by David Plotz
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 She ma 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 with 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 defi ant; 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.
Appendix:
Useful (and Not So Useful) Bible Lists
the bible’s twelve best pickup lines
1. “Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine” (Song of Songs 1:2).
2. “Lie with me.”—Potiphar’s wife to her slave, Joseph (Genesis 39:7).
3. “Praised be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me! And blessed your prudence.”—David to his future wife, Abigail (1 Samuel 25:32–33). An evangelical friend told me, “I use that line on Christian girls all the time. And it works.”
4. “What is your wish? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to half the kingdom, it shall be fulfilled.”—King Ahasuerus to Esther (Esther 6:6).
5. “There are sixty queens, and eighty concubines, and damsels without number. Only one is my dove, my perfect one” (Song of Songs, 6:8–9).
6. “I saw that you
r time for love had arrived. So I spread My robe over you.”—God to Jerusalem (Ezekiel 16:8).
7. “Let my beloved come to his garden and enjoy its luscious fruits” (Song of Songs, 4:16).
8. “Many women have done well, but you surpass them all.” —husband to wife (Proverbs 31:29).
9. “Here, let me sleep with you,” says Judah. “What will you pay for sleeping with me?” says Tamar, his daughter-in-law (Genesis 38:16).
10. “Come over here and partake of the meal, and dip your morsel in the vinegar.”—Boaz to Ruth (Ruth 2:14).
11. “Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, browsing among the lilies” (Song of Songs, 4:5).
12. “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may be intimate with them.”—townspeople of Sodom to Lot (Genesis 19:5).
god’s eleven best miracles (and one very lame one)
1 The ten plagues: Blood, frogs, hail, boils, slaying of the fi rstborn, etc. Really, how could God top that? (Exodus 7–12).
2 Jonah and the whale: Three days and nights in a big fish, then spit up on land ( Jonah 2).
3 The ark and the Philistines: The Philistines capture the ark of the covenant and leave it their temple overnight. When they come back in the morning, the statue of their god Dagon is lying on its face (1 Samuel 5).
Appendix: Useful (and Not So Useful) Bible Lists 309
4. Resurrection: Elijah lies down three times on the body of a dead boy and brings him back to life (1 Kings 17).
5. Parting of the Red Sea: Very cinematic! (Exodus 14).
6. The fiery furnace: King Nebuchadnezzar throws Daniel’s three friends into a blast furnace. They—along with a mysterious fourth man—walk right out, unsinged (Daniel 3).
7. High noon: When Joshua fights the Amorites, the sun stops in the middle of the sky and stays there for a whole day (Joshua 10:13).
8. The Assyrian plague: The Assyrians are about to sack Jerusalem. King Hezekiah prays for relief, and that night a plague kills 185,000 enemy soldiers (2 Kings 19:35).
9. World’s first IVF: Abraham and Sarah have a child when he is ninety-nine and she is ninety. Not such a miracle now, maybe, but it was miraculous back in the day (Genesis 17).
10. Elijah and the ravens: At God’s order, ravens feed Elijah when he is hiding out in a cave (1 Kings 17:4–6).
11. The Temple renovation: When Joash renovates the Temple, the project comes in under budget (2 Chronicles 24:4–15).
The Very Lame One
1. The miracle of wicking fabric: To convince Gideon that he will be victorious in battle, the Lord makes a wool fleece wet. Gideon isn’t persuaded and demands more proof, so the next night the Lord makes the fleece dry (Judges 6:36–40).
thirteen spectacular murders
1. Jael invites the fleeing General Sisera into her tent, gives him a glass of milk, puts him gently to sleep, then hammers a tent post through his brain ( Judges 4).
2. Judge Ehud tells wicked King Eglon, “I have a message for you from God.” Eglon agrees to meet with him privately, at which point Ehud stabs him so hard that “the filth came out” ( Judges 3).
3. Shechem and all his townsmen are circumcised so that he can marry Dinah. When they’re recovering from the surgery, Dinah’s brothers show up and slaughter them (Genesis 6).
4. King Ahasuerus has Haman impaled on a stake seventy-fi ve feet tall. Then Queen Esther does the same thing to Haman’s ten sons (Esther 7–9).
5. After Daniel escapes the lions’ den unharmed, Daniel’s accusers— and their wives and children—are tossed into the den. “They had hardly reached the bottom of the den when the lions overpowered them and crushed their bones” (Daniel 6).
6. A gang surrounds a house and demands that the man inside come out to be raped. He sends out his concubine instead. “They raped her and abused her all night long till morning.” She dies that day, at which point her husband chops her body into a dozen pieces and mails them throughout Israel ( Judges 19).
7. Jezebel and Ahab have Naboth falsely accused of blasphemy and stoned to death, so they can steal his vineyard (1 Kings 21). But they get theirs, because in the next chapter . . .
8. Ahab is killed in battle by an arrow, and whores bathe in his blood (1 Kings 22). And a few chapters later . . .
9. Jezebel is thrown from a window by three eunuchs and trampled by horses. Then her corpse is eaten by dogs (2 Kings 9).
