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

by David Plotz

  One of the longest dietary passages concerns which insects we can eat. This raises an obvious point: the ancient Israelites ate insects! (For the record, the Lord bans all bugs except locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers.)

  Do these laws make sense? Does the Lord have a dietary plan? He’s generally opposed to grossness and wriggliness: Everything that crawls or “has many legs” is forbidden. We can’t eat any animals with paws. But I actually don’t see a coherent scheme. Why are pigs bad but goats good? Why are camels bad but cows good? Why are herons bad but hens good? Am I missing something? Is there a logic to the dietary laws? Or are they rooted in so many diverse sources (what animals were around, how the Israelites could distinguish themselves from neighboring tribes, etc.) that it’s folly to look for a guiding philosophy?

  One dietary law does make perfect sense to me. God repeatedly promises dire consequences for people who eat blood. You mustn’t go vampire because “the life of all flesh is its blood.” That’s why meat must be drained of blood before it may be eaten. I know—the bloodletting doesn’t make any difference to the animal that’s being consumed; it’s just as dead no matter how it’s slaughtered. Even so, draining the blood is a powerful metaphor. When you bleed an animal, you are somehow allowing the animal’s life force to escape—that’s why they call it “lifeblood.” We are even ordered to honor the animal’s sacrifi ce by burying the blood. Not that my qualms have ever stopped me from ordering my steak bloody rare.

  chapter 12

  If a woman gives birth to a boy, she’s “impure” for a week. If she gives birth to a girl, she’s impure for two weeks.

  chapter 13

  The lepers are coming! The lepers are coming! This is a mind-bendingly confusing chapter about how skin diseases make you impure. Unless you’re a dermatologist, Leviticus 13 is nearly impossible to get through. I did my best. You try a bit.

  When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on the skin of his body, it shall be reported to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests. The priest shall examine the affection on the skin of his body: if the hair in the affected patch has turned white and the affection appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous affection; when the priest sees it, he shall pronounce him impure. But if it is a white discoloration on the skin of his body which does not appear to be deeper than the skin and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall isolate the affected person for

  seven days.

  The author has an obsession with leprosy. Again and again, he describes a skin problem in pustular detail, then concludes solemnly: “It is leprosy.” In one of those biblical passages that sound more like The Life of Brian than like God’s holy word, Leviticus orders that a leper be expelled from the camp, his clothes torn, and his head uncovered. Then “he shall cover over his upper lip, and he shall call out, ‘Impure! Impure!’ ” The Israelites thought everything was leprosy. God help the poor teenager with a few zits. This anxiety about leprosy: Was it just paranoid primitive ignorance, or a foresighted public health precaution? The priests are instructed to quarantine those with skin diseases. Perhaps this is the first recorded example of a public health campaign.

  Leviticus interrupts its warnings to reassure men that, yes, it’s OK to be bald. “If a man loses the hair of his head and becomes bald, he is pure.” And it gets better! God also approves of male-pattern baldness. “If he loses the hair on the front part of his head and becomes bald at the forehead, he is pure.” So throw out that Rogaine. God loves a cue ball.

  At the end of the chapter, Leviticus wanders way off into Weirdistan, prescribing what to do when you have an infection in your clothes. Such garment ailments, according to Leviticus, should be treated exactly the same way as skin diseases. So if your shirt suddenly develops an “eruptive affection,” then the priest must be called to examine it, quarantine it, and diagnose it. Are your Levi’s suffering from a “malignant eruption”? Has your favorite silk blouse ever been afflicted with the dread “streaky green or red” illness? I have no idea what this passage is talking about. Is there some deadly apparel plague that Burberry and the Gap have successfully hushed up?

  chapter 14

  Leviticus isn’t done with bizarre epidemics. Now it’s houses that are getting sick, infected by “greenish or reddish streaks” on the walls. Unlike the clothing plague, this kind of sick-building syndrome makes

  sense to modern readers, at least those of us who’ve ever dealt with mold. (I caught the green streaks once—my upstairs neighbor’s toilet had sprung a leak.) The priest is called to treat the wall pestilence, the house is quarantined, and if the malady spreads to other walls, Amityville-style, the house is torn down.

  This section also prescribes the purification ritual for a healed leper. The former leper must shave off all his body hair—twice. More proof that God favors the bald.

  chapter 15

  On to sex. As with food and skin, Leviticus demands a constant battle against impurity. For example, if a man ejaculates, he must bathe, and he remains impure for the rest of the day. Incidentally, this law suggests that the Bible tolerates masturbation, since the ejaculation described is one that doesn’t occur during intercourse.

  A menstruating woman? Impure, of course—for seven days. As with all the impure folks Leviticus describes, it’s not merely that she herself is impure: anyone who even grazes her is contaminated, anything she sits on is impure, her bedsheets are impure, etc. If you merely touch a chair she sat on, you have to scrub your clothes and take a bath—and you still remain impure for the rest of the day. Judging by Leviticus, life was nothing but baths and laundry. How would these directives go over today? In his hilarious 2007 book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A. J. Jacobs carried a portable stool with him everywhere—so that he would never have to sit where a menstruating woman had been.

  chapter 16

  I never knew that a “scapegoat” was a real goat. Did you? This fact appears in an extremely odd, yet poignant, passage. After Aaron purifies the tabernacle, he lays his hands on a goat’s head, and confesses all the Israelites’ sins to it—thus “putting them on the head of the goat.”

