God: A Biography.

God: A Biography, by Jack Miles (Knopf, 409 pp., $27.50)

Mr. Arkes is the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College and a contributing editor of NR. His most recent book is The Return of George Sutherland (Princeton).

SPINOZA sought gently to deliver his readers from the superstition that Moses had to ascend Mount Sinai in order to get closer to God. The gesture might have been useful for Moses, as a bit of theater, to make an impression on the minds of his followers. But as Spinoza remarked, God would have been no less near to Moses on the plain than in the heights. God would have heard him quite as well, for God did not suffer from diminished hearing, or from auditory nerves strained by age. With a comparable certitude, Albert Einstein was convinced that there was a design in the universe, that God did not play at dice. In either case, the conviction was rooted in an understanding of the character or nature of God, an understanding that could not be found exactly in the pages of the Bible. And yet, perhaps it could: Might it be that Spinoza and Einstein had simply filled in the ellipses marked off in the Bible? Might they have allied their imagination with the text, and drawn their inferences from the record that had been set down of the words and works of God?

Jack Miles takes, as his key to the problem of God, the problem of character in a play, in a literary work. He finds his analogy in the controversy that centers on Hamlet in the circles of literary critics: Is there a sense of Hamlet, the character, that runs well beyond the confines of the play? Or would we say, in Hamlet's line, that "the play's the thing" -- that it becomes impossible to know Hamlet outside the play that imparted structure and meaning to his life? Miles comes down on the side of the character:

Unless the viewer of Hamlet can believe that Hamlet was born and will die, unless the viewer's imagination is carried offstage into the life for which there is no direct evidence onstage, the play dies with its protagonist. A character understood to have no life offstage can have no life onstage. And so it is also with God as the protagonist of the Bible.

Miles has made his vocation as an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a gifted writer. But his training was in theology and Near Eastern languages. He set out, then, to read the Bible with the care of a critic learned in those fields, intending to trace the central figure whose character is unfolded in these chronicles. The reader can be drawn into this absorbing work of literary construction while preserving his detachment on the question of God. That is the seduction of the book, as Miles knows, and he claims that his own mission is to "mediate" between the people who believe in God and those who regard God merely as a literary device. But part of the mystery of the book is just what Miles means by "mediate": Does he intend to bring God closer, make Him more plausible by making Him a more rounded, personal figure? Miles himself describes his work as "consciously postcritical or postmodern." Does he mean then to plant, among the faithful, the premises of "postmodernism" and deconstruction, with their dubiety about claims of "truth"?

In the style of postmodernism, God might be treated as a character Who has broken loose even from the control of the authors who invented Him. Still He would be, after all, a character, a literary invention. He would reflect less about a real being than about the writers who invented Him and the moral sentiments of their culture. In any event, as Miles notes, "whether the ancient writers who wrote the Bible created God or merely wrote down God's revelation of himself, their work has been, in literary terms, a staggering success." Even the atheists who mean to reject God have a vivid sense of the God they mean to reject. What deepens the problem, and makes the character of God all the more compelling, is the fact that the account offered in the Bible is anything but a bowdlerized version. As Miles aptly remarks, much that is said of God in the Bible is rarely preached because, "examined too closely, it becomes a scandal." The account would contain, after all, the God Who was willing to visit the most dreadful calamities upon Job, that upright, good man, to settle a kind of gaming debt with Satan. The God Who is occasionally moody or intemperate, conciliatory or vengeful, becomes a more absorbing figure of interest.

But there is a still greater scandal. For Miles, the serpent in the Garden comes as a sign, early in the Bible, that God the Creator makes mistakes. The punishment meted out to the serpent, and to Adam and Eve, is at least an admission of where His work was in powerful need of correction. Miles assumes that God may indeed be surprised or taken aback when His chosen people suffer defeat and dispersal -- when, in short, His plans do not seem to unfold as He planned them. Miles keeps bringing back the question "How did this feel to God?" -- to the point, in fact, where God begins to sound like a patient in therapy. But how could God be God if He were really surprised by the turn of events -- if He really did not know how everything was going to turn out?

