God: A Biography
by Jack Miles
Buy on AmazonGod: A Biography is a 1995 non-fiction book by Jack Miles. The book recounts the tale of existence of the Abrahamic deity as the protagonist of the Hebrew Tanakh or Christian Bible Old Testament. The Tanakh and the Old Testament contain the same books, but the order of the books is different. Miles uses the ordering found in the Tanakh to provide the narrative on which his analysis is based. The book's central structure is that God's character develops progressively within the narrative. The accounts of God's actions in the various books are then used to deduce information about God's nature and motivation. The book won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
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"Jack Miles's 'God: A Biography,' with which I always end my undergraduate seminar."
By the Book: John Lewis Gaddis · nytimes.com
"This is not a book of theology or a book of biblical criticism – it’s a brilliant literary and psychoanalytically informed thought experiment. Miles treats the arc of biblical writings in their Jewish sequence (the order of books in the Christian Old Testament is different). He reads from Genesis to Second Chronicles, interpreting these texts as if they formed one continuous narrative tracing the trajectory of “God’s” personality development. As “God” interacts with humanity in general, and with Israel in particular, his “personality” grows and changes in startling ways. Miles actually makes a more interesting statement. His main character, “God,” is himself a sinner – unstable, brooding, given to grand gestures of generosity as well as to terrifying fits of violence. Miles’s “God” is a creator, a destroyer, a warrior, a father, a mother – too much to pack into one stable character. And at the very end of his book, Miles unravels what he has done, sorting out these various aspects of “God’s” personality and assigning them to different individual ancient Semitic gods. All the dramatic tension of biblical narrative disappears. And Miles, by letting this divine character dissolve into polytheism, is also able to dissolve the problem of evil. The creator god of traditional Western monotheism is all good and all-powerful. So why is the world that he made so bad? The problem of evil is the problem of defending this definition of “god” in the face of so much evil. When you have multiple gods, the problem dissolves, because no single god is in charge, thus no single god is responsible. But Miles also plays with a different idea: What happens if “God” himself is morally flawed? If he himself is morally defective? You don’t have to be a theist to find the idea absolutely terrifying. And as an explanation for evil, it’s terrifying. That would be a theological question: I do not know the mind of God! But Miles’s book is not theology – it is an incredibly imaginative meditation on not only the issue of sin, but also the problem of evil."
Sin · fivebooks.com