10. While he’s fleeing a battle, David’s rebellious son Absalom gets tangled in a tree by his long hair. David’s soldiers stab him to death while he’s hanging there (2 Samuel 18).
11. Shamgar slays 600 Philistines with an ox goad ( Judges 3:31).
Appendix: Useful (and Not So Useful) Bible Lists 311
12. One-upping Shamgar, Samson slays 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass ( Judges 15:15).
13. A woman in a town he is besieging drops a millstone on wicked King Abimelech’s head. Abimelech begs his servant to stab him to death “that they may not say of me, ‘A woman killed him’ ” ( Judges 9).
the nine best parties
1. The Persian king Ahasuerus’s six-month party culminates in a weeklong feast, at which “the rule for drinking [is]: ‘No restrictions!’ ” The drunken king demands that his wife dance for the guests, but she refuses (Esther 1).
2. Pharoah has a birthday banquet, during which he has his chief baker impaled, just as Joseph predicted (Genesis 40:15).
3. King Belshazzar of Babylon holds a grand party for 1,000 nobles. When he’s falling-down drunk, he brings out the cups stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem so the guests can booze from them. Bad move. God’s hand appears on the wall and writes that Belshazzar’s days are numbered. He’s killed that very night (Daniel 5).
4. After Aaron and the Israelites made the golden calf, “they sat down to eat and drink, and then rose to dance.” This celebration ends badly: Moses arrives to bust up the festivities (Exodus 32).
5. Solomon’s party at the dedication of the Temple lasts fourteen days, during which 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep are sacrifi ced (1 Kings 9).
6. Another party in Esther! After killing Haman, his sons, and 75,000 of their supporters, the Jews celebrate with “a day of feasting and merrymaking” (Esther 9).
7. Returned from exile in Babylon, the Jews rebuild the foundation of the Temple, and rejoice with trumpets and cymbals, shouting, weeping, and singing (Ezra 3).
8. God orders a day of weeping and lamentation to prepare for a looming catastrophe, but the Israelites ignore him. “Instead there was rejoicing and merriment, killing of cattle and slaughtering of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine: ‘Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!’ ” (Isaiah 22).
9. When David brings the ark into Jerusalem, the band plays and he dances wildly before the ark, “leaping and whirling before the Lord” (2 Samuel 6).
my favorite prostitutes
1 Rahab protects Joshua’s scouts when they’re spying on Jericho. She’s the original hooker with a heart of gold—and she’s an ancestor of Jesus ( Joshua 2).
2 Tamar, the widow of Er and Onan, sleeps with her father-in-law, Judah, who pays her with his staff and seal (Genesis 38).
3 Two mothers each claim that a newborn is their son. Solomon finds the genuine mother by proposing to split the baby. The two moms are hookers (1 Kings 3).
4 Gomer. God tells the prophet Hosea, “Take yourself a wife of whoredom.” Pretty Woman–style, he picks up Gomer and tries to make an honest woman of her (Hosea 1).
5 Jephthah’s mother ( Judges 11:1).
6 Moabite women. The Israelite men go “whoring” with them, and this really riles God (Numbers 25).
7 When Ahab is killed, the women who bathe in his blood are prostitutes (1 Kings 22).
Appendix: Useful (and Not So Useful) Bible Lists 313
8. During the time of bad King Rehoboam, Judah was swarming with “male temple prostitutes” (1 Kings 14:24).
9. Jeremiah says that Israel
has “played the whore with many lovers” (Jeremiah 3:3).
10. According to Ezekiel, Judah is a hooker, “carr[ying] on her whoring so openly and flaunt[ing] her nakedness” (Ezekiel 16 and 23).
eleven heroes you don’t want to be named after
1. Aaron: He makes the Golden Calf, then ducks responsibility. He tries to usurp the place of his brother Moses (Exodus).
2. Samson: A meathead. He’s not merely a homicidal maniac; he’s also a moron. Plus, he tortures small animals (Judges).
3. Sarah: No conscience. She happily defrauds Pharaoh and Abimelech. She vindictively, and savagely, has her servant Hagar and Hagar’s son, Ishmael, exiled into the desert (Genesis).
4. Dinah: Innocent, but cursed. Her rape gives rise to the most shocking crime in Genesis (Genesis).
5. Levi: Tricks men into circumcision so he can murder them. Later seeks to murder his younger brother Joseph (Genesis).
6. Jacob: A con artist. Dupes his bighearted twin, Esau, twice; tricks his father Isaac and his uncle Laban, then sits by passively while his sons double-cross and murder innocents (Genesis).
7. Rebekah: The ultimate stage mother. She overwhelmingly favors her younger son Jacob, abuses sweet Esau, and gleefully cons her husband Isaac (Genesis).
8. Saul: Israel’s first king was tall, handsome, and crazy (1 Samuel).
9. Isaac: A shiftless, easily fooled couch potato (Genesis).
10. Simeon: See Levi (Genesis).
11. Tamar: The Flowers in the Attic name. The first Tamar prostitutes herself to her father-in-law and gets pregnant by him. The second Tamar is raped by her own brother (Genesis; 2 Samuel).