I haven't read anything quite like this, and must say that it has slightly influenced on how I personally see God, and has brought to my understanding the various aspects of God. Truthfully I have never read the Bible, and am neither acquainted with much of its stories but the book manages to convey its personification of God without having to have such knowledge beforehand. For somebody (myself included) who was raised to view God in a certain way will surely find Jack Miles' biography of God to be an eye opener.

God, written as a literary character. I have some ideas on how to review this. Bear with me for a few days.

This book is an excellent and thought-provoking read, although it does lose momentum towards the end.

This book is quite an intellectual challenge, but could very well be life changing to a westerner, secular or religious.

Miles is brilliant and I can totally see how this won the Pullitzer.

As a Christian who was questioning my faith when I picked it up, I found it thoroughly interesting and an excellent way to understand the God of the Old Testament.

I will be moving to his New Testament work eventually.

Miles won the Pulitzer for this absorbing study of the life of the Biblical God, beginning with the opening chapter of Genesis and taking us through the entirety of the Old Testament in the Jewish ordering of the books from the Torah. Jehovah makes for a stirring and multifaceted subject - an omniscient and omnipotent deity that was assembled from the personalities and powers of a variety of ancient pagan pantheons, running the gamut from demiurge to demon; a terrifying and vengeful master, breaking his creations and his promises; maturing to a remorseful and avenging spirit, ragged from love and unyielding in justice; and then apparently abandoning his children to exile and slavery, only to be discovered once more - remote but present, restless but steadfast - when his far-flung flock regathered in the Chosen Land.

Miles provides a remarkable exegesis, bringing erudition and analysis to this fascinating portrait of a singular entity who proved to be remarkably differentiated and inconsistent throughout his sorrow-filled paternity - imparting an eminently human element to his earthly involvement, the Almighty as a tyronic parent who experiences all the vicissitudes and difficulties of an evolving responsibility, adapting his divine mediations as his children mature within time - and yet emerged at the end with the sagacity, capacity, and audacity to resolve the crisis in his being through a human form: Jesus Christ, the subject of Miles equally excellent follow-up Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.

Jack Miles takes the approach to consider both the Christian and Hebrew Old Testament(s) as literature and to consider God as literary character. His treatment of the Bible clearly got to some of his reviewers. But from my reading many of his critics did not bother to read the book. His careful scholarship here is pretty interesting. This is not a light book - and indeed one reviewer said it was "dry" - well the subject is dense - but Miles takes a complex subject and applies first rate scholarship to the topic.

Miles takes a sequential approach to looking at how God is portrayed - and thus starts with Genesis. And by reading the text closely one can discern a variable approach in the way that the writers approached their subject.

There are lots of conclusions from this book. One of the most interesting is whether the character of God is more like a Greek (Oedipus) or a Shakespearean Tragedy. Are some of the inherent qualities in God's portrayal more internally or externally caused. He makes a pretty good case that he follows the latter characterization.

Are there points in the book where a religious person might take exception? Sure, but don't think that because their might be interpretive differences that this book is not worth the read. I found it to be challenging and worth the time.

Some books I just breeze through with little effort while reading them, other works require more concentration, and then there are ones like ‘God: A Biography.’ Sweet Lord, Mr. Miles’s study of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as literature overworked my limited intelligence while I was reading the Pulitzer-Prize winning work. The author states, “I write here about the life of the Lord God as – and only as – the protagonist of a classic of world literature … I do not write about the Lord God as the object of religious belief. I do not attempt, as theology does, to make an original statement about God as an extraliterary reality. I do not write as a historian and therefore do not focus, as historians do, on the successive Israelite and Jewish communities that believed in God.” What he does do is examine the actual Old Testament story and breaks down the evolution of God’s character and the trial-and-error, 1500-year storyline. (If I understand correctly, the year-estimate ignores God creating the whole shebang until Abraham becomes the Big Guy’s focus. That’s where you get into the arguments with fundamentalists saying the planet is only 4000 years old before Christ made his stage entrance. In this cognitive realm, science has been locked in a closet and has no say in the matter.)

The comedian Lewis Black had once said about the God of the Old Testament, “Holy ****, he was out of control.” I agree. God was a deity with what appears to be a major multiple-personality disorder and a serious bloodlust. Mercy, the dude repeatedly orders the mass killings of innocent men, women, children, and animals with as much empathy as a toddler stomping on ants. As Mr. Miles states, “What is the mood of the (Hebrew) Bible/ (Old Testament?) Its mood varies, of course, but with impressive frequency it is one of irritability, denunciation, and angry complaint.” There is a back-and-forth illogical nature to many of God’s actions. Sometimes he is the cosmic puppet master, manipulating certain humans, while other times he’s indifferent or clueless. Often times in the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible, God is surprised and annoyed by humans. It sure challenges the belief that he knows all and sees all. It also supports the author’s contention that the Almighty in the story evolved as a deity. Boy oh boy, there sure is a lot of needless butchery for God to help him learn and mature. The thing is a blood-soaked frenzy. The storyline includes such wholesome family fare as murder, incest, self-mutilation, rape, cannibalism, genocide, duplicity, dismemberment, animal sacrifice, slavery, and that family-reunion favorite: human sacrifice. Mr. Miles also explains such things as the different dynamics at play in monotheism compared to polytheism stories; is God male, female, both, or neither; and the Bible’s escape clause when events don’t make sense. The prophets’ baffling statements that the author makes efforts to untangle could simply have been hallucinations. The prophets’ predictions were as accurate as those made by that psychic pay-per-call huckster Miss Cleo. (I highly recommend the late Oliver Sacks’s nonfiction 2012 work ‘Hallucinations.’) The Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament is big on retribution and reward as well as treating people as either good or bad. God, apparently, did not know he produced a plethora of people with complex quirky cognitive abilities and disabilities that challenge the whole simplistic good-or-bad decree. The Book of Proverbs introduction of the female entity known as Lady Wisdom was all new to me and a real eye-opener. It’s easy to envision devout believers viewing Mr. Miles’s literary study as blasphemy.

