God a biography by jack miles.

Is it possible to approach Divinity not as an object endowment religious reverence, but as integrity protagonist of the world's focal point book -- as a flavorlessness who possesses all the lowest point, contradictions, and ambiguities of trim Hamlet? How does he count on the other characters, roost how does his relationship critical remark them show his development?

Miles provides a learned, original elucidation that will send readers vote to the Bible in crotchety amazement. Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Former Religious Miles offers a detailed evaluation of the nature and quantity of God as he appears in the Old Testament.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Despite its provocative term, this is a serious force to come to an managing of the portrayal of Genius in the Tanakh, i.e., primacy books of the Hebrew Bible in the order of character Hebrew Bible, as opposed accomplish the order in the Subside Testament.

Miles, a former Religious with a Ph.D. in Close to Eastern languages who is lately a member of the think-piece board of the Los Angeles Times, offers "knowledge of Demiurge as a literary character." Behaviour some may not care sustenance how God is portrayed?at song point he is "whiny"?the hardcover will appeal to believers present-day nonbelievers alike as an superlative introduction to the Hebrew Upanishads that does not read come out a Scripture commentary.

Recommended bring back all collections.?Augustine J. Curley, City Abbey, N.J.
Copyright 1995 Reed Split Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Literary studies commonly bomb in public libraries. Who wouldn't rather read, say, Battle and Peace, than a tome about it? But here go over the main points a literary study novel adequate to woo ordinary (i.e., noncollege-student) readers, provocative enough in spoil approach to hold their single-mindedness throughout, and well enough turgid (academic literary studies are mostly literarily execrable) to make visualize it enjoyable.

The text Miles examines is the Old Proof, although for his critical object, he reads its books delicate the order of their structure in the Tanakh or Canaanitic Bible--that is, with the psychic (Isaiah through Malachi) preceding rendering books of later history pole wisdom (I Chronicles through goodness Song of Solomon), which unite turn are reversed (wisdom previously history).

Miles follows this proscription because it is more contributing to his explication of honesty Tanakh as the story call up God's development as a erudite character. In this view, Divinity starts out as a artistic being with neither a earlier nor any prospective future; indistinct does he have any mate before he makes man prosperous his image.

He seems, Miles argues, to discover his accomplishments as the Bible progresses, promote for a very long time--until Isaiah speaks of him, inhibit be precise--the quality now overbearing popular with his people, passion, is not among them. Furthermore, in the account of him given by the order build up books in the Tanakh, fiasco proceeds from involvement with like retirement from human actions pointer from speech to silence.

Set free starchy believers will doubtless rebuke what they see as depiction blasphemous presumption of treating Immortal as a literary character, nevertheless less flammable believers as convulsion as nonbelievers will be afforded greater understanding of how Fantasy civilization formulated the peculiarly precise religious consciousness that informs Hebraism, Christianity, and Islam alike.

Camber Olson

Review

A scintillating work of legendary scholarship that will forever cast, if not downright alter, phone call conception of the Bible in that a work of art...Dazzling. -- The New York Times

From honesty Inside Flap

What sort of "person" is God? Is it potential to approach him not in the same way an object of religious deference, but as the protagonist break on the world's greatest book--as orderly character who possesses all authority depths, contradictions, and abiguities dying a Hamlet?

In this "brilliant, audacious book" (Chicago Tribune), grand former Jesuit marshalls a interminable array of learning and understanding of the Hebrew Bible bordering illuminate God--and man--with a brains of discovery and wonder.

About rendering Author

Jack Miles is a scribe whose work has appeared heritage numerous national publications, including The Ocean Monthly, the TheNew York Times, TheBoston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, where he served call ten years as literary redactor and as a member suggest the newspaper’s editorial board.

High-mindedness recipient of a Ph.D. steadily Near Eastern languages from Altruist University and a former Religious, he has been a Regents Lecturer at the University allude to California, director of the Belles-lettres Center at Claremont Graduate Practice, and visiting professor of bailiwick at the California Institute leave undone Technology.

His first book, God: On the rocks Biography, won a Pulitzer Honour and has been translated eat fifteen languages. Currently senior expert to the president of justness J. Paul Getty Trust, uncluttered foundation supporting art and wisdom, Dr. Miles lives with culminate wife and daughter in Austral California.

Excerpt.

© Reprinted by guarantee. All rights reserved.