And yet that is precisely the possibility that Miles means to incorporate as he moves deftly through the chapters in the Bible. Miles's understanding here may be condensed in part in this way: God makes mankind in His own image "because he needs an image." He will not understand His own intentions more fully until He sees the reactions of these creatures made in His image. He is a personal God, and He requires an engagement with men and women in order to gauge more fully what He has wrought. "But at the start," says Miles, "he does not know what he wishes, and he does not know, either, that he needs his creatures to find out."

Miles is hardly the first to note the shift from the God of the earlier books -- the God Who was willing to punish the innocent with the guilty -- to the God of Isaiah, Who wished to beat swords into plowshares. The God in this book is capable of likening Himself to a bride in a marriage with Israel, cast now as the husband. In fact, as Miles argues, it is not until the book of Isaiah that God has ever loved, that love could be "predicated of him as an action or a motive." It was not from love that God had made man, or made His covenant with Abraham, or delivered the Israelites from Egypt.

Miles notes, also, that God does not demand worship from His people until Sinai, and not until then is it suggested that God in turn may bear obligations. His main injunction up to that point is to be fruitful and multiply. Still, God seems to recognize women as an afterthought, and it is not until Rebekah that a woman addresses God directly. God's willingness to answer her is taken by Miles as an early sign of His domestication. With Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel, it was recorded that "the Lord saw that Leah was unloved and he opened her womb." Up to this point, as Miles notes, God addressed himself to women through men, and his concern with begetting was at the level of founding nations. But now, as Miles remarks, God seems to be in the business of "managing the pregnancies one at a time."

Still, the enduring lesson on fertility and human autonomy comes with God's arrangement with Abram -- whose name is not changed to Abraham until after the covenant and the acceptance of circumcision. As Miles argues, that requirement was hardly an arbitrary demand for mutilation. "Abram's penis," he writes, "is what the covenant is about." The act of circumcision marks a symbolic concession that "Abram's fertility is not his own to exercise without divine let or hindrance." Or in the vernacular of our time, it was meant to signify that we are not wholly "autonomous" beings, deliciously liberated from any restraint or encumbrance in our "reproductive freedom." In the tradition of Judaism and Christianity, the act of begetting is an instance in which parents participate with God in the act of creation. Much later, the words would come back with Moses, and the sense of restraint would run even deeper. "And now, Israel," he asks, in Deuteronomy, "what does the Lord your God require of you, but . . . to keep the commandments and statutes. . . . Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart." In the way that God once asked us to surrender complete autonomy over our bodies and our begetting, we are asked now to forgo that claim of autonomy entirely by accepting a Law, and a Lawgiver, outside ourselves.

In Miles's construing, the mind of God has been "objectified in law" as the Hebrew Bible comes to an end. The God he finds in the last chapters of Daniel is the God Who knows now, in "stone-cold detail," how history will play itself out. He required, in Miles's reading, an engagement with His creatures in order to discover His mind, and fix His intentions. Once fixed, He recedes. His voice subsides.

But as the book settles into this cast, the question must remain: Is this indeed the God Who made the covenant with Abraham, or is it merely a literary fiction artfully reshaped by Miles? Has Miles imparted to us the assumptions of postmodernism -- or do the devices of postmodernism permit him rather to perform an even subtler turn? Might he be concealing now a traditional teaching in a guise that is brashly "postmodern" and anti-traditional? Miles has suggested that the understanding of God in the Bible seemed to absorb other notions of deities afloat in the ancient world. Yet he asserts that the sifting and editing was done by a number of writers over generations, and he finds it hard to imagine that a coherent notion of God could have been pieced together in this way. "A shared idea of God," he says, "must have come first." Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how many writers working separately, over so long a stretch of time, could have produced a work with such a "deep underlying unity." The postmodernists may read the book with a knowing wink, but Miles seems to have more in mind, by the end, than a literary device. In the sublime twist of the postmodernists, the literary character may spring loose from His writers and inventors, and He may spring free for the sovereign reason that He happens to be real.