Blogging the Bible carries an R-rating

[n2doc]

Blogging the Bible carries an R-rating
Lust and violence, and black humor, fill Old Testament
Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, January 28, 2007

David Plotz was a not-very-observant Jew who had spent three decades largely avoiding the Bible until one day when, bored at a cousin's bat mitzvah, he began thumbing through a copy of the Torah. Landing on Genesis 34, he was captivated by the rape of Jacob's daughter Dinah, and the devious way her family wreaks payback: tricking the rapist's family into disabling themselves with circumcision, then massacring them.

It got Plotz to wondering what other high drama -- the ghastly and wonderful, the tragic and comedic -- he had been missing. Thus he began to read the Bible cover-to-cover and discovered, in his words, "a bawdy, violent, sexy, jokey, sarcastic, Quentin Tarantino of a book."

Realizing that writing concentrated his thinking and that "no effort that could turn to profit should be wasted," the 36-year-old deputy editor of the online magazine Slate began posting his earnest, irreverent musings. The idea: to see what happens when a self-proclaimed ignoramus spends a year actually reading the book upon which his religion is based.

Today "Blogging the Bible" is a cyberspace hit, and Plotz's inbox is filled with thousands of e-mails from readers. Intending to finish the Old Testament by summer, he has a book contract to document his endeavor.

"The Bible sucks you in," he says, "because it is a great narrative." His observations may offend fundamentalists as sacrilegious and secularists as a waste of intellect, but they are undeniably raw and real.

He wonders why genealogies take up so much Torah real estate, observes King David as "such a horndog that he would pick up a widow at a funeral," labels Esau "the Harpo Marx of Genesis," ponders Jeremiah's description of the Israelites as a lustful she-camel, noting that the prophet's combination of scorn and sex "is very Church Lady -- at once prudish and obsessed."



more:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/01/28/INGGNNNR6B1.DTL

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[On the Road]

1. I Guess Not Everyone Knows This Stuff

I grew up with the Bible and had read the whole thing in my early teens. The parts Plotz talks about are fascinating and utterly alien. Judges in particular is really something. Very violent and raw. In one passage, one of Israel's judges promises that if God gives him victory, he will sacrifice the first thing he sees on returning home. Unfortunately, it turns out to be his only daughter. In another, a woman disguises herself as a prostitute and has sex with her father as part of a plan to get satisfaction for being wronged (if I'm remembering it right). A great book on some of these stories is:

The Harlot by the Side of the Road:
Forbidden Tales of the Bible
by Jonathan Kirsch

http://tinyurl.com/2wrlr3

It's funny to read evangelical treatments of these things. Often believers discuss stories like Sampson with great seriousness and propriety, yet seem completely unable to grasp the plain reality of the situation.

One thing I learned from the article -- "No one ever talks about Ehud, one of the judges, assassinating a king (taken to be) sitting on the toilet," he says." That must be the context of the strange description:

" ²¹ And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:
²²And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out."