The Work
God: A Biography was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1996. It is approximately 450 pages and reads the Hebrew Bible (in the order of the Hebrew canon, Tanakh, rather than the Christian arrangement) as the biography of its protagonist - God - tracking how God's character, motivations, and behavior develop from Genesis to Chronicles. Miles is a former Jesuit seminarian with a doctorate from Harvard Divinity School, and the book combines genuine scholarly learning with literary criticism's attention to narrative and character.
The book's governing conceit is deliberately provocative: God is treated as a literary character, subject to the same analytical methods one would apply to any protagonist - tracing character development, noting inconsistencies and surprises, attending to the psychology of motivation. Miles makes no claim about God's existence or theological nature; he brackets the question of reference entirely and reads the text as literature. The result is, paradoxically, one of the most theologically stimulating accounts of the Hebrew Bible produced in the twentieth century.
The sequel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (2001), applies the same method to the New Testament, reading the incarnation as God's response to the problem of divine responsibility for human suffering - a crisis that God: A Biography identifies as the deepest tension in the Hebrew Bible.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 1:1-2:3 (the first creation account) is Miles's starting point for God's character: God who speaks the world into existence, who names, who evaluates ('it was good'), who rests. The first creation account presents a God of creative power and aesthetic satisfaction, a God who takes pleasure in the order he imposes on chaos. Miles notes the contrast between this serene creator and the anxious, jealous, angry God who appears almost immediately in Genesis 2-3, and he treats this contrast as a characterological puzzle to be explored rather than harmonized away.
Exodus 3:14 ('And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you') is the moment of divine self-naming that Miles finds most revealing of God's character: the tautological self-identification ('I am who I am') refuses all external definition while asserting absolute self-sufficiency. Miles reads this as the characterological foundation of God's subsequent behavior - a being who can only be understood on his own terms, who resists every attempt at categorization.
Job 38:4 ('Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding') is the climax of Miles's biography - the moment that he reads as God's most fully realized self-characterization. The divine speech from the whirlwind is not an answer to Job's suffering but a magnificent assertion of divine transcendence that simultaneously acknowledges the force of Job's complaint and refuses to explain it. Miles finds this evasion humanly unacceptable and theologically honest: God cannot justify his behavior by Job's standards because God's standards are different.
Psalm 22:1 ('My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?') is the Psalm that Miles reads as the Hebrew Bible's deepest expression of the God-human relationship at its most honest: the creature abandoned by the Creator who has claimed to care for him. Miles argues that the entire arc of the Hebrew Bible ends with God increasingly silent - speaking through prophets, then only in dreams and visions, then falling silent altogether in the later books - and that this increasing silence is the biblical God's most characteristic mode in history.
Author and Context
Jack Miles was born in 1942 in Chicago, entered the Jesuit order in 1960, and spent nine years in Jesuit formation before leaving. He studied classics and Semitic languages and received his PhD in Near Eastern languages from Harvard. He worked as a book editor at Doubleday and later at the Los Angeles Times and taught literature at various universities. He is a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Miles described the origin of the book in the experience of attending a lecture on the characterization of God in the Hebrew Bible and realizing that no major work of scholarship had approached the question from a purely literary perspective, bracketing theological and historical-critical questions entirely. The gap seemed to him both intellectually significant and practically important for general readers who wanted to understand what kind of character the Bible presents.
His Jesuit formation is visible throughout the book: the careful attention to the text's exact words, the rigorous distinction between what the text says and what interpreters have traditionally said it means, and the frank acknowledgment of the disturbing aspects of the divine character are all characteristic of the best Jesuit textual tradition.
Themes
The book's central argument is that the God of the Hebrew Bible is not a stable, consistent character but a developing one who surprises the reader repeatedly by acting against type. The warrior-God of Exodus who drowns the Egyptian army coexists with the law-giver of Sinai; the creator-God who destroys everything in the Flood coexists with the covenant-maker who promises never to flood again; the God who demands Abraham sacrifice his son is the same God who provides a ram as substitute.
Miles argues that the God of Job is the book's most honest self-presentation: a God who cannot explain his behavior to human standards of justice and who resorts to asserting his transcendence as the only available response. This is, Miles suggests, the Hebrew Bible's deepest theological contribution - not a theodicy but a theophany that makes theodicy unnecessary by making it irrelevant.
Reception
The book was widely praised and won the Pulitzer Prize - unprecedented for a work of biblical literary criticism. Secular readers appreciated its bracket of theological controversy; religious readers appreciated its serious engagement with the biblical text. Some theologians criticized the methodology as reductive; others found it genuinely illuminating.
Legacy
The book established literary biography as a viable method for engaging biblical characters for a general audience. It directly inspired Karen Armstrong's A History of God (1993, actually published slightly before Miles's book but in the same intellectual moment) and influenced subsequent works of popular biblical theology. Miles's approach - taking the Bible seriously as literature while bracketing its theological claims - has become a significant strand in biblical studies and in religion-and-literature courses.