Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  The blonde nods, chastened.

  There’s almost always a church youth group at the soup kitchen. I have yet to see an atheists’ youth group. Yeah, I know, religious people don’t have a monopoly on doing good. I’m sure that there are many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular groups like Doctors without Borders.

  But I’ve got to say: It’s a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good. Back in high school, my principal—a strict guy who wore disconcertingly festive pink glasses—started something called “mandatory volunteering.” Every week students had to spend two hours doing good if they wanted to graduate.

  We students were outraged. Mandatory volunteering is oxymoronic! You can’t legislate morality! It must be cultivated naturally. Plus, the policy came from the administration, so it had to be wrong.

  But I wanted to graduate, so I went to a soup kitchen and cleaned trays. And it wasn’t so bad. Looking back, I realize that mandated morality isn’t such a terrible idea. Without structure, I would have been at home playing Star Raiders on Atari 800 or scouring at my dad’s censored Playboys. Maybe Congress should take a page from my high school—or Mormon missionaries or the Israeli army—and require good citizenship from Americans. You graduate high school, and you get shipped off to AmeriCorps for a year—it’s the law.

  Make an incense blended as by the perfumer…

  —EXODUS 30:35

  Day 309. Only two months left to go, which freaks me out. I have way too much to do. There are dozens of commandments I have yet to follow. And despite my shepherding and locust eating, I still haven’t submerged myself enough in a primitive lifestyle. This month I vow to do just that. So I take out my thin, brown hardcover copy of Daily Life in Biblical Times, and get to work:

  Incense. I’ve started burning myrrh every morning. As you probably know, myrrh is one of the three gifts the wise men brought to Jesus. It’s also mentioned several times in the Old Testament—God told Moses to make a sacred anointing oil using myrrh, along with cinnamon, aromatic cane, cassia, and olive oil (the recipe is so holy, you were exiled if you used it for nonsanctioned purposes).

  I bought my myrrh at a shop on Broadway, a cramped place filled with oriental rugs and brass jewelry and a surly guy behind the counter who was angry that I was wasting his time by having the gall to purchase items from his store when he had important sudoku to attend to. The myrrh comes in several congealed cones the size of a chocolate truffle, and I light one on the kitchen table when I wake up.

  Julie scrunches her face and says, “It smells like a cathedral in here.”

  Yes. That’s exactly what it smells like: the nave of Notre Dame or St. Paul’s. It’s not a frivolous smell. It smells old and serious and holy.

  Hospitality. They knew how to treat a visitor back in biblical times. If you’re looking for the best host in history, Abraham has to make the short list. When three visitors appeared at Abraham’s tent door, he ran and got them veal, cakes, and milk. He sat them under the shade of a tree. He stood nearby while they ate, just in case the veal was undercooked or they ran out of cakes.

  This turned out to be a clever move. The strangers revealed themselves to be divine, so Abraham’s hosting was not for nothing.

  The zeal for hospitality continues in the present-day Middle East. When I was in Israel, it got to be oppressive, quite honestly. I peeked into a shop in the Old City section of Jerusalem, and the shop owner insisted that I come in, sit down, and have tea with him.

  “I’d love to, but I actually have to run.”

  He looked at me like I had just taken a golf club to his car’s windshield.

  “Sit down and have tea.”

  It was not a request. I sat down and had tea.

  Food and drink aside, the proper biblical host offered something else: water for the guest’s feet. Everyone wore sandals, it was desert conditions—it’s a nice thing to do. For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying this out.

  “Come in!” I said to Julie’s friend Margie. “Can I offer you food? Drink? Care to wash your feet in a bowl of water?”

  In modern times, this always comes off creepy, no matter which gender I’m offering it to. I’ve realized that foot washing is a surprisingly intimate and private thing, like gargling. In other words, no one’s taken me up on foot washing. Margie went the furthest: She agreed to have a bowl of water brought out, but it just sat there forlornly on the table.

  Olive oil lamp. An olive oil lamp isn’t just biblical, you’ll be happy to know. It’s also environmentally friendly. As it says in the appropriately named web magazine TreeHugger, “Olive oil lamps are a pleasing way to light your home. Olive oil is a renewable, nonpetroleum fuel which burns without fumes or odor. You can also burn any vegetable oil, or liquid fat, or grease in these lamps.”

  I ordered a replica of an ancient “Samaria” lamp from Israel; it’s terra-cotta, about the size of a grapefruit, comes with a thick white wick, and looks like a genie might puff out of it at any minute.

  I use it at night. I’m typing right now by olive oil lamp. The flame is solid and steady and casts a healthy glow over the table, but it’s also disturbingly high. I can’t figure out how to properly adjust the wick, so I’ve got this thing that could be carried in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. I burn through a lamp full of olive oil in a half hour. Perhaps it’s not so economical after all.

  The robe. I’ve been wearing white for a few months now—or off-white, by now—but I started to feel that wasn’t enough. Before the end of the year, I wanted to sample some real biblical attire. I ordered a white robe off eBay, but when I tried it on, I looked like I was about to sing in a gospel choir. It wasn’t working at all.

