by David Plotz
What follows is an extraordinary (though appalling, for reasons we will discuss) act of collective responsibility. While Ezra is weeping and “throwing himself down before the house of God,” all the Israelites gather to discuss their sin. They agree that they’ve wronged God with intermarriage but decide that there’s still hope for Israel. In an astonishing consensus, they agree to banish the alien wives and the children of intermarriage. This will restore the Jews’ blood purity and mollify God. In a rainstorm, all the Israelite men swear an oath to ditch their foreign wives. Then the book publishes a long, long list of men, followed by this verse, the fi nal line in Ezra: “All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children.”
This is one of the very few times in the Bible that the Israelites accept responsibility for their sin and take strong, difficult measures to appease God. Yet it’s also horrifying. I don’t want to get self-righteous here. I took enough anthropology and history classes in college to know that group solidarity and blood purity are important to almost all cultures at almost all times. Only a few, rare societies, such as ours, welcome mixing and difference. So I know I’m imposing my patchwork-quilt idealism on my ancient ancestors when I say that it’s sickening to imagine the wives and children expelled from Jerusalem for an accident of birth. (These days, the rabbis would enlist those gentile wives to bring the bagels for a post- Shabbat brunch.) This is yet another reminder of the Bible’s radical morality. God does not put families first. He will let them be destroyed to preserve the faith.
the book of nehemiah
Chapters 1–2
Nehemiah, the Jewish cupbearer to the ruler of Persia, is heartbroken to learn that Jerusalem is a shambles. He’s so sad that he can’t even bear a cup without getting weepy. Rather than throwing him into a lions’ den or impaling him on a stake—the usual response of Persian monarchs to dour underlings—Emperor Artaxerxes asks Nehemiah what’s wrong. Nehemiah explains that he’s bummed about Jerusalem. The king agrees to let Nehemiah return to rebuild the city and its walls. (The action of Nehemiah comes after the events of Ezra: The Temple has already been rebuilt in Jerusalem, but the city lies undefended.)
Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem and rallies its Jews to join his wall project. But not all is milk and honey in the Holy Land. Nehemiah realizes that three non-Jewish local governors—Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arab—are seething about the plan to rebuild Jerusalem. They fear, quite reasonably, that a walled Jerusalem will be a mightier city, and a threat to its neighbors.
Let’s pause for a moment to observe the entrance of the Bible’s first and only “Arab.” Arabia is referred to a few times in passing in various books, and anonymous “Arabians” are mentioned, but Geshem is the single named Arab. The whole scene is almost too depressing—or too funny—to believe. There is just one conversation between a Jew and an Arab in the entire Bible. When Geshem the Arab and his cronies hear that Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall, they “mocked and ridiculed” him. Nehemiah responds by saying: “The God of heaven is the one who will give us success, and we His servants are going to start building; but you have no share or claim or historic right in Jerusalem.” In what can be seen as a darkly humorous divine joke, the only Arab in the Bible turns out to be (1) an enemy of the Jews and (2) at odds with them over who should control Jerusalem. It’s 2,500 years later: Has anything changed?
Chapters 3–6
Under Nehemiah’s command, the Jerusalemites begin rebuilding the gates and walls of the city. Geshem, Sanballat, and Tobiah continue to mock and scheme. (To be fair to Geshem the Arab, the other two are much nastier. Sanballat, for example, mutters, “What are the miserable Jews doing?”) The three enemies harass and terrorize the Jews so much that Nehemiah has to suspend the wall project. Eventually, Nehemiah sends his men back to the walls, but half of them have to provide security while the other half pile stones. Still, they manage to complete the wall in just fi fty-two days. Nehemiah is the biblical role model for our ambitious big-city mayors, undertaking massive construction projects, fending off sniping critics, rallying the little guys without losing the elite—a Fiorello La Guardia of the Levant.
Chapter 8
Ezra kicks off the celebration of the wall’s completion by reading the whole Torah to the assembly. The book inspires the Israelites, who realize while they listen that it’s time for the holiday of Sukkoth, which they haven’t kept for generations, although Sukkoth is mandated by the Torah. The whole country stops to observe the holiday— the same holiday that Jews celebrate today. It’s fascinating, and rather humbling, to realize that once more the book guarantees Jewish survival. By reading the Torah, the Jerusalemites are able to make themselves Jewish again.
Chapter 13
The most interesting parallel between Nehemiah and Ezra is found in the last few verses of this final chapter. Like the book of Ezra, the book of Nehemiah ends with an uproar over intermarriage. Nehemiah notices that Jews are marrying Moabite and Ammonite women, and their kids can’t even speak Hebrew. He gets the Jews to promise to stop intermarrying. Nehemiah cites the example of King Solomon, who despite being beloved by God and the smartest man in the world, was brought low by marrying foreign women. Nehemiah beats up, curses, and pulls out the hair of some of the intermarrying sinners. But let’s notice how the episode does not end. In Ezra, all the foreign wives and children were exiled. In Nehemiah, there’s no such purge. The Israelites promise not to sin in the future, but, unlike Ezra, Nehemiah doesn’t break up the families. The infidel wives and half-breed kids get to stay. Perhaps that reflects the difference between the zealous priest and the pragmatic governor. The holy man Ezra can afford to be uncompromising in the service of God. But Nehemiah has to keep his citizens happy and maintain civil relations with his idolatrous neighbors. Nehemiah knows what every office-seeker since him has learned: a politician doesn’t have the luxury of idealism.
TWENTY- SIX
The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles
Return of the Kings
In which the events described in the books of Samuel and Kings are recounted again.
he Christian Bible locates the two books of Chronicles with the other historical books in the middle of the Old Testament. But Jews shove Chronicles into the trunk, at the very end of our Bible. The Jewish way makes more sense, I suspect. That’s because Chronicles is largely a rehash of other books, mostly Samuel and Kings, but told more quickly and with less flair. It doesn’t rate a place of honor.
the book of 1 chronicles
Chapters 1–2
The fi rst five books of the Bible are condensed into two chapters of be-gats. 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 hamstr
ung, 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 trea sury, 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 par tic ular kings—notably David, Solomon, and various kings of Judah. The books burnish their reputations by leaving out their sins and infi delities.
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 fi rst 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?
hat’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 offi cial 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 between 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 fi rst 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 sud
denly 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— foreshadowing 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 mea sured, 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?