Volume 42, Number 19 · November 30, 1995
A God's Life
By John Barton
God: A Biography
by Jack Miles
Knopf, 446 pp., $27.50
It is usually assumed that the God of whom the Bible speaks is unchanging; indeed, the Bible itself says so. 'I the LORD do not change' (Malachi 3:6). The idea that God has a biography, and that this biography can be extracted from the Bible, is therefore paradoxical. But Jack Miles demonstrates in his new book that the paradox is only an apparent contradiction, that the picture of God in the Hebrew Bible changes and develops, and that it is the dogma of divine immutability that must go once we start to read the Bible with close attention.
Review, 3540 words
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