By
– November 15, 2011
What can a year spent slugging through thirty nine books, 929 chapters and more than 600,000 words bag you? If you’re David Plotz and the tome happens to be the Bible, the answer is a lot of tsuris and mishegas— and doubt in God.
Plotz, the editor of Slate.com and a selfproclaimed “proud but not very observant” Reform Jew, set out to discover “what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based.”
The result—Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible—sees Plotz’s transformation from “hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic” to “hopeless and angry agnostic.”
“I’m brokenhearted about God,” he writes at the end of his journey through ancient genocide, plague, and enslavement. “I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.”
Plotz isn’t shy about using an array of adjectives — from boring to funny to repellent— to describe the Bible’s yarns, nor is he coy about his ambivalence toward the Creator, as he wonders how to accept an erratic and vindictive God who smites the innocent.
Plotz isn’t the first lax Jew to recently undertake a biblical quest of self-discovery (see The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs, 2007), but he reminds us that the Good Book’s lessons are open to interpretation. By documenting his odyssey through Jewish history, he has unearthed a breathing blueprint, a timeless guide to living, a book written by and about real people that celebrates its nuanced heroes and villains, and reminds us a little bit…of ourselves.
Plotz, the editor of Slate.com and a selfproclaimed “proud but not very observant” Reform Jew, set out to discover “what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based.”
The result—Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible—sees Plotz’s transformation from “hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic” to “hopeless and angry agnostic.”
“I’m brokenhearted about God,” he writes at the end of his journey through ancient genocide, plague, and enslavement. “I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.”
Plotz isn’t shy about using an array of adjectives — from boring to funny to repellent— to describe the Bible’s yarns, nor is he coy about his ambivalence toward the Creator, as he wonders how to accept an erratic and vindictive God who smites the innocent.
Plotz isn’t the first lax Jew to recently undertake a biblical quest of self-discovery (see The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs, 2007), but he reminds us that the Good Book’s lessons are open to interpretation. By documenting his odyssey through Jewish history, he has unearthed a breathing blueprint, a timeless guide to living, a book written by and about real people that celebrates its nuanced heroes and villains, and reminds us a little bit…of ourselves.
Read David Plotz’s Posts for the Visiting Scribe
Is Monotheism for Jerks?
Why Is Judaism Such a Failure?
Jaclyn Trop is a Los Angeles-based freelance reporter.