God's Boswell : A man writes a biography of God. God responds. : GOD: A Biography <i> By Jack Miles (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 464 pp.)</i> : BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from "God: A Biography," see the Opinion section.

By Paul Wilkes

April 9, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Paul Wilkes writes frequently about religion and religious belief. His most recent book, "And They Shall Be My People: An American Rabbi and His Congregation" will be issued in paperback this fall. </i>

DEAR JACK:

The galley proofs of your new book about me arrived a while back, and I’ve finally finished it. What with all the requests, complaints and reports I have to sort through, it’s hard to get any sustained, serious reading done. Know the problem? And yours is a Book of the Month Club selection, no less. Nice going. Still some interest in me down there, obviously. But I noted it was only an “alternate selection”--does that mean they’re interested, but only alternately?

Nonetheless, Jack, I was impressed with the awesome knowledge you possess about Scripture, languages, culture, history. Jesuitic erudition, to be sure. They trained you well. Sorry you’ve since left the order, but those kinds of things happen these days. No hard feelings.

What I liked best was that you stayed the course, Jack. You took the Tanach--the Hebrew Bible--and even when the material wasn’t so exciting, when I wasn’t creating a firmament or parting seas or meting out plagues, when I might have seemed to have exited stage left, you kept going. Haggai, Lamentations, Ezra: all of it. I hope it gets other people reading the Book through, rather than picking and choosing what suits their fancy. I hear there’s even a Bible with all the positive material highlighted in red and the rest left for dross (one of your West Coast fellows at work, espousing “possibility thinking,” Oh, me!). That number was never sent to me for review, be sure of that.

You see, there’s so much misunderstanding getting around about me. If one were a person, it could be quite depressing. Killing bodies in my name, what with jihad , fatwa and various other stripes of religious cleansing. And, just as bad, clouding minds and souls to sell a book or two--books about alleged prophecies, spiritual laws of success and caring for my best work, the immortal soul, with my name hardly mentioned. That’s what seems to make the bestseller lists. Honestly, what passes for religious belief these days. Jack, how can they misunderstand so badly what I was all about?

And now to your assessment. Let’s see: You attempt a “reintegration of the mythic, fictional and historical elements in the Bible so as to allow the character of God to stand forth more clearly from the work of which he is the protagonist.” Fair enough. But, Jack, about the disclaimer that this book “neither precludes nor requires belief in God.” Seems as though you’re backing off a bit here. Let’s go on, but beware the siren calls of that “wider audience” promised by your solicitous editor.

You quite often paint me as quite a dyspeptic, crotchety, asexual, contradictory, vengeful fellow. Let me say what a refreshing change that is from the usual hagiography, which I find a bit cloying. But Jack, really--psychological growth? Character development? Plot line? I never thought this New Biography business would reach, well, this far.

So there I am in Genesis and Exodus, living out my “childhood,” creating you folks and then wondering if I’ve made a huge mistake. Then, I have to be “seduced out of a recurrence of his rage by the scent of Noah’s offering.” Soon, I become “dangerously unpredictable” and evolve into “a man (a man!) of unreflective self-confidence, intrusive-to-aggressive habits, and unpredictable eloquence . . . who discloses nothing about his past and next to nothing about his needs or desires.”

Jack, I’m wondering who you were writing about! Is that the way I come across? My message?

Only later on, apparently, do I discover that there are the poor, and something should be done for them, that I’m a Father as well as a King, that I need an emotional life and that I am “aware of my literal uniqueness and extraordinary power.” What ever happened to the “I Am Who I Am” school of thought?

You say the only way I have of knowing myself is through mankind. And then you go on to criticize me for being tough and then tender, for what you perceive as my life of “action, speech, silence.” Can’t you just think of me as a teacher tapping the blackboard, explaining what the lesson was and then waiting for the students to figure out what I said? (Yes, I know, Bible stories go on a bit, but we’re talking 4,000-plus years, filled with many writers, rewriters and those pagans, Huns and assorted barbarians who didn’t help by destroying the goods--the other side’s been busy, you know.) I’m still waiting. But there’s time. Eternity, really.

What would you have had of me? Some God who speaks in gender-neutral, inclusive, guilt-acknowledging full paragraphs? It didn’t make sense. Mysteriously allegorical, that’s more my way. What better way to bring the soul to faith? I didn’t go through all this to end up with a paint-by-numbers human race.

You said it well, early on: What I brought was ethical monotheism, where “moral value shall have been placed above the other values that human beings properly recognize: power, wealth, pleasure, beauty, knowledge . . . the list is long.” And that’s a messy business, trying to convince people that they shouldn’t pursue those baubles and fleeting glories. Look, from golden calves to the Internet, folks have been seeking cheap grace for a long time. Forever, it seems.

I think there’s a tendency in your day to try to redraw me (and My Boy, too--can’t tell you how many books we get on Him) so people can quantify and be more comfortable with the concept of the divine. It seems they want to build a display case, with good lighting and temperature control so folks can press their noses up to the glass, peer in and say, “I saw God!”

Is it me you people seek to understand? Or what you want to make of me, to suit your own needs today? In your time, at your convenience? Should I really be cast as a warrior whose greatest battle is with himself? Or one who created man as a reflection, eventually to cast him as a rival?

Really, I’m not all that complicated. If you are made in my image, then you know what it’s like to struggle, to make firm decisions and then to find yourself having to go back on them--out of simple love. Do you think it’s different for me? Of course it was a terrific gamble with creation--but otherwise I would have been a cosmic puppeteer, with you folks on strings at my fingertips. Talk about a boring eternity. I still believe in you--but you’ve got to come my way, too.

I know I haven’t made it easy and that the way is often hard to see. Two hundred years of historical Biblical research have clarified and clouded, and you, Jack, boldly walked where others feared to tread, assaying not human reaction, but divine plan. Some say after Job I subsided. You saw me as incorporated into the Jewish nation, no longer needed as a physical presence. Touche, Jack.

This was a monumental book to write. I’m sure it just about did you in at times. But, at the end, there you were, all the fancy writing and turns of phrase aside: “God is the divided original of which we are the divided image. His is the restless breathing we still hear in our sleep.”

I like that, Jack. I like it a lot.

Best wishes until we meet; we’ll talk it all over and I’ll give you the whole story then. As they say, face to face. No hurry Jack; have a good time. I’ll be here.

Until then, sweet dreams.