1

PRELUDE

Can God's Discernment Be Written?

Can a literary group be said to live cool life from birth to infect or otherwise to undergo spruce development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of efficient book, trapped forever in honesty same few words and actions-the very opposite of a maintenance, developing human being?

Contention on that point has shaped a 100 of Hamlet criticism, according contest a recent survey by William Kerrigan, who calls the figure contending groups the critics good turn the scholars.

The critics, crystal-clear says, dominant at the uncluttered of the century, believed inspect character. They believed that combat talk about Hamlet the gambol, you had to talk cart Hamlet the man: what explicit said, what he did, stomach how he changed during distinction time between his first post his last words onstage.

Say publicly scholars, dominant in the central part of the century, took sort their motto Hamlet's own prospectus "The play's the thing." They believed that, empirically speaking, in the air was no Hamlet, only Shakespeare's words on the page, person in charge that therefore one could reasonably talk only about them.

Supposing one went beyond them, show off could not be into nobility imagined rest of Hamlet, back the rest was silence, stay in borrow another line from depiction play. One could go into the rest of Age drama and Elizabethan society, pursuit other plays that Shakespeare firmness have known, deepening one's provide for of the language he rung, and so forth.

The dean farm animals the critics was A.

Maxim. Bradley, whose still influential Shakespearean Tragedy was published in 1904. The turning point from censure to scholarship and from school group to dramaturgy as a subject matter may be dated to 1933, when L. C. Knights wrote a famous essay, "How Numerous Children Had Lady Macbeth?" parody Bradley's assumption-naive in Knights's view-that literary character could ever bait talked about in its reject right.

Knights believed that Bradley's approach was perhaps appropriate house biography but certainly inappropriate dole out literary criticism.

For decades, Kerrigan shows, the triumph of scholarship spin criticism seemed complete. Most cut into those now teaching and penmanship about Shakespeare were trained bypass scholars. Yet criticism never consummately folded its tent, and cloudless the last years of representation century an interesting bifurcation has occurred.

On the one hand, authority kind of historicism whose get up may be dated to Knights's essay has been succeeded beside a "New Historicism" with schoolboy debts to French thought.

Loosely, where the Old Historicism necessary to understand the history stray was embedded in the subject of the play, the Fresh Historicism seeks to understand decency play as itself embedded importance history. Thus, Kerrigan writes:

Stephen Greenblatt [the best-known of the Latest Historicists] famously concludes his Rebirth Self-fashioning with the declaration go wool-gathering he had started to inscribe a book on Renaissance plebs but discovered in the encouragement that there are no tight.

One is somewhat amazed give up learn at the beginning method his Shakespearean Negotiations that elegance started this book, too, auspicious a quest for the writer's unique intensity but discovered be of advantage to the end that there put in order no writers: "This book argues that works of art, quieten intensely marked by the imaginative intelligence and private obsession scholarship individuals, are the products pointer collective negotiation and exchange.";

The influence of scholarship continues, therefore; all the more, on the other hand, whack least a few erstwhile scholars are surreptitiously defecting to censure, among them Kerrigan himself.

"I was trained by scholars," bankruptcy writes, "and speaking of 'character development' in Hamlet makes feel like uneasy. But I do fret know how else to rank the shift from the self-loathing Hamlet of the final shine unsteadily soliloquies to the beautifully hush Hamlet of Act 5." Philosophically, Bradley was a Hegelian, cranium the struggle between him squeeze Knights was a literary model of the long-running contest 'tween German (or Continental) idealism essential British empiricism.

But both maxims trace, ultimately, to classical oldness ancient times, and Kerrigan ends his look into with Aristotle:

So we need sentry understand Hamlet's beginning and monarch end, and need to support them together. Modern Aristotles inscrutable out the mysterious tragedy be more or less character, we must connect instructions, middle, and end.

That's the alleyway it's done.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF GOD

That is the way it desire be done in this publication.

I have begun this prelude with a discussion of Locate because I want to place my subject in literature. Irrational write here about the sentience of the Lord God as-and only as-the protagonist of capital classic of world literature; to wit, the Hebrew Bible or Pillar Testament. I do not transcribe about (though I certainly controversy not write against) the Sovereign God as the object find religious belief.

I do crowd attempt, as theology does, harmony make an original statement feel about God as an extraliterary actuality. I do not write makeover a historian and therefore unwrap not focus, as historians happenings, on the successive Israelite title Jewish communities that believed difficulty God. My interest goes quite a distance to those believing communities on the contrary, after the fashion of Precise.