  The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn’t cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd’s robe. It is white, with a V-neck, a belt rope. It’s surprisingly comfortable. A man rarely gets to walk around in public with his legs unencumbered by pants. It’s a nice change.

  When I took it for a spin this week, I learned that a robe is a polarizing garment. At times I was treated as if I were a D-list celebrity—two Austrian teenagers asked to have their photo taken with me. At other times, I engendered not just the usual suspicion but flat-out hostility. As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins’s book?

  I’ve felt absurd many times throughout in the last ten months, but wearing a white man-skirt was a particularly embarrassing part of the experiment. My beard has drawn attention, but it is also—paradoxically—protective, since it shields my face. A robe is not. A robe makes me vulnerable.

  My friend Nathaniel told me about a rabbi in nineteenth-century Lithuania who required his students do ridiculous things. He’d make them go into a bakery and ask for a box of nails. Or go into a tailor and ask for a loaf of bread. The idea was that he was trying to break down their ego, which he saw as a hurdle to true spirituality. That’s what I try to think of when I walk around with my shepherd’s robe, which sometimes billows up like Marilyn Monroe’s white dress: I am breaking down the ego.

  The slave/intern. My slave-slash-intern started a couple of weeks ago. And it could be among the top ten best things that ever happened to me.

  I’ve had assistants before, but this is a whole other league.

  Kevin is a nice boy from Ohio. He’s well-scrubbed, has dark blond hair, and looks like he stepped out of a commercial for herpes medication (I mean that as a compliment, by the way; they always cast the most vigorous American types, you know?). He’s also part of an a cappella group that sings Jay-Z tunes. I heard them on his iPod, and they’re really good.

  And, man, has he thrown himself into this role of biblical slave. Yes, he does a lot of regular int
ern stuff, like researching, making phone calls, and data entry (he set up an eBay account for me so I could sell some of my possessions—mostly DVDs and flannel shirts—and donate the proceeds to charity). But he also sends emails like this:

  “Need any shopping done? Any baby clothes or things like that?”

  Or:

  “I’m willing to work eight hours a week or eighty.”

  I felt a bit guilty at first, but that faded soon enough. It’s hard to complain when a guy zips off to the hardware store whenever a lightbulb blows out.

  He also sent me this email yesterday: “If I can use your kitchen—mine’s too small for these purposes—I’d love to bake you a loaf or two of Ezekiel bread tomorrow morning or afternoon, so that you can enjoy them over the weekend and on the Sabbath. Is this OK?”

  Today I come home from a meeting, and Kevin is in my kitchen, his hands covered in flour, mashing a mixture of grains with a mortar and pestle. Ezekiel bread is one of the few recipes in the Bible. God told the prophet Ezekiel to bake a bread made with wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet, and spelt. Kevin’s Ezekiel bread was quite good. It reminded me of a less-crunchy graham cracker. Kevin later confessed that he tweaked the biblical recipe and added honey, but I felt it would be petty to rebuke him.

  “Maybe we should give some to your neighbors,” Kevin says. “That would be the biblical thing to do.”

  We knock on some doors, but no one’s home. Well, actually, my neighbor Nancy is home, but she calls out from inside: “I’d love some, but I have a cracked rib, so I’m not getting up.” I remind myself: I’ve got to get to work on that Hendrix proposal when she’s better.

  Kevin says he’d like to take a portion of bread to give away on his walk home. He reminds me of the good servant in Jesus’s parable. The parable says that a master left for a trip, and gave five bags of money to his good servant and five to his bad servant. The good servant invested the money and doubled it to ten bags. By contrast, the bad servant buried his bag of money, which meant no increase at all. A good servant is proactive. Kevin would have doubled the money, maybe tripled it.

  If a man begets a hundred children…

  —ECCLESIASTES 6:3

  Day 314. We go out to a Chinese restaurant with Julie’s dad and stepmom. Julie is big enough now that the top of her stomach juts out at a ninety-degree angle, pretty much parallel with the table. She slides into the booth with impressive grace.

  The waiter takes our orders. I get the steamed vegetables—bland but biblically safe. A few weeks ago I decided to make my Berkeley-based aunt Marti proud and go vegetarian. It wasn’t so much an ethical decision as a pragmatic one. It’s just so much easier to keep the Bible’s food laws if you steer clear of the animals. Plus, according to the Bible, the human race started out as vegetarian—Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, right on up until Noah, who was the first to eat flesh. So avoiding meat has scriptural backing.

  I’ve also tried to cut out eggs. This is because of something I learned while interviewing a Karaite, a member of that sect of Judaism that follows the Bible as strictly as possible. “Let me drop an atom bomb on you,” said this Karaite; his name is Nehemiah Gordon, and he runs the Karaite website, the Karaite Korner. “You can’t follow all of the Bible literally because we can’t know what some of the words mean.”

  In Leviticus 11, there’s a list of birds that are abominations: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the pelican, and so on. Problem is, those birds are just our best guesses. The true identity of the birds have been lost in the haze of time. So to be safe, some Karaites don’t eat eggs or poultry at all. It’s a profound insight—and it has made my diet even more extreme.

