Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible Read online

  THE BIZARRE, HILARIOUS, DISTURBING, MARVELOUS, AND INSPIRING THINGS I LEARNED WHEN I READ EVERY SINGLE WORD OF THE BIBLE

  David Plotz

  For my parents, the best argument in the world for the Fifth Commandment

  Contents

  Introduction: In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

  1. The Book of Genesis: God’s First Try. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

  2. The Book of Exodus: Let My Complaining, Whining, No-Goodnik People Go!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

  3. The Book of Leviticus: Lovers and Lepers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

  4. The Book of Numbers: The Source of All Jewish Comedy . . . . 69

  5. The Book of Deuteronomy: The Bible’s Fifth Beatle . . . . . . . . . 85

  6. The Book of Joshua: Why So Many Bible Hookers? . . . . . . . . . 99

  7. The Book of Judges: The Meathead and the Left-Handed Assassin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

  8. The Book of 1 Samuel: The Bible’s Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . . . 123

  9. The Book of 2 Samuel: God’s Favorite King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

  10. The Book of 1 Kings: Kings of Pain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

  11. The Book of 2 Kings: The End of Israel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 12. Digging the Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

  13. The Book of Isaiah: The Jesus Preview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

  14. The Book of Jeremiah: The Prophet and the Lustful She-Camel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

  15. The Book of Ezekiel: God’s Whole-Grain Hippie Prophet . . . 209

  16. The Minor Prophets: All Those Books You’ve Never Heard Of, Plus Jonah and the Whale . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

  17. The Book of Psalms: 150 Short Poems about God . . . . . . . . . 229

  18. The Book of Proverbs: Chicken Soup for the Hebrew Soul . . 241

  19. The Book of Job: God’s Bad Bet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

  20. The Song of Songs: Hot and Holy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

  21. The Book of Ruth: My Favorite Bible Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

  22. The Books of Lamentations and Ecclesiastes: Bible Books for Rock Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

  23. The Book of Esther: The First Miss Universe Pageant . . . . . 275

  24. The Book of Daniel: Nice Pussycat! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

  25. The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah: Coming Home. . . . . . . . . 289

  26. The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles: Return of the Kings . . . . . 295

  27. Should You Read the Bible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

  Appendix: Useful (and Not So Useful) Bible Lists. . . . . . . . . . . . 307

  Ac know ledg ments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher

  Introduction

  In the Beginning

  ’ve always been a proud Jew, but never a very observant one. I believe in God, but only in a please-please- desperation- prayer kind of way. I say the Lord’s name only to take it in vain. I don’t have any other gods before Him, but mostly because I haven’t looked for any. I rarely remember the Sabbath day, and never keep it holy. I go to the synagogue about as often—and with about as much pleasure—as I go to the DMV.

  But not long ago, I made one of those rare visits to the synagogue for my cousin Alina’s bat mitzvah. As usual, I found myself confused (and bored) by a Hebrew service I couldn’t understand. During the second hour of a ceremony that would last as long as an NFL game plus overtime, I picked up a Torah from a rack on the pew, flipped it open at random, and started reading the English translation.

  I had landed at Genesis, Chapter 34. I was immediately engrossed— and horrified—by a story I didn’t know. It begins with a young man named Shechem raping Dinah, who’s the daughter of the patriarch Jacob. (Someone is in the kitchen with Dinah.) After the rape, Shechem realizes he actually loves Dinah, speaks to her “tenderly,” and decides he must marry her. He and his father, an idol-worshipping chieftain named Hamor, pay a conciliatory visit to Jacob and his sons, Dinah’s brothers. Hamor pleads: My son loves Dinah and yearns to marry her. Hamor and Shechem offer to share their land with Jacob’s family, marry off the women of their clan to Jacob’s sons, and pay any bride price if only Dinah will be Shechem’s wife. (I should note that Shechem and Hamor aren’t suckers: they’re also eager for the marriage so that they can get their hands on Jacob’s land.)

  Jacob’s sons pretend to agree to their proposal, but insist on one condition: Shechem, Hamor, and all the men of their town must be circumcised before the marriage. Shechem and Hamor accept this. They and their fellow townsmen get circumcised. And here the story turns macabre. Three days after the townsmen’s circumcision, “when they [are] in pain,” Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi descend on the settlement, spears drawn, and murder all the incapacitated men. Then Jacob’s other sons plunder the town, seize the livestock and property, and take the women and children as slaves. Jacob, who hasn’t said a word up to this point in the chapter, complains to Simeon and Levi that, because of the massacre, neighboring tribes won’t trust him anymore. “But they answered, ‘Should our sister be treated like a whore?’ ”

  Needless to say, this isn’t a story they taught me at Temple Sinai’s Hebrew school in 1980. The Garden of Eden, David and Goliath, Noah’s ark, sure. But the founding fathers of Israel lying, breaching a contract, encouraging pagans to convert to Judaism only in order to cripple them for slaughter, massacring defenseless innocents, enslaving women and children, pillaging and profiteering, and then justifying it all with an appeal to their sister’s defiled honor? Not on the syllabus. And the tale of Dinah isn’t hiding way in the back of the Bible, deep in Obadiah or Nehemiah or one of the other minor-league books no one ever reads. It is smack in the middle of Genesis, the one book of the Bible even ignoramuses think they know.

