silence, for all intents and purpose. Perhaps not a deafening silence, but a silence, nonetheless — a silence which speaks to the tragedy of God: He is trapped within his contradictions. The contradiction of being God the creator and God the destroyer; God the redeemer and God the punisher; God of the cosmos and “God of” in his personal dealings with Abraham and others; and God with something approaching a human conception of love and God approaching something approaching a human conception of jealousy. But in so coming aware of that through the ordeal with Job (and indeed, an ordeal, because God almost seems “on the brink” of a death of a kind), God’s “growth” is done in a sense. He is no longer stumbling around at least. He is aware of his power and importantly, knowledge of that power.

In this way, with God as a tragic, trapped figure, I felt bad for God! He almost seems lonely in his machinations and relationship to humans. But there is something beautiful, if comedic (Miles thinks of the Tanakh as a divine comedy because of how the books after God’s silence bring levity to the proceedings after the weightiness of Job), about how humans step up after God steps back. God, as protagonist and the one propelling the action forward, as it were, in the Tanakh, is still “present” (uh, omnipresent?) in these latter books, but in a sort of peripheral way, and the Jews are moving on in their way. God is no longer the necessary arbiter, even when the Jews are trifled upon.

This issue with God’s silence is a revelation to me, I should note. I always, apparently erringly, thought, as many who try to pushback against the Bible think, “Why doesn’t God speak to humans anymore? He was so active back then.” And as Miles pointed out, God was active back then, because he was still figuring it out, but unbeknownst to my Biblical illiteracy, God does go silent through much of the latter half of the Tanakh. Also erringly, this part of the Bible is certainly replete with the “fire and brimstone” God I expected and have thought of, but that isn’t the whole story, either. And that is the story Miles is telling here. God is complex, contradictory, and even contrite (to Job, even if not admitted directly).

Admittedly, some of the book with Miles’ analysis, some of which used analogies from other literary works, went over my head, as someone not steeped in this world, as it were, but I enjoyed it. I always enjoy thinking about God, and it was interesting to think about God in this specific literary way. I look forward to reading Miles’ other two books in this “trilogy” of sorts about God, because I’m quite curious about God once Jesus comes on the scene.