Reading the Bible in very different ways.

[question everything]

APRIL 9, 2009

Bookshelf
Signs and Wonders
Reading the Bible in very different ways.

By BENJAMIN BALINT
WSJ

A book that takes itself seriously -- and few books take themselves more seriously than the Bible -- invites readers to approach it with a measure of high moral purpose but also, sometimes, with a sense of doubt or irreverence. In "Good Book," David Plotz, an editor at Slate and a self-described "pork-loving Jew," takes notes on a year-long experiment: "What happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based?" As he plodded through an English translation of the Hebrew Bible -- unaided by teachers or commentaries -- Mr. Plotz recorded his responses, posting them first in an online column called "Blogging the Bible" and now collecting them in a comprehensive form.


He discovered in the Bible a book far less bland than the one he had been led to expect. And indeed his chapter- by-chapter summaries are both useful and engaging. At times he admires the Bible's grand notions of justice or finds its laws -- e.g., the injunctions in Leviticus 19 to render justice blindly, to love the stranger and to feed the poor -- "monumental and beautiful." He senses that his experiment in close reading has joined him in new ways to Jewish life.

More often, however, Mr. Plotz finds the Bible ridiculous. God, he writes, is "a kind of celestial Donald Trump" or "like Norman Mailer on a bad day." Much of Genesis reads to Mr. Plotz like a "smutty" soap opera -- "Dynasty in the desert." Leah (one of Jacob's wives) and her sister Rachel quarrel "like contestants on a reality show." Jacob himself is a "metrosexual." Moses sometimes acts "more like a drug lord than a prophet." His brother Aaron is "the Fredo Corleone of the Sinai."

And that's just the Pentateuch. As he surveys the prophetic books, Mr. Plotz learns that Samson is "off his meds." King David is "a horndog," and the tale of his affair with Bathsheba amounts to "the world's first Penthouse letter." Isaiah's apocalyptic visions sound to Mr. Plotz like the "logorrheic rants of sports talk radio." Reading Isaiah, he says, "sometimes feels like being trapped in an elevator with Al Sharpton." The Song of Songs, an erotic poem of remarkable literary richness, is to Mr. Plotz merely "Last Tango in Judah." This mode of commentary is pointedly casual, as if to defy the elevated way in which the Bible is discussed by those who regard it as a sacred text. In his more earnest moments, though, Mr. Plotz can sound as stern as a biblical patriarch, even if his terms of censure are modern ones.

He notes his revulsion upon encountering a work "filled with war crimes." He calls Joshua "a genocidal brute." He deplores the way the Bible conceives of "a Chosen Us, and a nearly subhuman Them." He concludes that the Old Testament God is capricious and cruel: "He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love." Such judgments are no doubt sincere, and in other circumstances might seem profound, but there is something about "Good Book" that reduces even its moral grapplings to a level of painful superficiality.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123923528203003287.html (subscription)