Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible

by David Plotz

  I’ve never read anything on the relationship of brothers that’s as grim as Genesis. Cain and Abel; Ham, Shem, and Japheth; Isaac and Ishmael; Esau and Jacob; and soon Joseph and his brothers. Brothers are purely antagonistic: they battle for inheritance, God’s love, their father’s respect. They conspire against each other, rat on each other, murder each other. There’s not a single act of love or kindness between brothers so far. Brothers are only enemies. Was nomadic life so difficult that only one son in any family could hope to prosper?

  And if brothers are bad, women are worse. The story of Isaac’s blessing is a reminder of just how uncharitable the Bible is toward the fair sex. God is like Norman Mailer on a bad day. The women of the Bible have so far been either invisible, foolish, or vindictive. Eve is suckered by the serpent. Noah’s wife doesn’t even get a name. Sarah is tricky (pretends to be Abraham’s sister) and cruel (exiles the concubine Hagar and Hagar’s son, Ishmael, to the desert). Lot’s wife dies because she lacks self-control. Lot’s daughters rape him. Rebekah hoodwinks her husband, Isaac, and punishes her older son. Why are the women so unappealing? Partly, I suspect, this portrayal refl ects the patriarchal, tribal culture from which the Bible sprang, a culture where control of female sexuality was of paramount importance. In such a society, women who wished to exercise power would have to do it slyly and in the private sphere. This situation produces either invisible women, or semi-heroines like Rebekah and Sarah, who are domestically wily because that is their only way of exercising power.

  But Rebekah, with her icy cunning, does embody a more important lesson of Genesis: God doesn’t suffer fools. It’s clear that Esau’s chief failing is that he’s dumb. He loses his birthright because he’s impatient for lunch, and loses his father’s blessing because he’s not smart enough to recognize that Jacob might steal it. Jacob and Rebekah, for all their faults, are smart. Abraham, Rebekah, and Jacob, the three great brains of Genesis so far, get what they want and earn the Almighty’s blessing because they finagle, cajole, argue, deceive, play mind games, and even misuse God to advance their lies. And the Lord seems to love it.

  This may explain the ambivalent attitude toward Isaac in Genesis. Isaac is at the heart of two of the Bible’s most vivid stories. As a child he is almost sacrificed, and as a dying man he is tricked by Jacob and Rebekah. In each story he is the passive victim. He never speaks up for himself: He doesn’t chastise his father or punish his son. He’s easily manipulated by his wife and gulled by Jacob. All the while, he appears just to want a simple life, kicking back in the tent, having a barbecue. He’s the accidental patriarch. Is it any surprise that God and the author of Genesis are so much more interested in Abraham and Jacob?

  chapter 28

  God appears to Jacob in a dream. God says that Jacob’s descendants will prosper and multiply—the promise He made to Abraham and Isaac. The Lord also makes a new personal commitment to Jacob: “Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

  My wife and I have many evangelical Christian friends, and one thing that strikes me about them is that they share Jacob’s sense that God is interested in their lives. Like Jacob, they feel that God, or Christ, is with them and that He will not leave until He has done what He promised them. But I don’t know any Jews who feel this way. It could be that I am friends with the wrong Jews, but the Jews I know don’t act or talk as if they have a personal relationship with God. They pray to God and may even feel that God works in the world, but they don’t believe that God takes a personal interest. I sure don’t think He’s watching me. Why would He bother? I’m not even interested in myself most of the time, so why should He be interested in me?

  I wonder if there’s a scriptural explanation for this difference between Christians and Jews. A Christian armed with the rather gentle New Testament has a very agreeable God and Savior to spend time with. You wouldn’t mind having Jesus micromanage your life. Jews face a more difficult proposition. Can you imagine the Old Testament God, with all His caprice, vindictiveness, and violence, acting directly in your life? I can’t. It would be like wearing a “Smite Me” sign taped to my back. Better to imagine an abstract, detached creator than worry that the God of Genesis is watching my every move.

  chapters 29–31

  Let the Bible soap opera begin! Jacob falls in love with his cousin Rachel and works seven years for his uncle Laban to win her, but on their wedding day, Laban sends Rachel’s elder sister Leah down the aisle. When Jacob finally lifts the veil, it’s too late: the vows have already been spoken. Turnabout is fair play: Laban has tricked Jacob into marrying the wrong sibling, just as Jacob duped his father into blessing the wrong sibling. Jacob works seven extra years and marries Rachel, too. Jacob starts fathering sons left and right with Leah. This makes the barren Rachel despondent, so she dispatches her maid Bilhah to Jacob. After Bilhah pops out a couple of boys, Leah sends her maid Zilpah to Jacob’s bed. (The poor guy must be exhausted!) Two more sons result. Then Leah has another son, and finally Rachel gets into the act and gives birth to Joseph. During this whole time, Leah and Rachel feud like contestants on a reality show.

