Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible By David Plotz Harper 2009, $26.99, pp. 336

The Good Book: Arbitrary, Cruel & Downright Vindictive

The Bible comes loaded with baggage. For example, before we even read the words, “In the beginning,” we know that hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered over differing interpretations of the Old Testament. The same cannot be said for other good books, say The Critique of Pure Reason or Portnoy’s Complaint. Lately, this propensity for bad behavior after reading sacred texts has spawned an industry of “New Atheist” critiques of religion, like Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Bill Maher’s film, Religulous. Today’s homily, adapted from a shtick by the young comedian, Emo Phillips, distills this particular piece of baggage into a neat fable, albeit in reference to that biblical addendum known as the New Testament:

I was walking across a bridge one day when I saw a man about to jump off. So I ran over and said, “Stop! Don’t do it!”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said. “What do I have to live for?”
“Well... are you religious?”
He said, “Yes,” and I said, “Me, too! See? We’ve got lots in common, so let’s talk this thing through. Are you Christian or Jewish?”
“Christian.”
“Me, too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
“Protestant.”
“Me, too! Man, we’ve got so much in common! Which denomination?”
“Baptist Church of God.”
“Wow! Me, too! Are you Baptist Church of God based on the Tubingen exegesis of the Bible in 1879, or Baptist Church of God based on the Hanover exegesis of 1915?”
He said, “Hanover exegesis.”
I said, “Die, heretic scum!” and pushed him off the bridge.

Where were we? Oh, yes, the Bible and its profound influence on the course of human history. Clearly this must be one heck of a powerful and inspiring book—even if that inspiration often leads to righteous slaughter.

Not so much, according to David Plotz, author of Good Book. Especially not if we read the whole shebang from cover to cover (or from beginning of scroll to final rollout) as he did, and have the keen eye for logical inconsistencies and big time moral ambiguity that he does.

Plotz earnestly admits that he came to the Bible with a hefty chunk of baggage: the expectation that at the very least he would encounter some compelling moral lessons, the kind he would feel good about passing on to his kids. But he comes away from his marathon reading appalled by the arbitrariness, cruelty and downright vindictiveness of the Good Book’s central character, God. The way He committed genocide in Sodom and Gomorrah with none other than brimstone (variously translated as hot rocks or sulphur) just to get a little respect—abject fear, actually—does not seem a morality tale suitable for Sunday school.

And then there’s the horror story of Dinah, wherein the Lord, blessed be He, engineers a trick in which Hamor’s tribe consents to be circumcised and while they are recuperating from the surgery, are massacred by Dinah’s brethren. Not nice.

Plotz isn’t too crazy about most of the book’s human protagonists, either. Here he is summing up some of their shenanigans: “So far Genesis has described straight rape, attempted gay rape, father-daughter incest, coitus interruptus with a dead brother’s wife, sex with one’s own wife, sex with the wrong wife, sex with a concubine, sex with dad’s concubine, and sex with a prostitute who is also a daughter-in-law.” Then Plotz notes, “What’s remarkable about Joseph is that he is the first person to resist sexual temptation. He’s the best—or perhaps the only—biblical argument for abstinence-based sex education.”

Ba-da-boom, as Milton Berle would say.

Yup, Plotz is a shtickster himself. And that’s his basic shtick: the goofy friction created by employing current language and pop references to comment on the ancient historical drama. It is very amusing in a “2,000-Year-Old Man” sort of way, but it often leads to a flippancy that glosses over potentially fascinating philosophical ideas. Describing the burning bush colloquy between God and Moses on how Moses can convince the Israelites of God’s ultimate authority, Plotz writes: “God, moving into thunder-and-lightning mode, declares, ‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,’ which is usually translated, Popeye-like, as ‘I am that I am.’” Thus ends Plotz’s commentary about God’s famous affirmation.

Cute, that Popeye reference, but one doesn’t need to be an existentialist theologian to wonder if there isn’t something more to God’s statement—something deep and definitive about the very idea of Being itself. Is God saying that He is the source and ground of all Being? (Granted, Popeye may have been having an ontological insight when he uttered, “I yam what I yam,” but Plotz doesn’t go there, either.)

In an epilogue, “Should You Read the Bible?” the author admits that many people have admonished him for “missing the chief lesson of the Hebrew Bible: that we can’t hope to understand the ways of God.” But, as Plotz says, “I’m not buying that,” because if God made man rational, then He can’t expect Plotz to do anything but submit Him to rational moral analysis. Really? Didn’t God also make some of us spiritual or, at the very least, full of wonder about the mystery of it all? In the language of neuroscience, cannot it be said that if God gave us both a right and left brain, then he expects us to use both?

Transcendental mysteries aside, Plotz’s book does shed some interesting light on an immanent (not to mention, imminent) problem. The publishing business is currently all atwitter about the encroachment of e-books and Kindle books on old-fashioned printed books. Well, Plotz’s book originally appeared as daily entries on the Internet magazine Slate, of which he is the editor. Blog readers loved it, so much so that it became a book on paper. But reading Good Book cover to cover can become monotonous; his wise-guy take on the Bible gets tedious over a long plotz. Indeed, in his introduction, Plotz urges us to feel free to skip around in the book, reading snippets here and there. He’s right; it’s much more fun to read in short takes. So maybe the best way to read this book is on the skip-around-easy Kindle screen one day at a time—almost like reading it in its original form, the blog!

Daniel Klein is co-author of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar and the forthcoming Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates. His novel The History of Now was published recently.