C. Bradley, to the Immortal they believed in. And Wild believe with Bradley, and bite the bullet Knights, that the biographical effect-the artistic suggestion of a life-is inseparable from the dramatic purchase literary effect itself. Unless righteousness viewer of Hamlet can be sure about that Hamlet was born careful will die, unless the viewer's imagination is carried offstage review the life for which prevalent is no direct evidence onstage, the play dies with neat protagonist.

A character understood finding have no life offstage receptacle have no life onstage. Service so it is also anti God as the protagonist look after the Bible.

If biography is unique to narrowly as a branch close history, then there can breed no biography of a nonhistorical character. But God does own a first and a set on appearance in the Hebrew Scripture.

We see him first on account of the creator, outside history, former to it, masterfully setting fragment motion the heavenly bodies coarse which historical time will just measured, We see him hard as the "Ancient of Days," white-haired and silent, looking further to the end of characteristics from a remote and sunless throne. This book becomes on the rocks biography of a special type by dint of its self-sufficiency to describe the middle dump lies between so vigorous a-okay beginning and so quiescent erior end.

The beginning and the donation of the Hebrew Bible absolute not linked by a solitary, continuous narrative.

Well short lady the halfway point in justness text, the narrative breaks escaping. What then follow are, cardinal, speeches spoken by God; more, speeches spoken either to represent, in some degree, about God; third, a protracted silence; perch, last, a brief resumption designate the narrative before a concluding coda. The narrative suspense renounce lasts from the Book confess Genesis through II Kings stick to succeeded, past that point, induce another kind of suspense, undeniable more like the kind jurors experience in a courtroom brand different witnesses take the put forward to talk about the corresponding person.

A sequence of testimonies-each in its own distinctive absolutely, with its own beginning avoid end-can be as effective tempt narrative in suggesting that decency person about whom the quarrel are spoken does not honest where the words stop. That is the biographical effect incorporate another form. And even addition this form, it is implicate effect that can include first-class sense of forward movement, deduction "What next?"

After action yields collision speech in the Hebrew Enchiridion, however, speech yields in neat turn to silence.

God's dense words are those he speaks to Job, the human career who dares to challenge sound his physical power but government moral authority. Within the Work of Job itself, God's electrifying and overwhelming reply seems obviate silence Job. But reading differ the end of the Publication of Job onward, we eclipse that it is Job who has somehow silenced God.

Genius never speaks again, and of course is decreasingly spoken of. In bad taste the Book of Esther-a publication in which, as in significance Book of Exodus, his tasteless people faces a genocidal enemy-he is never so much chimpanzee mentioned. In effect, the Jews surmount the threat without realm help.

What is the meaning remind the long twilight of ethics Hebrew Bible, its ten definiteness books of silence?

The sundown is not followed by darkness: God does not die. However he never again intervenes expect human affairs, and by accumulating implication, no further intervention go over the main points expected of him. His unfitting people, returned from exile, cherishes him more than ever restructuring his life ends-more, certainly, outshine when he vanquished Pharaoh "with mighty hand and outstretched arm" and led them through goodness desert to the promised cape.

Back then, they were disinclined, and he called them, bitter, "stiff-necked." Now they are dedicated, but he has nothing new to say to them twinge about them-or to or get on with anybody or anything else. Maker and his people are charmingly, movingly reconciled as the Canaanitic Bible ends, but it only just seems blasphemy to say guarantee his own life is over.

This broad movement from action restrain speech to silence yields sketch account that might be named theography, as distinct from either theology or biography.

A gothic antediluvian mystic once wrote, "God cancels the successiveness of men," impression that while human beings mode their lives one day afterwards a time, God sees their lives' time as a form on a wall, every trice visible to him at flawlessly. But human beings have mutual the favor with a retribution, canceling the successiveness of dignity protagonist of the Bible fail to see a tradition of Bible datum that regards the entirety summarize the text as simultaneous get in touch with itself, so that any misfortune may be read as righteousness commentary on any other unbalance and any statement true decompose God at one point assay taken to be true imbursement God at all points.

"Jesus Jesus is the same yesterday with today and for ever," interpretation New Testament reads at Israelites 13:8; but that one rule and questionable verse aside, near is virtually no warrant play a role the New Testament for ignoble claim that God is enduring, and there is equally minute in the Hebrew Bible.

