Good Book

by David Plotz

  The chief theme of Psalm 69 is loneliness, which is perhaps the underlying subject of all the psalms. Again and again, the psalms give us an embattled, solitary soul, clinging to love of God even as the rest of his world crumbles around him. In this poem, he has broken with his family. In others, he is beset by enemies or disease. Always, he has no one to talk to except God. I suspect that reading the psalms on assignment, as I am doing, does an injustice to them, because it deprives them of their unique power and value. In fact, people who love the psalms tell me, the poems are best read when you’re feeling alone and seeking consolation from distress—comfort that only God can provide. Reading for obligation misses the point.

  PSALM 84

  One day in God’s presence “is better than a thousand elsewhere.”

  What is it about 1,000 to 1? It’s the magic ratio. Helen’s was the face that launched 1,000 ships. A picture is worth 1,000 words.

  PSALM 89

  This is one of the most subversive chapters in the entire Bible. The usual narrative of the Old Testament is: we break our covenant with God, but He relents and lets us back into His favor. But here the psalmist reverses that story. The poem begins by praising God lavishly, admiring Him for His strength and wisdom, thanking Him for His goodness, and applauding Him for making a permanent covenant with David and David’s descendants. All this sounds good, right?

  Suddenly, the poet turns on Him. He points an accusing finger at God. “You have renounced the covenant.” God has “exalted” Israel’s enemies and shamed the house of David. We didn’t break the deal, God—You did!

  The psalmist reminds God of His younger and better days: “Where is Your steadfast love of old; which by Your faithfulness You swore to David?”

  The last verse of the psalm reads: “Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen and Amen.” Perhaps this is a sincere attempt to soothe the Lord. I don’t know. You could also read it ironically, as a jab in the holy ribs.

  PSALM 90

  I know nice Jewish boys like me aren’t supposed to have favorite hymns, but I attended an Episcopalian high school, and if there’s anything I learned in four years of mandatory chapel, it’s that those Christian composers sure could write a tune. All of which is to say: I’m thrilled to discover that my favorite hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” was inspired by Psalm 90. The lyricist, Isaac Watts, actually improved on the Bible text. This is the King James verse: “For in your sight a thousand years are like yesterday that has past, like a watch of the night.” Watts jazzed it up into this: “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone; short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.” Now imagine it with a pipe organ.

  PSALM 104

  This is a glorious one, a tribute to God as provider and creator. “You make springs gush forth in torrents.” You make the wind. You make the grass for cattle, trees where birds can build their nests, high mountains for the wild goats, and the crags “as a refuge for the rock badgers.” (What’s a rock badger?)

  This psalm, in addition to being a thing of beauty and a joy forever, neatly encapsulates the conflict between creationists and evolutionists. For a creationist such as the psalmist, the orderliness of the world is evidence that God made it. How else would the rock badger survive, if God hadn’t made the crag for it? Where would the stork make a home, if God hadn’t kindly provided the juniper tree? But to a Darwinist, these are post hoc explanations: the crag wasn’t created by God to give the rock badger a home; the rock badger evolved to exploit the opportunity offered by the crag.

  All sides, fortunately, can agree that Psalm 104 is a pretty darn spectacular tribute to nature, whether nature created by God or nature left here by chance.

  Another line worth mentioning: God makes the “wine that cheers the hearts of men.” Take that, my teetotaling friends.

  PSALM 111

  “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That wouldn’t be a popular sentiment today. We’d replace “fear” with “love.” Still, it’s very true to the Bible. So far, God has been much keener on scaring us than hugging us.

  PSALM 114

  This is my mother’s favorite. We include it in our Passover seder every year, and she always likes to read it. When the Israelites left Egypt, the psalm says, “The sea saw them and fled, Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep.” My mother is bewitched by the image of mountains skipping like rams. I am too.

  PSALM 117

  At two verses and only twenty-six words, the shortest chapter in the whole Bible. It’s too dull to quote.

  PSALM 118

  Almost every line in this psalm is familiar. Christian pastors must have some Amway-type arrangement with Psalm 118 whereby they get a bonus each time they quote it. A couple of the greatest hits:

  The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

  This is the day that the Lord has made.

  I don’t think this psalm has as much sway over Jews, perhaps because of its heavy emphasis on rebirth, a more popular theme with Christians than with us.

  PSALM 119

  So it’s the end of the day—a day that the Lord has made—and I can’t wait to shut my Bible and head home for dinner, when all of a sudden I encounter this psalm. It couldn’t make a worse first impression. In Hebrew, it’s an acrostic: the first word in each line of each stanza starts with the same letter. Also, it’s the longest psalm in the book of Psalms and the longest chapter in the Bible. As you can imagine, an endless acrostic is not what I want to be reading at quitting time. But after a few stanzas, I realize that this is one weird psalm. I gradually catch on that it’s a love poem, but not a regular moon-swoon-June verse. It’s a love poem, written to—guess who.

  No, not Him.

  Not him, either.

  Give up?

