Using only the text of the Tanakh as his source material, Jack Miles constructs an intoxicatingly clever pseudo-biography of the world’s most ubiquitous character: God. With an overwhelming attention to detail and an inventive, fearless command of the material, Miles re-visualizes God as a conflicted, confused, and multifaceted character in one of the world’s great literary masterpieces.
By treating God as a literary character, Miles is able to distance himself from centuries of pious writings and bracket theological inquiry. Miles’ methodology allows him to approach the text with fresh insight and sidestep tricky issues of orthodox interpretation. Of course, not all of the books of the Tanakh fit his reading; I expect this is why Miles excludes some books from his analysis and drastically reinterprets others. And just as the Tanakh’s concluding series of books abandon the narrative of the earlier books, the narrative structure of Miles’ biography becomes similarly muddled near the end--a fact that Miles himself seems to realize as he struggles with the Tanakh's several endings.
Despite these weaknesses, God: A Biography is a highly entertaining, endlessly illuminating, and thought provoking book that should become the subject of many heated debates and earnest discussions. Miles’ book is essential because it gives readers a new way to approach the Bible and a new way to think about the primary recipient of devotion for three major world religions. With this book, Miles argues more effectively than any theological treatise for the foundational importance of the Bible for Western thought and psychology.
