by David Plotz
THE BOOK OF 1 CHRONICLES
Chapters 1–2
The first five books of the Bible are condensed into two chapters of begats. The chief purpose of Chronicles is to glorify and legitimize the kings of Judah, so this elaborate genealogy is clearly intended to link Judah’s monarchs by blood to the patriarchs. The family tree begins with Adam and follows the Chosen through Noah’s son Shem to Abraham to Jacob to the twelve tribes and then down through Judah’s line to King David.
Chapters 3–9
Because I could barely stay awake while I was reading this tedious section, I almost missed an extremely important moment of pop theology. 1 Chronicles 4 mentions a descendant of Judah named Jabez, who audaciously beseeches God: “Bless me, enlarge my territory, stand by me, and make me not suffer pain from misfortune!” God grants his prayer, and in so doing, the Lord lays the groundwork for The Prayer of Jabez, a gazillion-copy best seller in 2000.
Chapters 10–20
First Chronicles grooves into its real subject: the kings of Judah. The remainder of the book retells the story of King David, only minimally tweaked from the version in Samuel and 1 Kings. There are a few interesting new episodes. One is the Bible’s version of a Congressional Medal of Honor citation: the heroic deeds of David’s best soldiers are recounted. My favorite is the guy who killed both a lion and a giant.
Close your eyes, eleven-year-old girls: When David defeats a rival’s 1,000-chariot army, he has all but 100 of the chariot horses hamstrung, a nasty chop to the leg that cripples but does not kill the animal.
Chapter 21
Remember how I puzzled about the end of 2 Samuel, when David angered God by taking a census. David was offered a choice of punishment: either famine, warfare, or plague. David chose plague. After thousands of deaths, he begged God to spare the innocent and punish only him, and God relented. In that discussion, I asked why God would get steamed about a census. That question is answered here, sort of. The chapter begins, “Satan arose against Israel and incited David to number Israel.” So, God was angry about the census because it was actually Satan’s idea!
Chapters 22–29
A bunch of very dreary chapters about the duties of each clan, which are decided by lot. (Shelemiah guards the east gate; Shebuel runs the treasury, etc.) David favors a peculiar rotating bureaucracy. Each month, a new group of 24,000 clerks and parchment-pushers serves the king. There are obviously good political reasons to rotate jobs by tribe—he surely didn’t want to irritate the Gadites by favoring the Reubenites too much—but can you imagine what a mess it was? Suppose you needed to pay the twenty-five-talent ticket you got last month for parking the ox on the wrong side of the street. When you show up at the office, you find that the entire Department of Unmotor Vehicles has turned over, and no one has any idea where the right scroll is.
THE BOOK OF 2 CHRONICLES
Chapters 1–4
Here’s a disturbing episode. In 1 Kings, Solomon built the Temple using 153,600 conscripted laborers. Now Chronicles retells that story but adds a sinister detail. Solomon takes a census of all the foreigners in Israel, and those are the 153,600 people he sets to work building the Temple. How, exactly, is this different from the Egyptians enslaving the Jews to build their cities and temples? In each case, the king separates a minority foreign population and indentures it.
Chapter 5–9
The summary of Solomon’s life and accomplishments in 2 Chronicles omits perhaps the key point made in the book of Kings: that Solomon ultimately betrays the Lord by marrying 700 foreign wives and building shrines to their gods all over Israel. Second Chronicles ignores those pagan wives entirely. That’s a pretty important point to miss, don’t you think? And that’s not the only kingly misbehavior that the books of Chronicles overlook. First Chronicles, for example, recounts the life of David without mentioning the sleazy seduction of Bathsheba. I’m sure these omissions are intentional. The books of Chronicles clearly seem to have been written to glorify particular kings—notably David, Solomon, and various kings of Judah. The books burnish their reputations by leaving out their sins and infidelities.
Chapters 10–35
Unlike 1 and 2 Kings, which alternate between Judah and the northern kingdom, 2 Chronicles concerns itself only with Judah, the mightier and longer-lasting of the two countries. These chapters detail lots of kingly shenanigans, most of which we heard about in 2 Kings, and only a few of which are worth repeating. One is that King Jehoshaphat dispatches a cadre of priests and bureaucrats to teach the Torah to the Judaean people. As far as I can remember, this is the first (and only) systematic educational effort in the Bible.
Wicked King Amaziah of Judah captures 10,000 men of Seir and has them thrown off a cliff, so that they “burst open.” Then King Uzziah, a great builder of war machines (a one-man Northrop Grumman), becomes so arrogant that he thinks he can perform incense ceremonies in the Temple. But only a priest may conduct these sacred rituals, so God afflicts Uzziah with leprosy.
A brief moment of sunshine. Hezekiah restores the Temple and celebrates Passover for the first time in memory. After the holiday, all of Judah goes out and smashes idols. Ah, good times!
And there is a genuine miracle. When Joash renovates the Temple, the project comes in under budget. (This is such a marvel that it has never been repeated since.) Joash spends the savings on gold cutlery.
