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

331 Pages·2009·1.59 MB·English

by  David Plotz

G ood
Book
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,
35
No- Goodnik People Go!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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
109
Left- Handed Assassin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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
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12. Digging the Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
13. The Book of Isaiah: The Jesus Preview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
14. The Book of Jeremiah: The Prophet
201
and the Lustful She- Camel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15. The Book of Ezekiel: God’s Whole- Grain Hippie Prophet. . . 209
16. The Minor Prophets: All Those Books You’ve
219
Never Heard Of, Plus Jonah and the Whale . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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:
269
Bible Books for Rock Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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
I
’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 ser vice 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, fl ipped it
open at random, and started reading the En glish translation.
I had landed at Genesis, Chapter 34. I was immediately engrossed—
and horrifi ed—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
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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 set-
tlement, 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 profi teering, and then justifying it
all with an appeal to their sister’s defi led 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 B ible—more or less. I read
parts of the Torah as a child in Hebrew school, then attended a
Good Book 3
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 w hale, forty days and nights, ten plagues and
commandments, twelve tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under,
Galilee Sea walked on, bush into fi re, 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
telev is ion 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 e lse had I
forgotten or never learned? What else had Rabbi Lippmann neglected
to teach us on Saturday morning? What other juicy bits did the Rever-
end 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 still 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 men-
tioned Dinah to a friend who was born Muslim. He then described to
me how he was circumcised as a t eenager—a s quirm-i nducing 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 Dia-
mant’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 horren-
dous story even worse: now Dinah was asking for it!
I soon realized that I needed to read the Bible—really read the
4 david plotz
B ible—for the fi rst time in my life. I would begin with “In the begin-
ning,” and see how far I got. I decided I would write about it as I went
a long—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 inti-
mately, 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
fi nd contradictions, or to mock impossible events, or to scoff at hy-
pocrisy. 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 com-
ing very late to the game. There are books to tell you why the Bible is
l iterally 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 law-
yer, an athlete, or a teenager.
So what could I possibly do? I had o ne—and only o ne—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 fi nd out what hap-
pens 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 essen-
tial 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
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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 h ouse. So I
will also dip into the King James Version, because it’s a well-
spring of our language and literature, and the foundation of all
subsequent En glish translations. And I will occasionally con-
sult and quote from other modern translations, particularly
the New International Version and the New Revised Standard
Version.