Miles - God: A Biography

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1996

Copyright 1995 by Jack Miles

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Jewish Publication Society: Verses from The TANAKH: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional HebrewText, copyright 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society. Reprinted by permission.

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA: Scripture quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Reprinted by permission.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Miles, Jack.
God : a biography / by Jack Miles. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78913-6
1. GodBiblical teaching. 2. Bible. Old TestamentCriticism,
interpretation, etc. 3. Bible as literature. I. Title.
BS1192.6.M6 1995

231DC20 94-30153

v3.1

An admirable and absorbing achievement. Jack Miles is a learned and original critic.

Frank Kermode, The New Republic

No summary of mine can do justice to the richness of this book.

Paul Johnson, Commentary

A tour de force. With artistic sensitivity Mr. Miles has accomplished what others failed to try. He has made a certain literary sense of the character God.

The New York Times Book Review

Belongs in a fresh tradition of Biblical scholarship it makes rich connections and many witty, astringent comments.

Washington Post Book World

A compelling and powerful personal reading of the central text of Western civilization the sort of book that can change the way one conceives the human experience. It makes one reach high for an adequate language of praise Its author is wise, learned, judicious lucid knowledgeable a man of profound and courageous imagination, a splendid and audacious biographer.

Chaim Potok, Philadelphia Inquirer

Jack Miles is director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate School, near Los Angeles, and contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly. For ten years, ending in 1995. he served as literary editor, then member of the editorial board, at the Los Angeles Times. A former Jesuit, he pursued religious studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard University. A 1989 Regents Lecturer at the University of California and a 1990 Guggenheim Fellow, he has served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, of which he is still a member. Miles freelances for a long list of national publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Commonweal, Tikkun, and others. He lives with his wife and daughter in southern California.

To Jacqueline
and for Kathleen

The spirit comes to guide me in my need,
I write, In the beginning was the Deed.

G OETHE

T hat God created mankind, male and female, in his own image is a matter of faith. That our forebears strove for centuries to perfect themselves in the image of their God is a matter of historical fact. During the long centuries when the God of the Jews and the Christians was the unchallenged ultimate reality of the West, European and, later, American men and women consciously sought to model themselves on him. They believed that by trying they could make themselves into better copies of the divine original, and they bent themselves diligently to the task. Imitano Dei, the imitation of God, was a central category in Jewish piety. The imitation of Christ, God made man, was equally central for Christians.

Many in the West no longer believe in God, but lost belief, like a lost fortune, has effects that linger. A young man raised in wealth may, when he comes of age, give his fortune away and live in poverty. His character, however, will remain that of a man raised in wealth, for he cannot give his history away. In a similar way, centuries of rigorous, godly character-building have created an ideal of human character that stands fast even though, for many, its foundation has been removed. When Westerners encounter a culture with a different ideal, when we find ourselves saying, for example, The Japanese are different, we discover, indirectly, the strangeness and durability of our own ideal, our inherited sense of what a human being should be. In innumerable external ways, Japan and the West have grown alike. Japan eats beef; the West eats sushi. Japan wears business suits; kimono has entered the Western vocabulary. Yet a deep difference abides, for Japan was looking into a different religiocultural mirror during the centuries when the God of the Bible was the mirror of the West. This book about God aims to place the biblical mirror, cleansed and polished, in the readers hands.

For non-Westerners, knowledge of the God whom the West has worshiped opens a uniquely direct path to the core and origin of the Western ideal of character. But for Westerners themselves, a deepened knowledge of this God can serve to render conscious and sophisticated what is otherwise typically unconscious and naive. We are all, in a way, immigrants from the past. And just as an immigrant returning after many years to the land of his birth may see his own face in the faces of strangers, so the modern, Western, secular reader may feel a tremor of self-recognition in the presence of the ancient protagonist of the Bible.