God: A Biography (a review)

Though I am not religious by any means, religion yet has the power to fascinate me. I suspect I have read more about religion than most non-religious people. Some years ago, while trying to learn more, I checked Jack Miles's God: A Biography out of the library and found it to be an extremely interesting book. I recently reread it and found it no less interesting on second reading.

The book's concept is to treat the Bible as a biographical document describing its central character, God. Some might consider this blasphemous; at the very least it doesn't require accepting assumptions about him that are common among the religious (most notably that he is purely good), or even treating him as a real entity. However, there is no question that for his experiment Miles knows the scriptures backward and forward, and is able to read them (in their original language) with great subtlety. Miles consciously chooses one particular version of the Bible, the Jewish Tanakh, for his purposes. It consists of essentially the same books as the Christian Old Testament, but arranged differently. The first books are the same, but later ones come in a different order, and this affects the outcome of the life that Miles describes.

Reading the scripture in this way is certainly unusual, and Miles spends a lot of words early in the book outlining how he intends to do it, as well as revisiting the general idea throughout. In general he seems to want to assume nothing; as if we are reading about a character that we might have heard of from a friend who'd read the book, but weren't otherwise familiar with. Traditional attributes such as omnipresence cannot be taken for granted, but must be read from the text (if they're there at all). On the other hand, I do believe that there are some cases where Miles refers to extrabiblical sources (particularly Judaic ones). Miles also uses interpretational techniques that would not have been available to people in previous centuries reading the Bible. I detect a whiff of psychoanalytic thinking at points. I'm not ordinarily all that sympathetic to such analyses but it wasn't so obtrusive here as to be obnoxious to me.

Miles's approach give him a very novel option with regard to interpretation of scripture. Consider some of the typical points of debate raised by atheists. The atheist claims that certain internal contradictions, or contradictions between God's behavior and his well-understood attributes (such as being utterly good) are reasons to disbelieve the Bible, or at least a literal interpretation. Different religious traditions have different approaches to these problems. A fundamentalist must take the scripture literally and face these issues head on. Others with less rigid interpretations may invoke figurative language or other means to resolve the apparent contradiction.

Miles has other ways of dealing with such problems. His approach mandates that he read the Bible literally in the sense that he has to take everything it says seriously as a description of God's character, and all the events that happened to him. However, he doesn't have to assume anything else about God's character that come along with religious tradition. If God's actions sometimes look evil, he doesn't have to explain them away. Rather, he can face them on and infer something from them about God's character, rather than having to fit them into a preconceived mold. Apparent contradictions can be turned into different character facets. (In this manner the different authors postulated by the Documentary Hypothesis turn into different sides of God's character.) This is a sense of taking the Bible literally, but not as taking it to be describing reality, but trying to understand the universe and character it describes as presented. It's much like what one might do in trying to assemble a fictional history. For these reasons perhaps God: A Story would be a better title, though undoubtedly a more provocative one.

The premise of Miles's biography is that throughout the Bible, God's interactions with the humans he created in his image are part of a process of self-discovery. In the beginning he has no peer, so he is a cipher even to himself. Humans are not his peers but they are the only beings he has interactions with. Their actions surprise him, and often cause him to act in ways that surprises himself. Early on he seems very prone to "fly off the handle" and strike out in anger. However destructive anger is only one of his character facets. He also is very capable of displaying love, though this aspect of his personality doesn't develop instantaneously. He finds himself having special relationships with certain individual humans especially, and it is with these people that the softer sides of his personality appear.

However, his relationships with human beings, both in the abstract and in the specific, still do remain rocky. The tribes of Israel are always problematic. God seems eternally disappointed by them, but their trials seem to bring them through to a point where they are more devout than they ever were before and God seems to shift from feelings of frustration to love as the story continues. Yet at this point it seems that God becomes powerless to return them to the heights of their glory in Davidic times. Other nations have passed them up and even with God on their side they seem destined to be a minor power.

The climax seems to come with Job. God gets into hot water by accepting a wager with Satan (there's some irony here that Miles could explore but that may be based on more modern versions of Satan than the one he's dealing with). Job challenges him squarely, and he is forced to resort to bluster to defend himself. Job seemingly acquiesces, but Miles reads subtle ironies in the book's turns of phrase that indicate that Job in fact won the day. I am no Biblical scholar, but Miles's interpretation of Job is much more nuanced than any I recall having seen elsewhere. In any case, after this altercation with one of his creations, God recedes into the background, as if embarrassed by how he dealt with Job.

The oddest thing about Mile's take on the Bible is how God seems to fail. This is something incomprehensible to traditional religion, and yet one can see Miles's point. Early on God nearly destroys his creation but comes to regret it. The people he chooses to establish relationships with (both individuals and the Israelites as a group) cause problems for him. Some of these problems are due to them, but God is by no means guiltless--again, his apparent impulsiveness plays against him. In the end in spite of his promises, his people don't really prosper. This cannot be entirely attributed to their straying, as they become more and more devout, yet his expansive promises do not come true. And yet the people wind up very faithful as he recedes from the picture. Ultimately God's biography, at least the Old Testament portion, is a strangely sad story. Miles has done a sequel on the New Testament, which I am now reading. It will be interesting to see how the story continues.

Agree or disagree with Miles's thesis and approach, God: A Biography is a fascinating book. It is also amazingly informative. Unless you are a serious Biblical scholar, it is likely that you will learn something you didn't know before. It is well worth a read by the religious and nonreligious alike.