Follow that Winnebago.

The Hebrew God Portrait of an Ancient Deity Bernhard Lang Yale University Press, $32.50, 246 pp.

Imagine yourself on vacation. Ahead of you on the road to Mount Rushmore is a large "recreational vehicle," slowing the traffic and blocking the view. Instead of feasting on the noble landscape, your eye feasts upon the stickers that festoon this hippo's rear end. From these, though you cannot quite assemble a history of the hippo's wanderings (who knows in what order the stickers were affixed?), you can at least analyze its owners' taste in tourism. You begin by dividing their destinations into major categories: historical--Jefferson Davis Memorial; athletic--Indianapolis 500; geological--the Wisconsin Dells. These three categories might well suffice.

Three categories suffice for Bernhard Lang in this portrait of the God of the Old Testament (to which a mini-portrait of "Christ as Second God" is appended in the final eight pages of the epilogue). The categories, borrowed from the anthropologist Georges Dumezil, are wisdom, war, and (in all imaginable forms) wealth. Lang's premise is that divinity, anthropologically understood, is the personification of humanity in one or more of these three functions. "The Hebrew God," as Lang chooses to call the God of Israel, combines all three functions and thus personifies human kingship.

Lang wishes the history of this God could be written; but like you behind that RV, he realizes that the stickers--the fragmentary evidence that has survived to our day--permit only a fragmentary history. In a passage that offers a fair sample of this author's English style, he concludes that "structural description" is the most we can hope for: "The ideal study of this God would consist of two parts: the first on his nature and character, and the second on his history, resulting in a monograph that would be entitled `The Hebrew God: His Character and His Story.' The second part of such a work would tell the history of the Hebrew God as it developed in biblical times and perhaps beyond. But due to the absence of reliable sources, only the first part, the one dealing with the deity's essential character traits, can actually be written. Only rarely is it possible to add historical detail to the structural description."

In the title that Lang gives his ideal study, the truly problematical word is "His" inasmuch as, whether for the purposes of character analysis or story-telling, Lang allows God no more subjectivity than you would allow that RV ahead of you on the road. Just as its travels are really its owners' travels, so God's history and even his character are really those of his worshippers. There are alternatives, of course, to the Hamlet-without-the-prince methodological atheism of history and social science: theological commentary, taking the real existence of God as a matter of faith, is one; literary commentary, treating the protagonist as real for the purposes of the story, is another. But Lang is without either theological or literary inclination. More striking is the fact that, although he has methodological atheism in common with historical-critical scholarship, he has little else in common with it.

In classic historical-critical Bible scholarship, the focus is on the believers rather than on him in whom or that in which they believe. The focus thus is on ancient Israel for the Old Testament or Tanakh and on the early church for the New Testament. Although canonical works are studied even when they yield little historical information (testimony to the continuing influence of religious belief), the goal remains the extraction from the Bible--as gold from ore--of the intellectual and political history of these two communities. Historical-critical scholars do sometimes employ the methods of social science, but they invariably subordinate the results to the overriding interest of history. History is the master, social science the servant. For Bernhard Lang, by contrast, social science is the master, and history the servant.

The result, page by page, is a synchronic, topical exposition--Lang's "structural description"--dense at every point with diachronic, historical reference. To choose just one illustrative example, Lang's description of the Hebrew God as a weather god refers in one passage of fewer than five hundred words to: a ninth-century b.c. Assyrian cylinder seal, an eighth-century b.c. Hittite rock relief, a fourth-century b.c. Phoenician coin, a first-century a.d. Palmyrene relief, the first-century a.d. Jewish temple as described by Josephus, and the Roman Ara Pacis (altar of peace) of 13-9 b.c. Each of these objects could take its place, obviously, in a separate history, but Lang's intention is not history but structural description.

Lang's erudition produces its best results in flashes of ad hoc illumination. Thus, partly on the basis of the references just listed, he writes: "The Israelites apparently disliked cultivating grain, even though it was the most important element in their diet. Its cultivation reminded them of God's curse" in the Garden of Eden. "Arboriculture and viticulture, by contrast, seem to enjoy divine blessing.... `They shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid (Micah 4:4)." I like this. I find it intuitively right, but I predict that historians will find Lang's way with words like "apparently" in the quote above little short of infuriating.

Lang has a way of settling historical debates en passant or implying that they are settled when they are not. One example among many must suffice. Noting that God is not a warrior in the Book of Genesis, Lang dates that book to around 500 b.c. and reads its concentration on fertility rather than war as the reaction of a defeated Israel to the failure of the Israelite monarchy. Though Lang is right that "some scholars" (he does not name them) "have come to consider Genesis the latest part of the Pentateuch," he does not report anything approaching a consensus when he writes: "Apparently Genesis and Job belong to the same cultural milieu. Written about 500 b.c.--that is, after the Babylonian exile--they echo that period's vital interest in restoring the material basis of Israel's existence and its spiritual identity. People became conscious of the fact that the state, with its emphasis on the Divine Warrior and the wisdom god, had been responsible for the national disaster of 586 b.c. Now, after the destruction of the military-bureaucratic complex, there was ... a movement of cultural regression in which people remembered the archaic Lord of the Animals."

None of this is impossible, but none of it is proved or remotely provable. Lang asserts as much himself yet repeatedly abandons his own skepticism. Some of his many guesses may well be right. Some of your guesses about the itinerary of the RV may also be right. Lang can be thought-provoking even when a reader thinks him mistaken. On the whole, however, the merit and the appeal of this book will be strongest for those of a taxonomic cast of mind. In other words, if you find literary criticism superficial and historical reconstruction improbable and so would prefer a topical organization of a good deal of what the Bible says about God, this may be just the book for you.

Jack Miles, a recent MacArthur fellow, is the author of God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (both Alfred A. Knopf).