Miles writes nicely about the conceptualization of God as we transition from polytheism to monotheism to incarnational theology.

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الكتاب مهم وممتع للمهتمين بدراسة العهد القديم، يتناول فيه الكاتب سيرة الله كشخصية روائية رئيسية لأحد أهم النصوص الأدبية في التاريخ، يحلل الكاتب أفعال الله وأقواله والدوافع خلفها ويستخرج المشاعر التي تحملها عباراته، كذلك يدرس تكوين شخصية الاله العبراني وتطورها منذ سفر التكوين وكيف اختلفت وتغيرت - مع مراعاة عدم الترتيب لأني نسيته عادي - من الاله الذي خلق ادم على صورته ثم الى اله الطوفان الذي ندم على خلقه الي اله شخصي لفرد من سلالة ادم ومنه الى اله محارب ثم مشرع وأخيراً الى اله لكل الأمم ، كذلك يبين الكاتب الجذور القديمة للاله العبري المستمدة من المعتقدات القديمة والواضح تاثيرها في شخصية يهوه المنقسمة المتناقضة في كثير من المواضع في أوامره وأفعاله. الترجمة جيدة جداً

كتاب غريب جداا هل من المعقول أن يفسر الكتاب المقدس لدى هؤلاء البشر بأنه مجرد عمل أدبي غير عادي وأن الإله شخصية غير عادية وأن الكتاب المقدس العبراني أو العهد القديم يعتبر كلاسيكيات الأدب العالمي وأن الإله كائن من نوع آخر مختلف ثمة تناقض كبير في فهم الدين ومعنى الإله وإن دل فإنه دال على إنكار وجود الله قمة الإلحاد.

In God: A Biography Jack Miles has written a brilliant literary exegesis of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and its diverse 32 books. He shows the evolution of God from naive creationist in Genesis through tormenting divinity in Job after which God goes silent. He is invoked as omniscient and a father figure but action shifts to the Israelites themselves and the vindictive God of Deuteronomy retreats. God is credited with design but is more remote after Job. The moral burden is fully borne by mankind after that. A unique view of the Bible, provocative and insightful.

Excellent

This book came as a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a psychological break dr of the character better know as, "God", and get it I did. Just not at all how I thought I would. I was expecting a theological or philosophical expostualtion (whether it be augmented ting or debunking) and got neither. What I got, rather was much better, on multiple levels. Jack Miles, a Jesuit professor, instead applies the sensibilities of a hybridized biographer/literary critic to deconstruct the Bible's protagonist vs. the author's observed antagonists: "Man" -- the first time in history where the a book's protagonist creates "H"is own antagonist.

Many, MANY observed discrepancies, by virtue of, gradual, devolution of translative reading comprehension (thanks to Miles' scholarship in aramaic, Latin, and Sanskrit -- among other languages), he unburies alternative, scenarios, meanings behind Biblical allegory, amongst oodles of other apocryphal outlook, this examination of the Bible is not one to be passed up by those who fancy themselves as Biblical experts and winds up being utterly digestible by laypersons with an interest in Judeochristian education, theological moorings, or, indeed, philosophy aficionados.

At no point does it preach. It merely opens up a plethora of alternative ways to interpret what, up until now felt perfectly understood.

Insight for both believers and non-believers.

The title of this book is is misleading. It does not describe the history of God's existence from a historical perspective. It explains the concept from a literary analysis. God is the protagonist of the Bible from author Jack Miles' position, and I think he wrote his argument adequately in this Pulitzer Prize winning book that should not have been given this specific award because it is not a biography. It is literary criticism. Despite how dry and scholarly it can sometimes be, it's a good one though.

All potential readers need to be told upfront that this book is not for anyone who is beginner in Bible studies or textual criticism. Miles deliberates on his thesis on God as a multi-personality protagonist with astute precision, academic language, and immense citation of the Bible. If you are not prepared for this, "God: A Biography" is going to be a slough to get through. For those who possess at least a moderate understanding of the source material, this book is a savory analysis of the Bible's primary protagonist.

It is quite impressive how Miles was able to walk the fine between proselytizing and providing a largely secular understanding of the influential character that is God. This book being a literary analysis, Miles is able to give a subjective interpretation of the God character without invoking lackluster assumptions about what is truthful of the Bible. This book is not about truth. It's about meaning. From that perspective, this book is well-deserving of its praise.

Miles studies the God character book by book of the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Testament of the Bible. This is both a saving grace and its weakness. This permits Miles to give this book great organization and clarity, but it suffers from all the deficiencies that the Tanakh suffers from as a work of literature. To put it bluntly, half of the Tanakh is horrendously dull because there are significant portions that do not have much involvement from God. Therefore, there is not much to talk about, so the last third of this book is repetitious and uninteresting.

Jack Miles has my respect. He crafted a highly nuanced book, one that I think believers and non-believers can derive quite a lot from. Well, as long as you aren't a stick in the mud and value different looks at a subject as complex as religion. If you are prepared for this book's thickness and boring bits, this book offers a lot to its readers.

The first time I encountered Jack Miles was in a video of him interviewing Slavoj Zizek about theology and Zizek's book “God in Pain.” Yet at the time, I didn’t quite know who Jack Miles was, and the sort of mythic status he had taken on by then in some intellectual/literary circles. It was only later that I more consciously encountered Jack Miles when his name came up in a PBS program I watched with Bill Moyers interviewing Margaret Atwood on religion. Atwood confessed her love for Miles’ work and being an admirer of Atwood’s commentary on religion, especially in her novels, I thought it would be worth checking out this book.

