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Title	:	God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)
Author	:	Jack Miles
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 464 pages
Published	:	March 19th 1996 by Vintage (first published 1995)
Categories	:	Religion. Nonfiction. Biography. History. Theology

God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)

Jack Miles

Paperback | Pages: 464 pages

Rating: 3.92 | 2260 Users | 180 Reviews

Interpretation As Books God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)

Miles shows us God in the guise of a great literary character, the hero of the Old Testament. In a close, careful, and inspired reading of that testament - book by book, verse by verse - God is seen from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. The God whom Miles reveals to us is a warrior whose greatest battle is with himself. We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind. As we watch him change amazingly, we are drawn into the epic drama of his search for self-knowledge, the search that prompted him to create mankind as his mirror. In that mirror he seeks to examine his own reflection, but he also finds there a rival. We then witness God's own perilous passage from power to wisdom. For generations our culture's approach to the Bible has been more a reverential act than a pursuit of knowledge about the Bible's protagonist; and so, through the centuries the complexity of God's being and "life" has been diluted in our consciousness. In this book we find - in precisely chiseled relief - the infinitely complex God who made infinitely complex man in his image. Here, we come closer to the essence of that literary masterpiece that has shaped our culture no less than our religious life. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles addresses his great subject with imagination, insight, learning, daring, and dazzling originality, giving us at the same time an illumination of the Old Testament as a work of consummate art and a journey to the secret heart of God.

Present Books Concering God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)

Original Title:	God: A Biography
ISBN:	0679743685 (ISBN13: 9780679743682)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	God in Three Classic Scriptures
Literary Awards:	Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (1996)

Rating About Books God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)

Ratings: 3.92 From 2260 Users | 180 Reviews

Crit About Books God: A Biography (God in Three Classic Scriptures)

Overall I found this book very interesting. The premise is to read the Hebrew testament, focusing on God as the character in a piece of literature. It was an interesting point of view, and also provided some insights into how the Jewish community arranges these books of the Bible. There were also some historical insights to put the Hebrew testament into context, and also provided, for me, an additional fresh perspective for reading the Old Testament in the Bible. There definitely some moments

As far as biographies of God go you're stuck mainly with the Biblical 'true believer' sort or the Christopher Hitchens, it's all bullshit approach.Jack Miles' attitude is refreshing and enlightening and moves in territory neither the 'new Athiests' and fundamentalists would even think about. Miles deals with the Jewish diety Yahweh as the main protagonist of the book called the Holy Bible. It's a brilliant approach and lets the Almighty 'talk' for himself. His words are the ones in the Bible.

I've owned this book for years, but only just gathered the courage to dive in. I guess the Pulitzer should have tipped me off to the quality of the author, but it's been a very pleasant surprise.What I like most is that Miles introduces God as history's most compelling novel character, whose personality shifts and changes in each new chapter. For example, we see both wrathful God and whiny God. Miles argues that insight from reading about God from this perspective casts light on the central

There are different ways of approaching the Bible and the picture of God it portrays. One is to see it as full and perfect revelation... ie the overall picture of God is perfect and complete all the way through (leaving it incumbent on believers to reconcile the apparent disparities). Another is to see it as progressive - the work of humans seeking to understand the nature of God, sometimes misreading situations and implications but nonetheless slowly arriving at a clearer picture of the

Here we have an unique perspective of someone who doesn't appear to be a man of faith, within the book Miles considers God purely as a literary character that evolves in the unfolding of the canon as ordered in the Tanakh. If Miles is even close to correct in his reading of the Hebrew bible, the God that Jews and Christians worship has very little in common with the extremely ambiguous, amoral and multi-personalitied deity that he thinks the ancient writers conveyed. Towards the end of the book,

So, this is a long book, and deep reading. The author proceeds through every book in the Jewish bible (the Tanach). It has a lot more books in it than the Christian Old Testament, and does not include the New Testament.What I found fascinating is that he basically rips up "God". The author lays out arguments that God is not omnipotent, not all powerful, not all loving, and is in fact a confusing mess of different personalities. And then ends the book saying how terrific the Tanach is.I came to a

I was excited about the idea that this was going to be a book analyzing the God of the Old Testament/Hebrew Tanakh as a literary character, which is exactly what the author, Jack Miles, promised he was going to give me. It didn't turn out that way, however, and even though I enjoyed learning a lot about the Old Testament, its historical context, its major figures, and the many deities who were amalgamated over time to become God, I can't help being very disappointed that Miles never really