Chapter 36
The final chapter of the Hebrew Bible. It retells history we have already heard several times—the Babylonian conquest, the destruction of the Temple, the exile. Then, in the final few verses, hope springs again. Persia conquers Babylon. King Cyrus restores the fortunes of the Jews. He says that God has ordered him to restore the Temple. Cyrus invites all of “His people” to return and help rebuild Jerusalem.
So we finish with a rebirth, a new creation story: God’s few Chosen People, their covenant with the Lord restored, will return to the Promised Land to build His kingdom, again. At the start of Genesis, “In the beginning,” God gave us life, land, and His love. And here He is at the end of His book, doing the very same thing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Should You Read the Bible?
That’s it! After thirty-nine books, 929 chapters, more than 600,000 words, and just over a year, I’ve finally finished reading the Bible—or at least the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament is not my Good Book; I’m going to leave it for another Bible amateur.
Should you read the Bible? You probably haven’t read it. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is nearly universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I’ve ever met, have never done more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The obscure parts are virtually unknown. The Catholic church, for example, includes only a small fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well, but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time learning the Talmud and other commentary than the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible thoroughly. That’s why, when I finished my reading, I challenged some evangelical friends to a game of Bible trivia. It ended in a tie: I knew what kind of tree Absalom was caught in (oak); they remembered which king ruled Jerusalem when 185,000 Assyrians died in a plague (Hezekiah).
Maybe ignorance of the Bible doesn’t matter, and maybe it doesn’t make sense for most of us to read the whole thing. After all, there are so many difficult, repellent, confusing, and boring passages. Why not skip them and cherry-pick the best bits? After spending a year with the Good Book, I’ve become a full-on Bible thumper. Everyone should read it—all of it! In fact, the less you believe, the more you should read. Let me explain why, in part by telling how reading the whole Bible has changed me.
When I was reading Judges one day, I came to a complicated digression about a civil war betwee
n two groups of Israelites: the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. According to the story, the Gileadites hold the Jordan River, and whenever anyone comes to cross, the guards ask them to say the password, “shibboleth.” The Ephraimites, for some unexplained reason, can’t pronounce the “sh” in “shibboleth,” and say “sibboleth” instead. When an Ephraimite fails this test, the Gileadites “seize him and slay him.” I’ve read the word “shibboleth” a hundred times, written it a few, and probably even said it myself, but I had never understood it until then. It was a tiny but thrilling moment when my world came alive, when a word that had just been a word suddenly meant something to me.
And something like that happened to me five, ten, or fifty times a day when I was reading the Bible. It was as if I lifted a veil off my culture. You can’t get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us from 3,000 years ago. The Bible is the first source of so much: from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David’s wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice.
Most of these cultural alerts occur on the back roads of the Bible. Just as an exercise, I thought for a few minutes about the cultural markers in Daniel, a late, short, and not hugely important book. What footprints has it left on our world? What bits of culture did I suddenly recognize after reading it? First, there are the “lions’ den” and “the writing on the wall,” two metaphors we can’t live without. The “fiery furnace” that Daniel’s friends are tossed into is the inspiration for the Fiery Furnaces, a band I listen to. The king rolls a stone in front of the lions’ den, sealing in a holy man who won’t stay sealed—fore-shadowing the stone rolled in front of the tomb of Jesus. Daniel inspired the novel and the television show The Book of Daniel. It’s a touchstone for one of my favorite good-bad movies, A Knight’s Tale, in which the villain is always belittling our hero by declaring, “You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting”—exactly what the writing on the wall tells Belshazzar. And in the final days of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama used that same “found wanting” verse to describe John McCain’s economic policies.
While reading the Bible, I often felt as though I was understanding my own world for the very first time. It was humbling. In reading, I learned that I didn’t know the true nature of God’s conflict with Job, which is the ur-text of all subsequent discussions of obedience and faith. I was ignorant of the story of Ruth. I was unaware of the radical theology of Ecclesiastes, the source of so many of our ideas about the good life. I didn’t know who Jezebel was, or why we loathe her, or why she is the painted lady, or even that she was married to Ahab. (This also means I managed to spend most of a college semester studying Moby-Dick without knowing who the original Ahab was.) I was unfamiliar with the second half of Jonah, ignorant of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, unacquainted with the whore of Babylon. I don’t want to sound like a theocratic crank, but I’m actually shocked that students aren’t compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain. How else can they become literate in their own world?