  It’s a love poem to God’s laws—a sweat-soaked, 9½ Weeks ode to His commandments, decrees, and rules. Imagine Supreme Court Justice David Souter falling head over heels, and you get some idea of this psalm. Here is just a small sampling of the adoring verses:

  I take delight in Your laws.

  Your decrees are my delight, my intimate companions.

  I cling to your decrees.

  I prefer the teaching You proclaimed to thousands of gold and silver pieces.

  O how I love your teaching!

  And in verse 131: “I open my mouth wide, I pant, longing for your commandments.” Now that’s a psalmist you’d don’t want to let too close to your Torah.

  It is, of course, easy to mock this kinky legalism, but let me try to restrain myself. I want to try to appreciate Psalm 119 for what it’s trying to do. Over the weekend I listened to a CD of Leviticus in the car. As I listened to Leviticus 19, perhaps my favorite chapter in the Bible, I got chills. The Levitical laws mandating justice, generosity to the poor, and decency to the blind and deaf are as inspiring as the Bill of Rights. I don’t always keep all the commandments, but I remain astonished that my ancestors wrote down, 3,000 years ago, laws which still guide our behavior today. Those laws—whether dictated by God or merely inspired by faith—are monumental and beautiful. They are our greatest heritage. We should pant for them, longingly.

  PSALM 127

  A poem about the blessing of having sons. “Happy is the man who has a quiver full of them.” Possibly true, but I know a family with five boys, and “happy” is not the first adjective that comes to mind.

  PSALM 133

  The last section of Psalms includes many short, imagistic poems. Their stanzas are bit like modern poetry—a metaphor or two, and not a lot of explanation. This psalm, for examples, anticipates the unification of Israel, saying that reconciliation will be “like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.” What a combination of strangeness and grandeur!

  Can’t you see the oil glistening, the beard shiny and matted with it, and the joyful smile on Aaron’s face as he is anointed a
s God’s priest? The prayer captures God’s blessing, Aaron’s gratitude, and—most of all—the physical sensation of that oil: slick, golden, glorious.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Book of Proverbs

  Chicken Soup for the Hebrew Soul

  In which Solomon writes the first self-help book.

  CHAPTERS 1-3

  According to the opening verses, Solomon wrote Proverbs in order to teach “wisdom” to his people. It’s the world’s first self-help book, and it offers surprisingly sensible advice throughout: practice prudence, never panic, don’t quarrel “without cause,” don’t plot against your neighbor, “do not envy the violent.” Why doesn’t some sly publisher put this between covers, throw a catchy title on it (The Way of the King: The Timeless Wisdom of Solomon), and rake in the bucks? It couldn’t possibly be worse than The 48 Laws of Power.

  Proverbs 1 includes a superb after-school-special moment. Solomon advises kids that if a gang of roughnecks should ask for help in mugging passersby, just say “No!” That’s because such thugs will get their comeuppance. In the most after-school-special moment of all, Solomon says that the would-be muggers have “set an ambush—for their own lives! Such is the end of all who are greedy for gain.” (Can’t you hear the basso narrator, pausing pregnantly before saying, “for their own lives”?)

  CHAPTERS 4-5

  The code of behavior in Proverbs is monkish in its self-denial: wisdom comes from talking little and minding your own business. The word “discipline” appears in chapter after chapter. In a typical passage, Solomon advises: “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Keep straight the path of your feet, and all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left.”

  It’s odd to hear this call for self-restraint coming from our putative author Solomon. He was a king notorious for excess—too many wives, too much gold, too big a house, too much talking. And you could argue that those very excesses—his swerves off the straight and narrow, his flirtations with other gods and other women—were what gave him such an active mind and curious spirit. In other words, his own wisdom came from habits exactly the opposite of those he is teaching. He didn’t look directly forward. He didn’t avoid the adulteress. He denied himself nothing. And yet he grew in wisdom.

  Another example of the Solomonic paradox is this passage about marriage: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. May her breasts satisfy you at all times; may you be intoxicated always by her love.” May you, indeed! But wouldn’t Solomon’s plea for uxorial satisfaction be more convincing from a man who didn’t have 700 wives and 300 mistresses?

  CHAPTER 6

  I must quote the following passage in full, because (1) it’s great advice; and (2) it captures something fundamental about Proberbs:

  There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry to run to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.

  Don’t get too hung up on those numbers—is it six or seven hatreds, Lord? Instead, let’s talk about the first five abominations—haughty eyes, lying tongue, bloody hands, wicked heart, evil feet. Solomon is reminding us that the physical is the moral. Again and again, Proverbs uses images of the body to describe moral behavior. (“Let your eyes look directly forward”; “turn your foot away from evil”; etc.) Our age celebrates the supremacy of the mind and holds that morality is founded in thought and feeling. But I like the model in Proverbs, which recognizes that it is the body that sins, not the vague, incorporeal mind.

  CHAPTER 7

  Solomon watches a sexy young thing seduce a dumb guy walking down the street. Her husband’s away, so she has tarted herself up and decorated her house like a bordello, and she proposes to the stupid buck: “Let us delight ourselves with love.” He follows her home “like an ox to the slaughter.” His sin will “cost him his life.” It’s not clear if the romp will literally get him killed, because the cuckolded husband will murder him, or if he only dies a moral death, losing God’s favor.

