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Article: God, A Biography.
- Article from:
- Free Inquiry
- Article date:
- June 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Jack Miles's God is a bold, often amusing biography of the god of the Hebrew Bible, about whom Miles, as it turns out, has nothing good to say. Since God is by convention immutable and outside time, Miles can write his biography only by treating the successive ideas of God suggested by the writers of the Hebrew Bible as if they were stages in a human life.
The incompatible visions of these various writers is evident at the very beginning of Genesis in the two accounts of the creation, coming one right after the other. In the first God says, using the royal "We": "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." In the second, which contains the story of Adam and ...