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

by David Plotz

  chapters 38–39

  . . . God Himself appears—in a whirlwind. He is not happy. The Lord Most High does not appreciate Job’s complaints. His opening line to Job: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man.” Job wants to question God, but that’s not how it’s going to be, the Almighty says. The Lord is going to be the one asking the questions. His first query to Job is a tough one: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.”

  God continues in this swaggering vein for two chapters. It would sound like bragging if He weren’t, you know, God. He lists His creations and asks what Job has done that can compare: “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?” “Have the gates of death been revealed to you? . . . Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.” Can Job move the stars? Is Job the father of the snow? Does Job send rain to make the desert bloom? Does Job “know when the mountain goats give birth”? Will the wild ass serve Job? Is it by Job’s wisdom that the hawk soars and the ea gle commands the mountains? I don’t think so.

  God doesn’t merely humble Job. He savors Job’s humiliation, demolishing Job with sarcastic jabs: “Where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Surely you know.” That “surely you know” is so mean, so petty. God takes too much plea sure in making Job feel like an ignoramous, like a mere speck.

  Vicious, petty, cruel—definitely. But beautiful, too! God’s self- congratulatory speech is one of the most spectacular passages in the Bible, a masterpiece of imagery and forceful language, one killer phrase after another. Indulge me as I quote a favorite bit about the making of the ocean:

  Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—

  when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its

  swaddling band,

  and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors,

  and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

  and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?

  “Thus far shall you come, and no farther”!

  chapters 40–41

  God bullies Job to answer His questions. “Anyone who argues with God must respond.” What do you have to say for yourself now, smart aleck? You started the fight, Job, so let’s hear it! Not so chatty, now,

  are you, little fella? I’m very familiar with how Job must feel at this moment, since God sounds exactly like my wife when she knows she has defeated me in an argument. Much like me, Job stammers, stutters, and caves in. All his courage of Chapters 1–37 vanishes in the teeth of this divine hurricane. He is totally cowed. His grand oath in Chapter 13 to confront God goes out the window. He whispers that he has nothing to say. “I lay my hand on my mouth. . . . I will not answer.”

  That’s not good enough for God, who wants to run up the score on Job. He redoubles His bragging. Can Job tame the Behemoth, the mighty creature with “limbs like bars of iron”? Can Job fish and catch the Leviathan, the giant sea monster with “flaming torches” in its mouth, which “laughs at” javelins and arrows? God seems to think He has won this round because He has reduced Job to a blubbering mess. In the keeping score department, God certainly has triumphed, because Job has given up. But God has won only in the way that the president “wins” when he argues with his assistants, or a principal “wins” when she suspends a student. The powerful can crush the impotent whenever they want. But an inde pendent referee would give the victory to Job, because God’s actual answer is unpersuasive. Job says that he is innocent, that he doesn’t deserve God’s punishment, and that God screwed up. God doesn’t address any of these points. Instead He thunders: I’m the mighty God of creation—how dare you question Me? God’s answer, as a lawyer might say, is “nonresponsive.”

  chapter 42

  But wait—even God apparently recognizes that He’s in the wrong. Here in the final chapter, God rebukes the three friends and acknowledges that Job is “right.” So all the bragging of Chapters 38 through 41 was just posturing, God fl exing His big muscles before quietly admitting He screwed up. God restores Job’s fortune. Job gets twice as many sheep and camels as before, and ten new children—seven sons, and three daughters, who are the most beautiful girls in Uz. (This is perhaps the only time in the Bible when we are told the names of daughters but not sons.)

  I confess that I’m flummoxed by Job. Should we believe Chapters 38 through 41, when God tells us we’re nothing, and that we have no right to question Him? Or should we believe Chapter 42, when God acknowledges that Job was right and settles the lawsuit? The God of Chapters 38–41 is petulant, arrogant, and wrong. The God of Chapter 42 is willing to correct His mistake. Also, the God of Chapter 42 admits that the three friends are fools. By rebuking them, He seems to be conceding that, in fact, the wicked aren’t always punished and the good aren’t always rewarded. But isn’t such a concession impossible for God? If He disavows their arguments, isn’t He saying that He’s impotent—that He doesn’t actually reward the righteous and upbraid the wicked?

  Job is the paramount example of what I would call the Messy Bible, a story that’s far more complicated, ambiguous, and confusing than its popular version. The principal task of priests and rabbis has been cleaning up the Bible, taking complicated stories and bringing order to them. But it is an artificial order, with a much neater morality that we find in the real book: Jacob good, Esau bad; Moses good, Pharaoh bad; God good, good, good. As we’ve seen, the actual text is much sloppier. Some of the heroes are intolerable; some of the villains are admirable, and God himself is often unreasonable. This Messy Bible is truer to our actual world—where the good do evil and the evil do good, where people suffer for no reason—than the idealized Bible is. The Messy Bible is the better Bible. That’s why we should read the Good Book for ourselves, to confront the complexity that the idealized Bible avoids.