  What with having a dozen sons, Jacob needs cash. He decides to go into business for himself. As compensation for his fourteen years of service, Jacob asks for all of Laban’s streaked and spotted goats and sheep. Laban agrees, but then secretly culls the streaked and spotted animals from his flocks. Jacob, realizing he has been fooled, tricks Laban back. He separates out the healthiest animals from the herd and breeds them to be streaked and spotted, leaving the feebler animals for Laban. It’s like a David Mamet movie, with two all-time great tricksters crossing and double-crossing each other.

  I guess that “one God” concept hasn’t really caught on yet. When Jacob and his family leave Laban’s house, Rachel steals her father’s “household idols.” How does the Lord feel about these teensy domestic rivals?

  chapters 32–33

  Jacob wrestles with and defeats an angel, then forces the angel to bless him. The wrestling match wins Jacob a new name (Israel), and it also gives him a new identity. Until now, Jacob has been the mama’s boy, a

  metrosexual (without any metro). Esau went out hunting; Jacob stayed home cooking. Esau was hairy and manly, an animal. Jacob’s hairlessness suggested weakness. Esau was strong; Jacob was cunning. Yet when the angel wrenches Jacob’s hip, the patriarch fi ghts through the pain and crushes the angel. He’s the original tough Jew.

  Immediately after the wrestling match, Jacob reconciles with Esau. When last seen, Esau was vowing to murder his birthright-cadging, blessing-stealing younger twin. So Jacob is understandably cautious in approaching his estranged, wronged brother. Jacob musters every defense he has, both human and divine. He prays to God to protect him. He divides his livestock and followers into two camps, so that if Esau attacks one group, the other can escape. He sends hundreds of animals to Esau as a present, explicitly hoping to bribe him off. But none of this is necessary. Esau, proving again that he is the mensch of the family if not the brains, sees Jacob and immediately runs to him, embraces him, and kisses him. Jacob insists on giving Esau the animals, and it’s clear that Jacob views this as buying back his brother’s goodwill. But the present doesn’t seem to matter to Esau, who grants forgiveness for nothing. Yet between Esau’s morality and unconditional love and Jacob’s strategy, it’s obvious which God prefers.

  That’s why this is a story I’m not sure I want to teach my own Jacob. Beneath its surface of filial forgiveness is a deplorable moral: don’t bother treating loved ones right, since the suckers will always forgive you. The good guy is played for a fool.

  chapter 34

  Dinah. Enough said.

  chapter 35

  Jacob’s getting old. His firstborn son, Reuben, sleeps with Jacob’s concubine Bilhah. This is an obvious “screw you” to Dad, but Jacob doesn’t protest or chastise. His powers are fading.
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  Riddle me this: Isaac was blind and near death when Jacob stole the blessing, eight chapters and more than twenty years ago. Yet he does not die until this chapter.

  chapter 37

  The biggest, nastiest fraternal rivalry of them all: Joseph versus his ten elder brothers in a no-holds-barred battle to the death (or slavery). I forgot or never knew that Joseph is actually a nasty little tattletale. He sends “bad reports” of his brothers to Jacob. Then he lords it over them by telling them his dreams, recounting one in which he and his brothers are sheaves of wheat, and they bow down to him, and another in which they are stars and bow down to him.

  Of all people, Jacob should know that favoring one son rips a family apart, but he can’t help it. Because Joseph is the first son of his beloved wife Rachel, Jacob singles Joseph out as his darling. He gives Joseph the special present of a “Technicolor dreamcoat” (oh, wait, I mean “ornamented tunic”). Given Joseph’s twerpiness and Jacob’s favoritism, is it any surprise that the older brothers “could not speak a friendly word” to Joseph? Can you blame them?

  So they make a plan. The brothers say to each other, “Here comes that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; and we can say, ‘A savage beast devoured him.’ ” Whose idea is the murder? We know the firstborn, Reuben, isn’t to blame, because he immediately tries to stop it. The next two brothers in age are Simeon and Levi. Aha! There is an ugliness to those two: they are the villains of Dinah’s story, scheming to slaughter Shechem and Hamor. Presumably it’s they who seek to murder Joseph, too.

  Judah, the fourth-born son, saves Joseph’s bacon by suggesting they sell him into slavery instead. “After all,” Judah says, “He is our brother, our own flesh.” What a line! This is the Genesis philosophy of brotherhood: he’s our brother, so let’s not kill him—let’s just sell him into slavery. (They get twenty pieces of silver for Joseph. Even I know that Judas sells out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Another New Testament swipe?)

  The brothers smear the tunic in goat’s blood and show it to Jacob. This is Jacob’s second comeuppance for the trick he played on his own father, Isaac. It’s brilliantly parallel—each father is fooled by his own senses. Blind Isaac tasted his son’s stew and felt his hairy hands and thus believed he was blessing his beloved Esau. Jacob examines the tunic and sees the blood, and thus believes his beloved Joseph has been killed by wild animals.

  chapter 38

  Genesis mysteriously interrupts itself, leaving Joseph in a slave caravan, to tell a fascinating story of sexual malfeasance. Judah marries a Canaanite girl, who bears sons named Er and Onan. Er marries Tamar, but Er is “displeasing to the Lord” and dies. Judah orders Onan to do his duty to his dead brother by marrying Tamar and getting her pregnant. Onan, knowing the child would be treated as Er’s and not as his own, “let the seed go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife.” This annoys the Lord, who smites Onan.