‘God’ is a useful work because it helps present-day readers understand what transpires in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. I doubt very much that most religious people even have an inkling of what is contained in the Bible. Most believers do not read the entire story in context. Based upon my experiences as a Catholic, followers only read or hear portions that are cherry-picked by religious leaders and spoon fed to their audience. Again, Mr. Miles was primarily interested in studying its literary value and does it in a non-sarcastic manner. However, the author asks many questions that cannot be answered. Surely, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was written and compiled by men and God played no part in the anthology’s creation or how the different scrolls where arranged into what fundamentalists think are the Big Kahuna’s actual thoughts on paper. I honestly can’t see Joe or Jane Sixpack, especially if they are devout followers, plowing through Mr. Miles’s erudite work. I’ve been agnostic for almost four decades but grew up Catholic in a very Catholic town in Maine. ‘God: A Biography’ finally gave me clarification as to the storyline in the old work instead of the patchwork fare I was served by the Catholic Church. That’s all I was looking to achieve. Mr. Miles did a splendid job in fulfilling my objective. Oh, and if the tone of my review is not clear enough for ya, I’m still very much an agnostic.

Reading about God as a literary character can be a very enlightening exercise. The Bible is unquestionably an unusual work of literature, but there is plenty to consider when we study God from a strictly literary point of view, as this book does deftly. It’s important to never forget that literary criticism is the purpose, or certain points will be misunderstood, like when the author asks, “Did the telling of the stories create the God, or did the God, imagined first, provoke the telling of the stories?” The author thinks it’s more plausible that a shared idea of God came first, but even asking the question leads us to see that God, as a protagonist without a past, and a narrative without a memory, is the story of man before he was created by God. At least this is where we are after the first interlude.

Moving through the books of the Tanakh, we see God assume the roles of Creator, Destroyer, Liberator, Lawgiver, Liege, Conqueror, Father, etc. During these phases, God becomes a historical character who acquires the status of myth, also mixing with entertaining fictions in a combined story of mythic and historical gravity. But this is where the author suggests that “the argument over whether this narrative is really history, really myth, or really fiction is misbegotten. It is really a mixture of the three. The mixing is precisely what is distinctive about it as a form of literature.”

“Taking the Tanakh on its own terms, everything in it really happened (history), it’s outcome is of enormous personal consequence for each and every reader or hearer (religion), and page by page it has the unmistakable confidence and artistic panache of a living literature (fiction). We shall never know this unity again. No historian, no preacher, no novelist can ever recreate it - can ever again, that is, be all three at once.”

The third interlude addresses the “problem of pain” by sampling the latter chapters of Isaiah, and it gives a good description of what can (and should) be inferred when innocent people suffer and evil people prosper. I won’t recount the listed possibilities here, but an apt quote appears a few chapters later that is a typical response to the problem of pain when considering a being whose ways are higher than our ways; when moral confusion forces a concession: “The first thing a man of understanding must understand is that there is much that he will never understand.”

The character of God seemingly evolves as he progresses through various roles as a protagonist. Each chapter illuminates another aspect of an evolving relationship between God and man. This is the great success of the author - showing a character progression beyond any other. The whirlwind, the raging, and the still small voice. He started loud and grew quiet. He was worshiped, he was abandoned. He was reclaimed. In the beginning, he seemed to be creating his people, and now the people seem to be preserving their God.

“He is the restless breathing we still hear in our sleep.”

Starts very strong, meanders a bit, returns with some real insight around the Book of Job, but then tapers off. A quiet and contemplative book, which like the book it tracks, the Old Testament, has bursts of hyper-violence and action, followed by longeurs. (This might account for why I kept putting it down for months, then somewhat reluctantly/dutifully picking it back up.) I couldn’t shake the feeling that Miles’s project, a reading the God of the Old Testament as a “coherent” unitary character, was slightly misbegotten, given the wild inconsistencies built into that character—a clear composite of different deities from different places and times.

God: a Biography by Jack Miles offers a thorough literary approach to the Bible, through the life of its protagonist, God. Setting aside puzzles of historical veracity, and ignoring issues of religious interpretation, Miles examines the character as written, from Creator to the Ancient of Days. Character development requires an authoritative ordering of the books , and Miles shows how the sequence of the Hebrew scriptures, the Tanakh, as opposed to the Christian Old Testament, provides continuity in the story of the relationship between God and Israel. This secular scholarly work neither confirms nor denies any spiritual perspective, but illuminates the foundation of Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism.

Overall I found this book very interesting. The premise is to read the Hebrew testament, focusing on God as the character in a piece of literature. It was an interesting point of view, and also provided some insights into how the Jewish community arranges these books of the Bible. There were also some historical insights to put the Hebrew testament into context, and also provided, for me, an additional fresh perspective for reading the Old Testament in the Bible. There definitely some moments where I raised an eyebrow or rolled an eye when I felt he was taking the literary reading of the God-character to the extreme. (For example, trying to bring a little bit of Freud in to analyze God? Please, no.) However, that may simply reveal the bias I have of growing up thinking of God as...God and not a literary character.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
- The Book