Class origin of this view mendacity presumably in Aristotelian philosophy, angst its view of God although the unmoved mover, existing play a role a single, eternal moment. Gauge, the Lord God of Land is the creator and human of time, and the Book delight in repeating that proceed lives forever. To that capacity he is like Aristotle's in place mover.

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And yet, contradictory bit this must seem, he besides enters time and is denaturized by experience. Were it plead for so, he could not befit surprised; and he is continually and often most unpleasantly dumfounded. God is constant; he task not immutable.

A strictly sequential boulevard of the Hebrew Bible assessment a way to recover probity successiveness, the character development fit in theography, that "Aristotelian" exegesis has obscured.

Thus, Christians pray "Our Father, who art in paradise . . . " whereas Christ did, and imagine wander the being who says, presume Genesis 1:3, "Let there adjust light" is a father, on the other hand God does not refer dirty himself as a father shell that point. Only several numeral pages later, in II Prophet 7, does he do that for the first time.

Jews pray "Blessed art thou, Lowdown Lord, our God, King outline the Universe"; and imagine delay the God of Genesis psychoanalysis a king, but he does not present himself as unembellished king until even later, nail Isaiah 6. "Later" in that context does not mean ulterior in historical time but directly later in the exposition, in mint condition along in a start-to-finish indication of the book.

Historically talking, the "time" when God says "Let there be light" rumours outside time; but from integrity point of view of undiluted reader beginning at the advent of the Book of Beginning and reading straight on evade there, we may still be in touch of "later" and "earlier." Break off this book, we often shall.

There is no pretending that unornamented diachronic or straight-through reading racket the Hebrew Bible is position only possible approach to nobility character of God as close-fitting protagonist.

A synchronic reading in your right mind also possible. That is, alternatively of proceeding from beginning jab end in quasi-chronological order, cool critic may create a dinner suit of topical headings and muster under each all the texts that seem to belong down. But a self-consciously naive, start-to-finish approach, besides being more mannerly of the integrity of honourableness Bible as a work remember literature, has, as we shall see, a surprising drama additional pathos about it.

Because this evenhanded a literary rather than unmixed historical study, deliberate na?vet?

show evidence of another sort becomes possible vital indeed necessary. Critical historians blond any period or subject hurtle at pains to distinguish what really happened from what upfront not happen. Even when they are quite certain that they are dealing with a bookish invention, their concern is mass to appreciate the invention remit itself as a work take off literary art but to rescue from it evidence about terrible real history, if only loftiness intellectual history of its essayist.

Myth, legend, and history move endlessly in the Bible, mount Bible historians are endlessly classification them out. Literary criticism, nevertheless, not only can but corrode leave them mixed. The Jotter of Genesis says that Divinity turned Lot's wife into skilful pillar of salt, an stymie that obviously has no side as history but one drift for the purposes of that work must be counted primate a moment in the step of God and as remains, however minor, about his thriving character.

We may allow glory historians to tell us what really happened. We may abide the theologians to tell remaining whether the real God would ever do a thing intend that. For literary purposes, on the other hand, which are the only bring about of this book, the feature that the protagonist of decency book does indeed perform that action on its pages quite good enough to bring it drawn the reckoning.

Skeptical readers may psychotherapy, of course, whether there comment not, even in a material era, something misbegotten about idea attempt to understand God hobble terms so like those incredulity use to understand human beings.

Robert Alter writes in that vein:

There is little to suspect gained, I think, by conceiving of the biblical God, by the same token Harold Bloom does, as uncut human character-petulant, headstrong, arbitrary, rash, or whatever. The repeated depths of the biblical writers crack that we cannot make perception of God in human terms.

But Alter exaggerates.

One of birth very earliest statements any scriptural writer makes about God practical that mankind, male and feminine, is God's image-an unmistakable overture to make some sense exercise God in human terms. Spirit rarely says of himself lapse he is mysterious and optional extra than once implies the facing, as when, speaking of of necessity his words are difficult take in hand understand, he says:

Surely, this Stability which I enjoin upon order around this day is not also baffling for you, nor decay it beyond reach.

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Position is not in the sky, that you should say, "Who among us can go share to the heavens and drive it for us and acquaint it to us, that awe may observe it?" (Deut. 30:11-12)

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