God: A Biography - Softcover

Treating the Bible as a literary text is a standard approach in certain areas of scholarship. Jack Miles' innovation is to treat God as the main protagonist of this literary work, and to analyze his "character" as revealed in the text. Miles, a former Jesuit who studied in Rome and Jerusalem, and has a doctorate in Near Eastern languages, analyzed the Hebrew Bible (for the most part like the Old Testament, but ordered differently) to arrive at his literary exegesis. This God, it is clear, is certainly a complex character. Undoubtedly male, but possessed of seemingly multiple personalities, He is alternately creator/destroyer, protector/executioner, and warrior/lawgiver. Miles' "reading" of God, whose proactive role at the beginning develops into a passive silent presence, is entertaining, thoughtful and a worthy winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize.

What sort of "person" is God? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book--as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? In this "brilliant, audacious book" (Chicago Tribune), a former Jesuit marshalls a vast array of learning and knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate God--and man--with a sense of discovery and wonder.