God: A Biography.

Should we think of the Bible as a kind of novel, with God as the story's protagonist? And if we read the Bible in this way, will it deepen our understanding of God or of ourselves, or of the "book" we regard as sacred Scripture? Jack Miles attempts such a character study of the "Lord God" as that figure is developed within the Hebrew Bible. (An excerpt from God: A Biography was featured in Commonweal's March 10 issue.)

Borrowing the distinction made by William Kerrigan about readers of Shakespeare, Miles associates himself with those "critics" who think about the character of Hamlet, rather than with those scholars" who are concerned only about the play Hamlet. Although the features of the character can be derived only from the text, it is only when we can imagine that character as "real" and "alive" outside the text that the character becomes compelling and places demands on our imagination. Miles moves from the hints provided by the biblical text concerning what "Lord God" thought, spoke, and did, to reflections on who this character might be.

Since Miles traces the development of God's character through the sequence of biblical books, the ordering of the texts is obviously important. Should God's character be drawn from the sequence of the Christian Old Testament (based on the Septuagint), which follows the narrative accounts with wisdom writings and concludes with the prophets? Or should it be constructed from the order of the Hebrew canon (the Tanakh), in which God first acts, then speaks, but then falls silent? Miles chooses to follow the Tanakh.

He seeks to identify the character traits of God in this sequence of texts, considering God in turn as creator, destroyer, friend of the family, liberator, lawgiver, liege, conqueror, father, arbiter, executioner, holy one, wife, counselor, guarantor, fiend, sleeper, bystander, recluse, puzzle, absence, ancient of days, scroll. He pauses frequently for excursi that pose such reflective questions as "Does God Love?" or "Does God Fail?" or (perhaps most provocatively), "Does God Lose Interest?"

Here's the story of "Lord God" in brief: God is a being without any history but with a pronounced case of multiple personality disorder. He wants a hi story, so invents humans "in his image." God can't decide what exactly to do with these beings, but gives them the power to reproduce, then tries to find himself in their story, changing as they change, gathering new character traits through their experience. First he fights them jealously for the power over life, then becomes a warrior who develops a taste for blood, and finally, after showing his power once too often to the canny and adamant Job, falls silent, allowing himself to be utterly incorporated into the life of the people, and ultimately, in their book about him. In short, God both finds and loses himself in his human creature. Miles concludes by suggesting that the reason why humans in the "Western Tradition" have such a complex sense of self is that they learned it from the odd combination of unity and multiplicity in their biblical God.

Although the book adopts a deliberate sort of naivete in its tracing of God's character (taking only what the text will give, being surprised even when the text is not), it is not in the least unlearned. The author's credentials as a student of the biblical world in its Near Eastern environment are abundantly displayed, and his choice of contemporary conversation partners matches in sophistication his often stunning prose. There is much that is inventive here, much that is deeply interesting.

For all that, the book is, in my judgment, also deeply flawed. The project is obviously limited by its self-restriction to the order of books in the Tanakh. Neither for Judaism nor Christianity has the character of God been derived solely from those writings. By failing to trace the character of God as it is developed in the Christian writings of the New Testament, or continues to function as a character in Jewish intertestamental, rabbinic, and mystical literature, Miles ends up dealing with a literary abstraction.

The character of God, I would argue, has probably never been constructed from the kind of sequential reading of the canonical books here undertaken by Miles. It has been constructed in much more complex fashion in a free-ranging conversation with these texts and many others in the life and prayer and study of these rich and living religious traditions. For that reason, Miles's choice to consider the psalms (to take one example) only in one place in the sequence betrays their very essence as prayer, which resists such linear ideas of development. The psalms are not a moment in the development of a character but contain within themselves all the moments of past (and, for Christians) future developments of God's character. Miles's profile is therefore interesting but not compelling, for it is, in a very real sense, beside the point for most readers of these texts or worshipers of this God.

There are other problems in execution, even when the value of Miles's project is accepted. It seems to me to be a lapse in method to invoke, as he does, extrabiblical mythology and lore from the Ancient Near East, and use it in constructing God's character. If we want to work just with what the Bible gives us, then we should stick to that. If Miles wants to work in some cultural intertextuality, then he should give up the "construction of character from the unfolding of narrative" naivete. But the artificiality of this pose is also shown by Miles's insistence on arguing repeatedly from silence: "if the Bible has not yet told us this or that about God, then God must not yet have been this or that." I'm not quite sure what to call this fallacy, but I am fairly sure that it is not even good literary criticism to suppose that characters acquire traits only as the text announces them.

Finally, Miles's own preoccupations are perhaps read into the text more than he realizes. I was struck by how much attention was paid to what might be called the emotive side of God's character, and how little to his mental side. The most obvious example is the portrayal of God as Lawgiver. Miles acknowledges the transtemporal greatness of the Ten Commandments. But he barely pauses over the specifically characterological implications of the heart of Torah. He rushes on to the bloodthirstiness of God, shown in the various punishments to be administered. He does not celebrate--as the entire rabbinic tradition has celebrated--what the very concept of covenant and law says about the character of God. I can only conclude that Miles considers that the confused passions of persons are more constitutive of their character than the products of their minds. Which makes me not look forward to any book he might write on the Trinity.