Jack Miles, a former Jesuit and a 1990 Guggenheim Fellow, has a Harvard doctorate in Near Eastern languages and directs the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate School. This book was a Pulitzer Prize Winner and a national bestseller.

The premise of this book is to apply “literary criticism” to God using the Hebrew Bible – the Tanakh (in particular, the 1985 Jewish Publication Society’s translation). What this means is to use only the Tanakh to learn about God, taking nothing whatsoever from our Judeo-Christian tradition. Imagine a highly educated person with no knowledge of the Judeo-Christian heritage who wants to learn about God by reading the Tanakh as one would read a book – the way one learns about Hamlet by reading Shakespeare’s play. This is the task that Jack Miles undertakes here. What sort of a “person” is God? What is his “life story?” Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence but as the main character of the world’s greatest book – as a character with all the depths, contradictions, and ambiguities of a Hamlet? Miles does not use the Tanakh as stories of the Israeli people but as the story of God and his character.

The Tanakh has a different order than the Old Testament, which was rearranged to serve as prologue to the New Testament. The Tanakh has the order: Torah, The Prophets (Former, then Latter), then The Writings. As Miles emphasizes, the distinctive, broad movement of the Tanakh from action to speech to silence differs from the Old Testament, whose movement is from action to silence to speech. This difference is crucial to his analysis of God. Near the beginning, Miles states “Myth, legend, and history mix endlessly in the Bible, and Bible historians are endlessly sorting them out. Literary criticism, however, not only can but must leave them mixed.”

How do we read God’s character by what he says and does? The Elohist (God) account of the first act of human generation (Gen 5:1-3) differs in several ways from the Yahwist (Lord) account that precedes the story of Cain and Able. For “major” character changes, God starts as a creator, but soon adds destroyer. His main concern in the Torah seems to be procreation of his chosen, but to accomplish this he must add to his “fusion” of characteristics, so he becomes a liberator in Egypt, then a lawgiver in the wilderness when he realizes that more is needed of him. Miles says “There are elements of divine self-discovery, however, within this broadly stable identity. The terms we attach to these are (1) conqueror, developing the earlier liberator; (2) father, developing the earlier friend of the family; (3) arbiter, developing the earlier lawgiver.”

Miles spends much time on Job: “The last word about the Book of Job will never be spoken,” but he states “Job speaks at length about justice and demands that God respond. God refuses. God speaks at length about power and demands that Job respond. Job refuses.” Miles doesn’t accept biblical redaction that has Job saying he was wrong. And in a later chapter, Jack Miles points out that “from the end of the Book of Job to the end of the Tanakh, God never speaks again. His speech from the whirlwind is, in effect, his last will and testament. Job has reduced the Lord to silence.” From Job on, people speak of and about God, but God speaks no more. I wonder why the Hebrew arrangers of the Tanakh wanted this order. Did they view God as having “retired to the sidelines” after Job? Miles suggests but does not stress this point. He says the Tanakh ends with I & II Chronicles because this provides a never-ending “end,” as I & II Chronicles serve to point back into the depths of the Tanakh for an endless cycle of reading the Hebrew Scriptures.

For my summary, using the Tanakh‘s story as the story of God gives valuable insight, but to me it is insight into the story the ancient Hebrews chose to tell of their ever-growing ideas of God. At times Miles may shock you, but since his analysis tells us how outsiders might view our God, it is a very worthwhile read – we all need to be shocked into thinking “outside our usual box.”