God: A Biography
by Jack Miles
Summary
Jack Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian with a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard, reads the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and treats God as its central character, the way a critic would treat a protagonist in a novel rather than a theologian would treat a doctrine. The book follows this literary God through the Old Testament in the order the Hebrew canon actually places its books, not the rearranged Christian order most readers know, tracing a personality that changes visibly across the text: a creator and lawgiver in Genesis and Exodus, a warrior who levels cities in Joshua, an increasingly silent and withdrawn presence by the time the narrative reaches Job and the later prophets.
Miles brackets the question of belief entirely, treating the biblical text as a completed literary work whose central character can be read for consistency, contradiction, and development the same way readers examine any long running character across a shelf of books. He gives real attention to God's stranger moments, the argument with Abraham over the fate of Sodom, the wrestling match with Jacob, the whirlwind speech to Job that never actually answers Job's questions, reading each as evidence of a figure whose confidence in his own creation erodes as the story goes on.
Reading the book means following a genuinely unusual critical exercise, serious literary analysis applied to a text most readers approach only devotionally or historically, written in clear prose that assumes curiosity rather than faith. It suits a reader drawn to close reading and character study who wants to see the God of the Hebrew Bible considered on the page exactly as written, contradictions included, rather than smoothed into a single consistent theology.
Historical Context & Significance
God: A Biography won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, an unusual choice for a category built around human lives, over finalists John Loughery's John Sloan: Painter and Rebel and Maynard Solomon's Mozart: A Life.
Miles, who had been book editor of the Los Angeles Times and who received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, went on to extend the same method to two further books, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God and, decades later, God in the Qur'an, turning the original volume into the start of a series reading each tradition's scripture as literature. The book has been translated into sixteen languages and remains most often cited for the audacity of its premise, that a biography could legitimately be written about a character who is also, for many readers, God himself.