I’m still in the process of reading the Bible in its canonical order, though I am currently reading it through the Christian canonical order, whereas Miles spends most of the book commenting on the biblical canon by way of the Hebrew Bible. Early in the book Miles comments on the divergence in literary effect between the Christian Old Testament’s ordering of the books compared to that of the Jewish Tanakh, a section I found particularly interesting.

I found the first half of the book really fascinating, especially the Pentateuch, which is most familiar to me. However, I struggled with the second half, and I suspect this is because I have not yet read through the second half of the Tanakh or so-called Old Testament very thoroughly, other than the popular prophetic texts that Christianity later appropriates. So, it is certainly a possibility I will return again to some of the later chapters of Miles’ book after finishing with the second half of the Hebrew Bible.

I have watched all the Hebrew Bible lectures by Christine Hayes that Yale has put out as open courseware, and I think those series of lectures have deeply shaped my conception of the Tanakh’s contours. Like Sam Sifton’s pizza cognition theory, which suggests the first slice of pizza as often strongly defining one’s sense of pizza proper, those Yale lectures have inescapably become the framework by which I judge all other meta-readings of the Tanakh. And there were a few points of divergence between Miles’ reading and that of Hayes’, such as the way Miles treats the Satan character, especially the way he relates it to the Edenic serpent character as tradition often does. And while Miles does peddle in historical criticism here, a lot more than I would have expected (or even wanted lol), his primary concern (at least this is his claim) is a literary reading of the Tanakh. I have also encountered readings by Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye, both of whom I enjoy a bit more than Miles, but whose work I have also read much less of.

What I found most frustrating about Miles’ reading however were his frequent appeals to some argumentum ex silentio, like if God doesn't suddenly interrupt or respond to a particular thing in the text, this must mean [something]. Or how Miles often does not leave room for events that are subtly implied or suggested, that happen behind or outside the perspective of the text, but only what is explicitly written is taken as a narrative event. I think a lot of the narrative points to something outside of itself, and there are things that occur in subtle suggestion, requiring the reader to imagine what is left unsaid, or what is covertly done outside the direct view of the reader. Hence the generative midrashic tradition which has followed in the Bible's wake.

So I basically think Miles reads far too much into the absence of explicit articulations, and asserts the points derived from these absences a bit too strongly (in my opinion). I still wouldn't want to miss out on any of these comments. I just think they could have been better presented more gently, e.g. as possible readings among many, or as questions even (although I do understand parsimony is a virtue in accessible writing). I also think some of his attempts at contorting the texts into an overarching structure, were not entirely plausible to me, but they were still very interesting and memorable. And I think the texts he curated in this book were a very satisfying collection.

Overall, a worthwhile read, although the book’s synopsis sounded quite a bit more exciting to me than the book turned out for me (a sign that book marketing still holds quite a sway on me). He’s not my favourite commentator on the Hebrew Bible out there, but still, a pretty fascinating read nonetheless.

I get what this author is trying to do. He's writing about God as if he is the main character in a great work of literature: the Bible. He's analyzing his actions and discussing his role in the story as if we might study Hamlet. I get that.
The problem is that God is not a character in a story that begins and ends with the story. If all you're doing is analyzing God based on his interactions with humans in the Bible, you're missing most of what God is.
Because that's all Miles does, he gets God's character completely wrong.
Miles is trying to humanize God, like a character in a book, and it just doesn't work. I know Miles wasn't trying to portray the religious God, but how can that be left out when that's what God IS??

Here's an excerpt from the book:

"As for the concrete particulars of what God wants mankind to be, this he only discovers as he goes along. His manner is always supremely confident, but he does not announce or seem even to know all his plans in detail or in advance. Again, and again, God is displeased with man, but often enough it seems that he discovers only in and through his anger just what pleases him. To change the analogy slightly, he is like a director whose actors never seem to get it right and who is, as a result, often angry but who doesn't, himself, always know beforehand what getting it right will be."

This is not God at all. God is omniscient, else how could we (and the peoples in the Bible) have faith in him?

In contrast, here is a quote from Joseph Smith:

"Without the knowledge of all things, God would not be able to save any portion of his creatures; for it is by reason of the knowledge which he has of all things, from the beginning to the end, that enables him to give that understanding to his creatures by which they are made partakers of eternal life; and if it were not for the idea existing in the minds of men that God had all knowledge it would be impossible for them to exercise faith in him. [As quoted by Bruce R. McConkie in Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), p.264]

The humanization of God kills faith.
So I guess you might say this is just an interesting study of the Bible, then. But since Miles got the main "character" all wrong, it's not a very good study in my opinion.

Considering God as a literary character whose portrait develops through the Hebrew Scriptures. Fascinating, well written but quite demanding at times. The chapter on the book of Job stood out for me.

First, a confession: I know Jack Miles personally and he once urged me to write a book of my own (on guerrilla warfare!) Now to the business at hand. How can God have a biography? Simple, He's just like one of us (although not a slob, contra Joan Osborne). He changes over time, goes from kind to cruel, and violates His own oaths, particularly the one about not harming His own creation. Nota Bene: This is the Hebrew God of the Old Testament; the one Andy in WEEDS called "a gangster". Miles does a marvelous job of retelling His story from the perspective of those subject to Him. Don't worry, folks. Jack got around to Jesus in another biography.