  CHAPTERS 10-11

  Solomon starts tossing off snappy one-liners, the proverbs that give the book its name. “A wise child makes a glad father, but a foolish child is a mother’s grief.” (I’m not really sure what that one means, but it sounds good.) A few of my favorites in these chapters: “Love covers all offenses.” “Lying lips conceal hatred.” “Like vinegar to the teeth, and smoke to the eyes, so are the lazy to their employers.” That last one was probably the corporate slogan of the Judean version of FedEx.

  That proverb about vinegar in the teeth is an excellent reminder that the Bible, among its other achievements, is also a pretty good guidebook for ethical behavior in business. Throughout the book, but especially in Leviticus and here in Proverbs, there are instructions on how to do business honestly. For example, the first proverb in Chapter 11 is: “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but an accurate weight is his delight.” Think how important true weights and measures are to any society. We have electronic scales and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Israelites didn’t, so God makes honest scales His business.

  Here’s a doozy of a line: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without good sense.”

  CHAPTER 17

  God is not a big fan of schadenfreude: “Those who are glad at calamity will not go unpunished.”

  Great proverb: “Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Proverbs is not keen on alcohol. Here it says, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler.” And Proverbs 23 teetotals more emphatically, vividly describing the symptoms of both a hangover (“Who has redness of eyes?”) and drunkenness (“Your mind utter[s] perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea.”) Proverbs 23 rails particularly at “those who keep trying mixed wines.” As any bartender will tell you, only a fool mixes his drinks.

  But Proverbs does believe there is one group of people who should drink. After recommending that kings and princes avoid wine because they need their wits about them, the book urges us to ply the poor and miserable with liquor because it will help them “put their troubles out of their mind.” In other words, when a panhandler begs for a buck, you should hope that he uses it to buy rotgut.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Bible enthusiastically endorses corporal punishment: “Do not withhold discipline from your children; if you beat them with a rod, they will not die. If you beat them with the rod, you will save their lives from Sheol.” That’s pretty unequivocal.

  CHAPTER 24

  A lot of Proverbs sounds like something my Irish grandmother would say, if I had an Irish grandmother. “One who gives an honest answer gives a kiss on the lips.”

  CHAPTER 25

  May I pause to pay tribute to the sheer common sense of Proverbs? It speaks up for modesty, humility, generosity, hard work, sympathy, and all the other virtues of moderation. Two gems in this chapter: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, or else, having too much, you will vomit it.” “Visit your neighbor sparingly, lest he have his surfeit of you and loathe you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Proverbs is fascinating on the subject of marriage, alternating wild enthusiasm and Married with Children fury. Proverbs 21, for example, has this negative comment: “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a contentious wife…. It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and fretful wife.” But Proverbs finishes with one of the most wonderful tributes to a wife ever written. The “capable wife”—“she is far more precious than jewels.” The capable wife makes Oprah look like a bum: She gets up in the middle of the night to start her chores. She plants her own vineyard. She buys real estate. She operates a successful textile manufacturing bu
siness. She gives generously to the poor. And she’s delightful company: “She looks to the future cheerfully. Her mouth is full of wisdom, her tongue with kindly teaching.” She’s not beautiful, but so what? “Beauty is illusory”! She loves God; she works hard; she does good. We should all want to marry her—or be her.

  NINETEEN

  The Book of Job

  God’s Bad Bet

  In which Satan wagers God that he can make Job curse the Lord; Satan kills Job’s family, bankrupts him, and afflicts him with horrible skin diseases; Job complains incessantly and berates God for punishing him; Job’s three friends tell him he deserves his suffering; Job insists he doesn’t; God shows up and belittles Job’s complaints, but then restores his fortune and family.

  CHAPTER 1

  It is one of the embarrassments of my life that I’ve never read the book of Job. (Some other embarrassments, for those who are curious: repeatedly referring to Christian Scientists as “Scientologists” in an article for my college newspaper; a short-lived ponytail.) Job is a fundamental text of western civilization, the Bible book that even people who don’t read the Bible have read. Yet I’ve managed to avoid it.

  While not reading Job, I apparently developed a gross misconception about what was in it. Like everyone with a pulse, I knew the basic outlines: God bets Satan—a gentlegod’s bet, no cash at stake—that His most upright servant, Job, will remain faithful even in the face of catastrophe. God and Satan afflict Job, and he endures patiently.

  But I seem to have wildly misunderstood the story in two ways. First, I assumed that the book was the story of Job’s trials, an endless series of unfortunate events, punctuated by satanic (and divine) laughter. In fact, God and Satan wipe out Job by the middle of Chapter 2. The next forty chapters are just argument. Second, because I believe clichés, I thought that Job would be patient (“patient as Job”). In fact, it turns out he’s the opposite of patient. He’s frustrated, enraged, petulant, and agitated about his situation. He can’t believe how badly he has been screwed, and he’s desperate to fix it, right now.