  Like many lax but well-educated Jews (and Christians), I had long assumed I knew what was in the Bible—more or less. I read parts of the Torah as a child in Hebrew school, then attended a rigorous Episcopalian high school in Washington, D.C., where I had to study the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck in my mind—Adam and Eve, Cain versus Abel, Jacob versus Esau, Jonah versus whale, forty days and nights, ten plagues and commandments, twelve tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee Sea walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, I absorbed other bits of the Bible elsewhere— from stories I heard in churches and synagogues, from movies and television shows, from tidbits my parents and teachers told me. All this left me with a general sense that I knew the Good Book well enough, and that it was a font of crackling stories, Jewish heroes, and moral lessons.

  But the tale of Dinah unsettled me, to say the least. If this story was strutting cheerfully through the heart of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned? What else had Rabbi Lippmann neglected to teach us on Saturday morning? What other juicy bits did the Reverend Mr. Bowen leave out of Bible class? When I got home from Alina’s bat mitzvah, I complained to my wife, Hanna, “How can I be thirty-fi ve years old and sti
ll so uneducated?” I found myself obsessed with the story of Dinah. At a party, I was introduced to a woman named Dinah and spent an awkward half hour enlightening her about the source of her name. I met an Orthodox Jew named Dinah who told me about her lifelong quest to make sense of her namesake’s story. I mentioned Dinah to a friend who was born Muslim. He then described to me how he was circumcised as a teenager—a squirm-inducing story that brought home the agony suffered by Shechem and his townsmen. I learned about various interpretations of the story, how some commentators—whose views have been dramatized in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent—think Dinah went with Shechem willingly. By contrast, an evangelical Christian friend told me that when she was a girl, her parents and pastor taught her Genesis 34 as a cautionary tale about female modesty: Dinah never should have gone out where Shechem could accost her. This version appeared to make a horrendous story even worse: now Dinah was asking for it!

  I soon realized that I needed to read the Bible—really read the Bible—for the first time in my life. I would begin with “In the beginning,” and see how far I got. I decided I would write about it as I went along—not learned exegesis or spiritual essays, just my immediate responses. That is the origin of Good Book.

  For the millions of Jews and Christians who know the Bible intimately, this project may sound presumptuous or even absurd: why should a numbskull beginner interpret the Bible stories that you know by heart? I didn’t intend any kind of insult. My goal was not to find contradictions, or to mock impossible events, or to scoff at hypocrisy. I was reading out of genuine curiosity and fascination. I needed to understand the book that has shaped my religion and my world.

  I also knew enough to know that Judaism and Christianity aren’t just the Bible. Judaism is built on thousands of years of commentary, interpretation, and law. This library of wisdom was totally unfamiliar to me, and I couldn’t hope to compete with it. I also knew I was coming very late to the game. There are books to tell you why the Bible is literally true, others to advise you how to analyze it as history, and still others to help you read it as literature. There are experts standing by to teach you how to approach the book as a Jew, a Catholic, an evangelical Protestant, an archaeologist, a historian, a feminist, a lawyer, an athlete, or a teenager.

  So what could I possibly do? I had one—and only one—advantage over the experts: the book was fresh to me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to know. My goal was simple. I wanted to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based. I was in the same position as many other lazy but faithful people (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus). I loved Judaism; I loved (most of ) the lessons it had taught me about how to live in the world; and yet I realized I was ignorant about its foundation, its essential document. So what would happen if I approached my Bible empty, unmediated by teachers or rabbis or parents; if I ignored commentary and learned experts; if it was just me and the word(s)? What would delight me? What would horrify me? How would the Bible relate to the religion I practice, and to the lessons I thought I had learned in synagogue and Hebrew school? How would it change me? Would it make me more faithful, or less? I have small children: would it teach me how to teach them about God?

  how to read this book

  Good Book is a chapter-by-chapter tour through the Hebrew Bible. You can read it in various ways. You can start with the chapter on Genesis and go straight through to the end of 2 Chronicles. Or you can dip into it, a little Genesis here, some Job there, and Esther for dessert. You can read Good Book as a Bible study companion, following the text along with me, comparing my take on the book of Judges with your own. Or, if you don’t have the time or inclination to read the Bible, you can just read Good Book instead. It will give you a rapid (and entertaining, if not necessarily theologically sound) biblical education, without your having to suffer through a single “begat.” Good Book is unlike the Bible in one very signifi cant way: you can, without feeling guilty, keep it in the bathroom.