  Stop right there! Why on earth has Onan’s story been read as a condemnation of masturbation? It has nothing to do with masturbation. God smites Onan to punish his crime against a dead brother. Onan has sex with Tamar, but spills his seed. This is coitus interruptus. So Onan’s sin, “onanism,” is not masturbation, it’s birth control.

  The story takes an even pervier turn. Now that her husbands, Onan and Er, are dead, Tamar moves back into her father’s house. One day, her father-in-law, Judah, walks by. Tamar, who’s sitting at the roadside, covers her face with her veil to conceal her identity. Judah assumes she’s a whore and asks to sleep with her. She insists that he leave his seal and staff with her, then obliges him (and thus has now slept with every man in the family). Three months later, Judah hears that Tamar had “played the harlot” and is pregnant because of it. With the Near East’s usual tolerance for female sexual misbehavior, he orders her burned. Before this can happen, she reveals Judah’s staff and seal. He revokes the execution order, but doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by or ashamed at what he did.

  I love the Onan-Tamar-Judah-Er rectangle. It’s exciting and smutty. It has given us a wonderful word, “onanism,” and a misinterpreted sexual prohibition. Even so, I have no idea what the story is doing in this part of Genesis. Why interrupt the tale of Joseph for this digression?

  Biblical literalists will argue from Sunday to Sunday that the Bible is perfectly organized and internally coherent. But reading Genesis 34–38 in one sitting, I get a sneaking suspicion that the book has no plan at all, that it’s just a mess. Here’s what I mean. From Genesis 34 to 38, we read about, in this order: the rape of Dinah, Simeon and Levi’s slaughter of their newly circumcised enemies; Jacob building an altar; Jacob’s son Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine; the birth of Benjamin; the death of Isaac; the genealogy of Esau; Joseph feuding with his brothers and being sold into slavery; and the sexual misbehavior of Judah, Tamar, Onan, and Er. How on Earth do these bits connect to each other? How does one lead to the next?

  After I finished the whole Bible, I went back and read some biblical theory, because I was so confused by the apparent incoherence. The chaos of these fi ve chapters goes right to the core of the debate about the authorship of the Bible. Most scholars—at least those who aren’t literalists—doubt that a book like Genesis was composed by a single writer. Rather, it was written, edited, and redacted by various scribes over hundreds of years. James Kugel, author of How to Read the Bible, famously calls the Bible a work of “junk sculpture,” meaning that various random bits have been soldered together and thus turned into a new piece of art. The separate stories that make up the Bible had their own individual meanings. But welded together in a “book of Genesis,” the stories take on entirely new meanings, because the juxtapositions create significance never intended by the authors.

  Professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown extends Kugel’s argument. In a fascinating book, The Secular Bible, Berlinerblau contends that all biblical interpretation rests on a false premise of the Bible as a coherent whole. Rather, he says, we must recognize that the book is a pastiche of accidental juxtapositions. Any meaning we ascribe to those juxtapositions is artificial, and was never intended by the author— because, in fact, there was no author, merely a series of editors separated by centuries and often working at cross-purposes. We impose meaning on these disjointed stories to serve our own religious, spiritual, political, or literary purposes, says Berlinerblau, but we’re deluding ourselves if we think that our meanings are intended by the book.

  Let’s apply Kugel and Berlinerblau’s reading to these chapters. Scholars sympathetic to the Bible would say that Genesis 34–38 is thematically linked, that it intentionally explores the consequences of sexual misbehavior and highlights the dangers of family confl ict. But in fact, this is not even remotely clear on the page, at least as I read it. After all, there are forty-three verses of genealogy chunked into the middle, a birth, a death, the building of an altar, etc. Berlinerblau’s view is that these passages were thrown together by the Bible’s compilers for reasons we can’t possibly know now. We find meaning in them only because humans have an extraordinary capacity for pattern recognition. We are very good at finding artificial order in chaos—Ah, these chapters are about sexual misbehavior and its consequences—but it’s like seeing pictures in the clouds.

  chapter 39

  Back to Joseph, who is now enslaved to Potiphar in Egypt, and yet another story about sex. Joseph’s encounter with his Egyptian slave- mistress is pure Desperate House wives. Joseph is “well built and handsome”—the Middle Kingdom’s version of the cabana boy. Over and over, Potiphar’s predatory wife demands, “Lie with me.” Over and over, Joseph rebuffs her. He doesn’t succumb even when she threatens to frame him for rape. And it’s not as if Joseph is being faithful to a nice little wife back home. The kid has no wife—he just has character. The chapter reminds us four times that “the Lord was with Joseph” while he was enslaved. Joseph’s willpower, in other words, is rooted in his faith and God’s love
. 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. In any situation in which sex is available, men seize it. 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.