A Review of
God: A Biography

by
Jack Miles

Mr. Miles is a Jesuit currently teaching at the University of California. He earned his doctorate at Harvard after a preliminary education at Hebrew University in Israel and at the Vatican.
In this book, Mr. Miles explores the personality of God by making the assumption that God is, in fact or for the purposes of this study similar to a person, but of unlimited power. He anthropomorphizes Him, in a word. This is nothing new, The Bible does the same, to some extent, and the tendency for the religiously naive has been to do this from the beginning. But, not just like Mr. Miles.
Mr. Miles treats The Bible as if it were a play. He compares what he is doing to considering whether Hamlet has an offstage personality and just what sort of psychology would be expected in such a personality. He imagines that God has done just what he is represented to have done in The Bible, but he goes on to consider what it would be like, from God's point of view, naively creating humans as a means to self knowledge for Himself and the mistakes and false steps He has made, if such they were, in the process.
For example. His analysis of the Garden of Eden episode leads him to conclude that God intended to give the right of procreation, without strings, to mankind, and that, as time went by discovered that such power was too much for mankind and could only be shared by humans with God. That, in fact, that is the meaning of circumcision. To give back to God, some of the power and responsibility for procreation.
He divides The Bible into three phases for God. In the first section God is a proactive force, frequently involving himself in human affairs, at least among chosen individuals among His chosen people. In the second phase, God describes Himself and is described by others, but He restrains Himself from action, and finally, He becomes a static entity, neither acting nor communicating further with his people.
In Mr. Mile's view it is also proper to see God's transformation in his active years from creator in Genesis, to warrior in the conflict with the Egyptians, to lawgiver at the point of handing down The Ten Commandments.
In my own view, as a deist, and much in agreement with the founders of this country, it is irrational to conceive of a God of this vast and various universe in such human terms. It is much more likely, I would think, to expect a rather incomprehensible God, than such as this. Rather, I would think it more rational to conceive of God as the ordering principle and the Jewish God as a projection of the Jews, trying to make sense of the workings of their world. As The Rolling Stones point out in Sympathy for the Devil, it is the nature of his game that puzzles us.
It is apparent that in all cases that can be analyzed, causality is king. But, there are a great many cases that are beyond analysis and it is just here where we are tempted to look for some other principle. But, it could still be causal here too, only very complicated. Of a complexity that is beyond our ken, at this moment.
As is pointed out elsewhere, this (the time of Abraham) is a particularly crucial time in the history of humans. The entirety of the world has been populated with humans at this point, but thinly, due to the reliance on natural food production. There is nowhere to go, for those that find themselves in a state of conflict with their neighbors, so that a new system is required, ownership of land, and farming, the new method of developing sufficient means to allow further population growth. For more details on this scenario, read this.
We can take it that Abraham has lost in his contest with the Canaanites for control of the land and has been ejected to continue the no longer viable nomadic life style. Pondering his predicament and what it means for his clan, it becomes clear to him that to prevail, he has to outbreed the Canaanites, and so sets about devising a scheme that will have the effect of maximizing survival rates among his people. The plan will be, once sufficient numbers have been achieved, to reenter Canaan and seek revenge, along with control of the land. As might have been predicted, the Palestinians don't take this lying down, when it comes about, but plot their own revenge and the play is still in progress, 5000 years later, with no apparent final victory in sight.
The exact problem Abraham faces then, is to gain ascendancy over procreation within the clan, an area generally under the control of wives and mid wives until now. To do this he devises the cult of the masculine God of order, who lays down the law regarding sexual contact and procreation. He devises laws that have the effect of minimizing disease emanating from sexual contact and also a ritual, circumcision, that makes it clear that control over sexuality is the domain of God. He makes it clear that God's plan for the tribe is to make it more numerous than the surrounding peoples (as when God is made to say that He will make the descendants of Abraham as the sands of the sea), ostensibly due to favoritism in God's view of the people of Abraham. He devises detailed rules regarding food to develop a sense of community and to minimize the inroads of disease emanating from improper food handling.
He does not restrict fighting with neighboring tribes, no doubt due to an appreciation for the strengthening effects of conflict, and instead turns his attention to means of providing advantage to his tribe through religious identification and the general recognition that God is on their side.
What is really going on then, in The Bible, is the recounting of the development of an idea, that of an omnipotent father, and how that father relates to his extended family. This is a new idea in human affairs. Up until now, the mother was the constant in life and fathers, due to their frequent absences, a much less significant figure in the life of the family. The deities are either feminine or subject to the feminine goddesses: Isis, Sin, and Gaia, for example. The development of this idea is, of course, acted out in the lives of actual families and the result, eventually, is the well known autocratic source of the family law, against which feminism is currently rebelling.