  TWENTY

  The Song of Songs

  Hot and Holy

  In which two lovers get hot and heavy, and Solomon drops by for a visit.

  chapter 1

  ike my grandmother’s basement, which is crammed with jelly jars, eighty-three-year-old report cards, and failed perpetual motion machines, the Bible is a magnificent hodgepodge. It contains everything under the sun, from a creation story (or two), to law books, genealogical tables, prophecies, histories, ritual handbooks, self-help manuals, and now—erotica.

  The Song of Songs—also called the “Song of Solomon”—is like nothing else in the Bible, a steamy poem narrated by two lovers. She is foxy, young, and dark. He is strong, sexy, and seductive. (He may even be Solomon, the purported author of the song.) Some biblical scholars, whose libidos we must question, insist that the song is merely an allegory, that the lusty verses are just enthusiastic prayers. No way. This is no religious metaphor. This is Last Tango in Judah.

  The poem begins with her daydreaming. Imagine a young woman alone in her room, hugging her pillow: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.” Now that’s an opening line.

  In one of my translations, our songstress describes herself as “dark and swarthy but beautiful.” The New Revised Standard Version uses a saucier, modern coinage: “I am black and beautiful.”

  chapter 2

  She’s very forward, our dusky beauty. She says her lover is an apple tree, “and his fruit is sweet to my mouth.” (She follows this with the carnal imperative, “comfort me with apples,” borrowed as a book title by both Ruth Reichl and Peter De Vries.)

  In the middle of the erotic reverie, she catches herself, and sits up long enough to address a word to her young readers: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem . . . do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!” She repeats this line twice in later chapters. What does it mean and why is it so important? She includes this caution to remind us that she can be
wanton only because he is her true love. She guarded her heart and found the right man, and that has liberated her to indulge her sensual desires. She wants girls to be careful, not to give away their hearts, or their virginity, too easily. This lesson—that true love waits, to steal a phrase— makes the otherwise spicy poem suitable for church and synagogue.

  A pretty exchange between the two of them—he’s a gazelle; she’s a dove—climaxes with a verse that has been co-opted by brides and grooms everywhere: “My beloved is mine and I am his.”

  chapter 3

  She can’t sleep, so she gets out of bed and wanders the city, seeking him out. (See Patsy Cline, “Walking after Midnight.”) She finds him, brings him back to her mom’s house, and—well, you’ll have to imagine the rest.

  Meanwhile, Solomon’s wedding pro cession comes to town. He’s riding in a palanquin, and he has seriously pimped his ride for maximum scoring: “He made its posts of silver, its back of gold, its seat of purple; its interior was inlaid with love.” Inlaid with love, oh my! On the back, Solomon attached a bumper sticker: If this palanquin’s a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’.

  chapter 4

  Now it’s the guy’s turn to praise his lover. Either he’s not much of a wordsmith, or men chatted girls up differently back in the day. He says: “Your hair is like a flock of goats . . . your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes.” Your brow is like a “pomegranate split open.” “Your neck is like the tower of David.” You’re so beautiful—your hair looks like goats! Your forehead is a pomegranate—a fruit that resembles, um, acne. And you have a neck made of brick. These lines wouldn’t go over well at my house.

  His most famous compliment is: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” This isn’t exactly insulting, but it is confusing. Fawns are bony, muscular, and jumpy—not at all how I would describe breasts. However, someone pointed out to me why the metaphor may work: “I’ve always thought that the comparison between breasts and twin fawns is more that they are soft-looking and symmetrical—and, in her case, similarly colored. If you see a fawn, don’t you want to pet it? Especially two of them?”

  When he calls her a “locked garden,” that really turns her on. “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”

  chapter 5

  This is probably the hottest passage in the song. She recalls her beloved knocking on the door. Then he “thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt.”

  She praises his good looks. Her compliments, unlike his, withstand the test of time. He’s “radiant and ruddy.” His hair is black like a raven’s. His cheeks “are like beds of spices . . . his lips are lilies . . . his arms are rounded gold . . . his legs are alabaster columns.” Is it any wonder the girl digs him?

  chapter 6

  He is her true love. But is she his true love? In this chapter, he mentions sixty queens and eighty concubines, then says she’s the finest of them all, the only woman he really cares about: “My dove, my perfect one, is the only one.” Should we believe him? That depends on how you interpret the line about queens and concubines. If the author is just a regular guy, and he’s saying that his love is more beautiful than any queen—the way you hear guys brag, “My girlfriend looks like Salma Hayek, only hotter”—then perhaps he does love her truly. But as I read it, the author—perhaps Solomon—is referring to these sixty queens and eighty concubines as his own queens and concubines. And that sets off the alarm bells. If he has already run through 140 women, he’ll run through one more. (And if the author actually is Solomon, he’ll run through 860 more women, since he ends up with 700 wives and 300 concubines.) All his sweet compliments mean nothing: they’re just lines he’s using to get her into his palanquin.

  chapter 7

  In a wonderful passage, she proposes that they go for a walk in the fields and vineyards, to see if the blossoms have opened: “There I will give you my love.”

  chapter 8

  She wishes that her lover were her brother. Then they could be together in public and kiss in the street, and no one would notice. Doesn’t this sound eerily like what must happen today, in Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia that have turned ancient sexual taboos into the law of

  the land?