That’s my intellectual defense of reading the Bible. Now, a more personal one. As a lax, non-Hebrew-speaking Jew, I spent thirty-five years roboting through religious rituals. These rituals felt entirely random—incomprehensible prayers honoring inexpicable holidays that wove around the calendar like drunken sailors. None of it meant anything to me. Now it does. Reading the Bible has joined me to Jewish life in a way I never thought possible. I can trace when this started to the minute: It was when I read about Jacob blessing his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, at the end of Genesis. I suddenly realized: Oh, that’s why I’m supposed to lay my hand on my son’s head and bless him in the name of Ephraim and Manasseh. This shock of recognition has been followed by many more—when I came across the words of the Shema, the most important Jewish prayer, in Deuteronomy; when I read about the celebration of Passover in the book of Ezra; when I read in Psalms the lyrics of Christian hymns I love to sing. Reading the Shema in Deuteronomy did not make the existence of God more real to me, but it did make me feel that I belonged. Its words were read and spoken by my grandfather’s grandfather’s great-great-grandfather, and his father, too, and so on back to the Judean desert. And now those words are mine, too. I still don’t believe Ephraim and Manasseh ever existed, but I feel a sense of historical continuity, and a duty to that history.
You surely notice that I’m not saying anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn’t really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I’m brokenhearted about God.
After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or no sin at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.
When I complain to religious friends about how much He dismays me, I usually get one of two responses. Christians say, “Well, yes, but this is all setup for the New Testament.” To them, reading only the Old Testament is like leaving halfway through a movie. I’m missing all the redemption. If I want to find grace, forgiveness, and wonder, I have to read and believe in the story of Jesus Christ, which explains and redeems all. But that doesn’t work for me. I’m a Jew. I don’t, and can’t, believe that Christ died for my sins. And even if he did, I still don’t think that would wash away God’s epic crimes in the Old Testament.
The second response tends to come from Jews, who razz me for missing the chief lesson of the Hebrew Bible: that we can’t hope to understand the ways of God. If He seems cruel or petty, that’s because we can’t fathom His plan for us. But I’m not buying that, either. If God made me, He made me rational and quizzical. He has given me the tools to think about Him. So I must submit Him to rational and moral inquiry. And He fails that examination. Why would anyone want to be ruled by a God who’s so unmerciful, unjust, unforgiving, and unloving?
Unfortunately, this line of reasoning seems to leave me with several unappealing options: (1) believing in no god; (2) believing in the awful, vindictive god of the Bible; or (3) believing in a vague “creator” who is not remotely attached to the events of the Bible, who didn’t really do any of the deeds ascribed to him in the Bible, and who thus can’t be held responsible for them.
I am searching for a way out of this mess, and maybe I have found one. I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the great questions of morality and belief. I’ve been too busy getting the kids off to school and angling for a promotion to spare much thought for the big questions. Reading the Bible woke me up. Faced with its moral challenges, I had no choice but to start scratching my head. Why would God kill the innocent Egyptian children? And why would He delight in killing them? What wrong did we do Him that He should send the Flood? Which of the Ten Commandments do we actually need? I didn’t become a better person by reading the Bible. I’m not tithing or leaving gleanings in the field or serving the halt and lame. But I am thinking.
And maybe that’s my solution. I came to the Bible hoping to be inspired and awed. I have been, sometimes. But mostly I’ve ended up in a yearlong argument with my Boss. This argument has weakened my faith, and turned me against my God. Yet the argument itself represents a kind of belief, because it commits me to engaging with God. I don’t have the luxury that Christians do of writing off all the evil parts of the Old Testament. They’ve got Christ and the New Testament to fall back on. Jews have no such liberty. We have only one book. We’re stuck wi
th it. So what do we do? We argue with it, and try to fix it. I know I’m not the first person to realize that the Hebrew Bible is morally taxing. In some sense, the entire history of Judaism is an effort to grapple with its horror. Consider the passage in Deuteronomy stating that if you have a disobedient son, you can take him to the elders of the town and proclaim,
“This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst.
When I badgered my rabbi about this passage, she gave me a very convenient answer: “There is a lot in the Bible that not only do we not do, but rabbinic tradition says we never did—like stoning our children…. So what is it doing there? It is there for us to question, to study, and discuss.” In other words, you don’t have to believe the Bible, as long as you are willing to debate about it. A major purpose of Jewish commentary, of the Talmud and the Midrash, is to take the repellent stories of the Bible and make moral sense of them. God gave us the book, and then gave us 2,500 years to squabble about it.
What I’ve been doing, I think, is arguing with the Bible as it actually is, not as we want it to be. By reading the whole book, I have given myself a Bible that’s vastly more interesting than the vanilla-pudding version I was fed by Sunday school teachers and the popular culture. The Bible’s gatekeepers have attempted to dupe us into adopting a Bible with a straightforward morality and delightful heroes. The real book is messier, nastier, and infinitely more complex. In other words, it’s much more like life.
The Bible has brought me no closer to God, if God means either belief in a deity acting in the world, or an experience of the transcendent. But perhaps I’m closer to God in the sense that the Bible has put me on high alert. As I read the book, I realized that the Bible’s greatest heroes are not those who are most faithful, but those who are most contentious and doubtful: Moses negotiating with God at the burning bush, Gideon demanding divine proof before going to war, Job questioning God’s own justice, Abraham demanding that God be merciful to the innocent of Sodom. They challenge God for his capriciousness, and demand justice, order, and morality, even when God refuses to provide any of these. Reading the Bible has given me a chance to start an argument with God about the most important questions there are, an argument that can last a lifetime.