  Anyway, that was my dinner: vegetables that had been steamed into tastelessness. The conversation consisted mostly of Julie’s stepmom trying to console Julie about the overload of Y chromosomes in our household.

  “If you have another baby, I bet it’s going to be a girl,” she said.

  When we get home, I ask Julie about the helpful tip.

  “You think we should?”

  “No. Absolutely not,” she says. “These ovaries of mine are done.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Though we do have a frozen embryo at the clinic, right?”

  I don’t know. Do we have another frozen embryo? I can’t believe I don’t know. I should have been on top of that. The next day, I call the clinic and get a nurse on the phone. No, we have no embryos left. Nothing survived besides the two in Julie’s swollen belly. Which is a relief. I don’t have to figure out what to do with an extra embryo. One fewer moral decision to make.

  The ethics of embryos—stem cells and abortion—are, of course, incredibly complex. Reasonable people disagree. And, frankly, the debate is beyond the scope of this book. So I won’t try to argue for one side or the other. You can probably guess my position—it’s typically liberal. But I will say this: When I read the Bible, it didn’t seem to support either side. Religious tradition, church doctrine, rabbinical interpretation—those all weigh in on stem cells and abortion, and weigh in mightily. But the literal words of the Bible are, I believe, neither pro-life nor pro-choice.

  Some pro-life advocates disagree. They point to several passages to prove that life begins at conception. Among them:

  For thou didst form my inward parts; thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalms 139:13). (This passage is cited to prove that God is working on the fetus even as it is in the womb, thus making the unborn child sacred.)

  The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name (Isaiah 49:1). (Here the prophet Isaiah says that God made him sacred him before he was even born. Again, God is at work in the womb.)

  And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:41). (Here John the Baptist’s pregnant mother meets the Virgin Mary, also pregnant. John the Baptist jumps for joy—which is cited to show that unborn children have emotions.)

  To base a major ethical decision on passages like these seems overreaching. They’re too vague. They can be interpreted any number of ways—and, naturally, pro-choice Christians and pro-choice Jews do just that. But pro-choicers go further, which I wasn’t expecting. They cite passages of their own. I read an article called “The Bible Is Pro-Choice” from a journal called Humanist Perspectives. The article talks about this quote from Ecclesiastes 6:3.

  If a man begets a hundred children, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but he does not enjoy life’s good things, and also has no burial, I say that an untimely birth is better off than he.

  Here an untimely birth is interpreted as a phrase for miscarriage. This is meant to show that sometimes it is better that a life not be lived at all.

  And there’s also a controversial line in Exodus 21:22. This one says that if a man hurts a woman while she’s pregnant and she loses her offspring, the man is liable. His punishment: He shall be fined some money. This, it’s argued, shows that the unborn child is not considered a person. If it were a person, the man’s punishment would be more severe. He’d be put to death.

  Naturally, the pro-lifers have rebuttals to this. And their opponents have rebuttals to the rebuttals. (If you want to see a more in-depth look at the back-and-forth arguments, I recommend a website called ReligiousTolerance.org.) The abortion and stem cell debates always remind me of a William Blake quote. I wish I could say I read the quote while perusing Blake. Heck, I wish I could say I read the quote while reading a book by a Yale Divinity School professor. The sad truth is, I read it in a book called Don’t Know Much about the Bible. But it’s still a great quote:

  Both read the Bible day and night,

  But thou read’st black where I read white

  He who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished.

  —PROVERBS 17:5

  Day 324. I don’t know what’s happening to me. My friend Paul emailed me a YouTube video. I clicked it open. It
showed a female newscaster reading some stock market news, when suddenly a huge stage light falls, smacking her on the head. She crumples off her chair and out of sight.

  All the viewer comments said “LOL” or “laughing my ass off.” But I didn’t get it. It just seemed upsetting. I spent twenty minutes on Google trying to find the name of the poor newscaster so I could email her a get-well-soon or hope-you-win-your-lawsuit note. I couldn’t track her down.

  What’s going on? What kind of an overly virtuous sap am I turning into? Next I’ll be renting Pay It Forward.

  By day the heat consumed me…

  —GENESIS 31:40

  Day 332. It’s a hot, hot New York summer weekend. I’m sweating heavily in my beard and tzitzit. Jasper’s face is lobster red. So when our friends—who have a plastic blow-up kiddie pool in their courtyard—invite us over, it sounds like a good idea.

  Jasper’s right now splashing around in the pool with their daughter Lily, and he’s having the time of his two-year-old life. He’s laughing like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. He’s showing us how he can jump from one side of the pool to the other. I, on the other hand, am not having the time of my life. It’s not good, this jumping. He’s going to break his kneecap, crack his skull—something. I want to dial 9-1 and keep my finger poised over the other 1 in preparation for the inevitable disaster.

  After three minutes of watching, I can take it no longer. I slip off my shoes, roll my white pants up to my calves, get up from the table, and step into the kiddie pool.