  She says he can drink “the juice of my pomegranates.”

  And one fi nal line plagiarized for weddings: “Set me as a seal upon your heart.”

  TWENT Y-ONE

  The Book of Ruth

  My Favorite Bible Story

  In which two poor widows, Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth, move back to Bethlehem; while gleaning in the fields, Ruth meets Boaz, a relative of her dead husband; he falls in love with her; eventually they get married, and are great-grandparents to King David.

  chapter 1

  t’s the time of Judges. There’s a famine in Bethlehem, so Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons immigrate to Moab. Elimelech promptly dies. The sons marry Moabite girls—a brave move, since we know how the Lord feels about intermarriage with idolaters. Both sons die, though their deaths are not attributed to divine disapproval of the mixed marriages. This is our first sign that Ruth is not like other books of the Bible. God won’t be the prime mover here. The characters in Ruth are faithful, but they make their own fate; the Lord won’t make it for them. Ruth is a great book for agnostics, since it shows how good people should behave even when they don’t expect God to intervene.

  Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem, but before she leaves she gently tells her widowed Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to remain in Moab and remarry. Naomi isn’t trying to ditch them for selfish reasons. On the contrary, Naomi knows that she herself is too old to marry again, and she doesn’t want to burden the young women. They insist on going with her anyway. Naomi orders them not to follow her. Orpah finally leaves, but Ruth sticks to her like glue, delivering one of the most moving speeches in the Bible: “For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” This speech is impressive in many ways, but perhaps most because of its insight into how people choose a religion. Ruth does not come to the Lord because He is the Lord. She comes because she loves Naomi. If Naomi worshipped Baal, Ruth probably would have become a Baalite. Sometimes theologians forget that religion is not a calculation: almost always, we come to God or Allah or the Buddha not because we have carefully analyzed the relevant laws, texts, and miracles but because someone we love leads us to him. Relationships, not theories, make religions grow.

  Incidentally, this chapter is the source of the most famous quasi-biblical name of our time. Oprah Winfrey was officially named Orpah— it’s on her birth certificate—but because of spelling confusion, the family called her Oprah instead.

  chapter 2

  Naomi and Ruth return to Bethlehem during the barley harvest. They’re flat broke. Ruth goes to glean in the fields, collecting the grain left behind by the harvesters. (Leviticus 19 orders farmers to leave gleanings for the poor. This is one of many passages in which Ruth shows us biblical laws in practice.) Ruth doesn’t yet know it, but she happens to glean the field of Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s dead husband, Elimelech. Boaz shows up in the field and hears that Naomi’s daughter-in-law has been gleaning. He immediately invites her to drink his water and glean from all his fields. He calls her “daughter,” a red herring that distracts us from the idea that they could ever marry. She asks why he’s being so kind to a stranger, and he says he heard how good she was to his kinswoman Naomi. He invites her to eat and drink with him, then surreptitiously orders his workers to leave extra stalks so she can glean more.

  chapter 3

  Naomi decides that Ruth needs to remarry, and that Boaz would be a
catch. She has Ruth wash and dress up, then go to the barn where Boaz is spending the night, in preparation for a big day of threshing. Naomi instructs Ruth to uncover his feet, then to fall asleep at them. Ruth does this. He wakes up astonished, and asks who she is. She tells him to put his robe over her—a euphemism for “have sex with,” perhaps?—because he is “a redeeming kinsman.” This means he is a male relative of her dead husband and thus has an obligation to marry her. No spring chicken, Boaz is evidently thrilled to find a lovely young woman throwing herself at him. His first response is to thank her for not seeking a younger man. Then he hesitates. Because he’s a deeply good and law-abiding man, he knows he can’t say yes. Full of regret, he tells her that there is a “closer” male relative, who gets first dibs on her. He invites her to spend the night anyway. (As friends, I think. Boaz does not seem to want to get in her pants. In fact, he appears to be trying to protect her reputation.)

  chapter 4

  The next day, Boaz waits by the town gate for the closer kinsman. When he arrives, Boaz offers him a deal: you buy Elimelech’s land and marry Ruth, but any son you have with Ruth will inherit the estate. The relative, though tempted, says no. The relative then offers Ruth and the land to Boaz. Without hesitating a second, Boaz accepts. They seal the deal, with the other kinsman removing his sandal. (In discussing Deuteronomy, I made fun of the weird law by which a man refusing a levirate marriage has his sandal removed and is known as the “unsandaled one.” And now, it has happened.) The townspeople cheer Boaz’s announcement that he is marrying Ruth. He is the beloved old bachelor of Bethlehem, and everyone is overjoyed that he’s finding happiness in his declining years. No one blinks at the idea of his marrying a Moabite: by her actions, Ruth has made herself as much a Jew as anyone. The women of Bethlehem congratulate Naomi, telling her that her daughter-in-law Ruth “is better to you than seven sons.” True enough.