  Note on translation: I can’t read the original Hebrew of the Bible, obviously, so I’m stuck with translations. My wife, charmed by my new biblical obsession, gave me a wonderful Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible for Hanukkah. That’s my number one source. I dishonored my father and mother (and broke another commandment, too) by stealing a copy of the King James Bible from their house. So I will also dip into the King James Version, because it’s a wellspring of our language and literature, and the foundation of all subsequent English translations. And I will occasionally consult and quote from other modern translations, particularly the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version.

  ONE

  The Book of Genesis

  God’s First Try

  In which God creates Earth and pretty much everything else, including Adam and Eve; Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden; Cain kills Abel; God floods the sinful Earth; Noah survives; God chooses Abram, renames him Abraham, and promises him the Holy Land; God incinerates the sin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; Abraham almost sacrifi ces his son Isaac; Isaac’s son Jacob tricks his older twin brother, Esau, out of their father’s blessing; Jacob wrestles an angel, is renamed Israel, and has twelve sons; the older sons sell Joseph into slavery; Joseph becomes prime minister of Egypt, saves his brothers during a famine, and reconciles with them; all the Israelites settle in Egypt and fail to live happily ever after.

  chapter 1

  ou’d think God would know exactly what He’s doing at the Creation. But He doesn’t. He’s a tinkerer. He tries something out: What happens if I move all the water around so there’s room for dry land? He checks it out. Yes, “this was good.” Then He moves on to His next experiment: How about plants? I’ll try plants.

  Creation is haphazard, like any do-it-yourself building project. For example, God tackles the major geological and astronomical features during the fi rst two days—light, sky, water, earth. But day three is a curious interruption—the creation of plants—that is followed by a return to massive universe-shaping efforts on day four with the formation of the sun, moon, and stars. The plant venture is a tangent, like installing the refrigerator before you’ve put a roof on the house.

  Does the Lord love insects best? They’re so nice He makes them twice. On day five, He makes “the living creatures of every kind that creep.” A day later, He makes “all kinds of creeping things of the earth.” “Creeping” is all over Creation, in fact. When God tells His newly made man and woman that they rule over the Earth’s creatures, He specifies that their subjects include “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” What a phrase, perfect for bugs and babies.

  chapter 2

  Two chapters in, and I’m already confused. Chapter 2 gives us an entirely different account of Creation, with different methods and in a different order. In Chapter 1 (first Creation), God makes man and woman at the same time on day six, after he has made everything else. But here in Chapter 2 (second Creation), He forms man, but not woman, before he makes plants and animals. Only later, after the plants and animals arrive, does God create woman, from Adam’s rib. And while man and woman are created equal in the fi rst Creation, here in the second Creation the woman is made explicitly to be man’s “helper.” Which is the real story? I’ll take the first Creation, any day.

  As it happens, just as I’m reading about Creation, my five- year- old daughter has arrived at the age when it becomes necessary for her to ask impossible questions, such as “Where do people come from?” She drops that on me one night at bedtime, and I find myself fl ummoxed. I briefly consider trying to explain the evolution of Homo sapiens and chimpanzees from a common ape ancestor over millions of years but then decide that’s way too complicated to throw at her. So for lack of any better idea, I fl op back to the Genesis story. After all, I figure, it’s had a 3,000-year run. I tell her that long ago, even before Granny was born, God created the world and made people. I feel ashamed of myself as I gaze into her blue eyes and
say this, but I find a way to rationalize it: the Genesis story is simpler and easier for a five-year-old to understand, and I can always tell her the scientifi c version later.

  But I get what I deserve: my skeptical wife, Hanna, overhears us and rebukes me for telling a story I don’t believe. And my daughter, who’s a little rationalist, right down to her pinky toes, doesn’t buy it, either. As kids always do, she intuits that I’m lying. She asks the same question a couple of nights later, a sure sign that she was dissatisfied with my creationist story. This time I give an evolutionary explanation, and she’s very enthusiastic. She asks me a few follow-up questions about apes, then goes happily to sleep. She never again asks me about where people come from.

  Before God creates Eve in Genesis 2, He parades the animals past Adam—cattle, wild beasts, and “all the birds of the sky”—so that Adam can name them all. This episode captures something fundamental about the male brain: our obsessive need to categorize. The bird- watcher, the stamp collector, the guy trying to visit every Starbucks in America— we are all reenacting in a small way Adam’s introduction to the animals.

  chapter 3

  The Lord—not so good at follow-through. In Genesis 2, He is clear as can be: He commands man not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, “for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” No wiggle room there. As soon as you eat of it, you shall die. But when Eve and Adam eat the fruit at the beginning of Genesis 3, do they die? Nope. God merely punishes Eve with “most severe . . . pangs in childbearing” and curses Adam by making the soil barren. Any parent knows you have to follow through on your threats, or your children will take advantage of you. God made a vow He didn’t keep. Instead He delivers a halfhearted punishment that will actually encourage His children to misbehave. Is it any surprise that we sin again? And again? And again, all the way down to the present day? You can call this “original sin,” but maybe it’s just lax parenting.