  Then he exiles the goat to the wilderness, ridding the Israelites of their iniquities. Poor goat.

  chapter 18

  Hey—all you folks who say Leviticus is boring? You’re nuts. It’s riveting!

  For example, Leviticus 18 is crammed with incendiary sex laws. The first group of laws concern “uncovering the nakedness” of women. You must not uncover female relatives. Also forbidden to uncover: any mother- daughter combination, any menstruating woman, and thy neighbor’s wife. I don’t know exactly what “uncover the nakedness” means. I suppose it means “have sex with,” but why would Leviticus use a euphemism when the book is otherwise so explicit? These prohibitions are directed only at men. There’s no parallel passage forbidding women from uncovering the nakedness of, say, their brother.

  All this uncovering nakedness is a warmup for the hottest law of all, the number one all-time favorite, top-of-the-pops Bible verse for social conservatives, Leviticus 18:22:

  Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhor

  rence.

  A lot of ink, and probably some blood, has been spilled over the meaning of this verse. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard religious conservatives cite it in their condemnation of homosexuality. On the other hand, I once listened to my rabbi hold forth for twenty minutes about why the word “abhorrence” actually has a much milder meaning than, well, “abhorrence.” (Other translations use the word “abomination,” which doesn’t much help my rabbi’s case.) Despite his impassioned argument, I don’t think supporters of gay rights are going to get very far by trying to deny the Bible’s opposition to homosexuality. There is no Brokeback Mount Sinai. In this verse about abhorrence, plus a si
milar verse in Leviticus 20 mandating death for gay sex between men, plus the destruction of Sodom, the Bible is pretty clear about male homosexuality. (Lesbian sex isn’t mentioned in the Bible.) So how can Bible-loving supporters of gay rights rebut Leviticus 18:22? The strongest counterattack, I suspect, is to point out all the other things the Bible is equally clear about. It imposes the death penalty for gay sex, yes— but also for cursing your parents and for violating the Sabbath. It imposes exile for sex with a menstruating woman. And so on. Supporters of gay rights can turn the Bible back on the social conservatives: why do they fixate on abhorrent gay sex but not on abhorrent menstrual sex, or cursing one’s parents, or the Sabbath violating? Dare them to take all of God’s laws so seriously.

  In a fascinating aside, God tells why He’s so worried about sexual misbehavior. It’s not at all the explanation I expected. He says that the Israelites must follow sexual laws in order to keep the land pure. The reason the Israelites are allowed to expel the Canaanites from the Promised Land is that the enemy violated these moral laws, and the land punished them: “Thus the land became defiled; and I called it to account for its iniquity, and the land spewed out its inhabitants. . . . So let not the land spew you out for defiling it, as it spewed out the nation that came before you.” According to the Lord, the land is alive—the land itself can be purified or defiled, the land can rise against the people. An Orthodox friend of mine often talks to me about his mystical connection with Israel, and I have always (inwardly) pooh- poohed it as ruthless conservative nationalism pretending to be religious romanticism. But I take back my pooh-poohing. Until this passage, I never fully understood that when God makes His covenant with Israel, He is actually making a three-legged deal: He makes a covenant with His people, for His land. Maybe that’s why so much of Genesis is about real estate. Maybe that’s why, for many faithful Jews, being Jewish in America, Canada, or France is not being wholly Jewish at all: they are cut off from the land that is our covenant with God. We’re not His Chosen People anywhere. We’re His Chosen People on His Holy Land. And that’s why the land must be pure.

  chapter 19

  Leviticus 19 is glorious, a catalog of laws that’s even more impressive, in its own way, than the Ten Commandments. No one can argue with the Ten Commandments—who favors murder?—but they’re pretty vague. The laws in Leviticus 19 are beautiful for their mix of pragmatism and justice. Let me quote the middle of the chapter at length; it’s so good:

  You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Lord am your God.

  You shall not steal; you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another. You shall not swear falsely by My name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.

  You shall not defraud your fellow. You shall not commit robbery. The wages of a laborer shall not remain with you until morning. You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind. You shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

  You shall not render an unfair decision; do not favor the poor or show deference to the rich; judge your kinsman fairly. Do not deal basely with your countrymen. Do not profit by the blood of your fellow: I am the Lord.

  You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord.

  You shall observe My laws.

  Top that, Congress! In just a few sentences, the Torah speaks up for justice, charity, workers’ rights, and the disabled; it condemns financial crimes, gossip, and war profiteering; and it offers perhaps the most perfect one-sentence directive on human behavior: “Love your fellow as yourself.” (Ever wonder where Jesus got “Love thy neighbor”? Wonder no more.)

  I particularly adore the percussive repetition of “I am the Lord.” It’s the key to the whole chapter. Why? Start with an obvious point: these are not laws that people want to follow. The employer wants to hold the wages overnight. The farmer wants to pick up fallen fruit. The victim wants to take vengeance. So why should they follow these laws? In a tribal society, a society without a constitution, a Supreme Court, or a history of common law, how do you justify laws like these? How do you enforce them? There’s a lot of modern conservative legal scholarship about “natural law,” which, as I crudely understand it, is that idea that there is a basic underlying legal code, largely derived from the Bible, that is inde pendent of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—laws just like these. But, as this litany suggests, even biblical law is not natural at all. Law can exist only if there is power to enforce it (the police, the courts). “I am the Lord” is a statement of faith, but even more a statement of force. For the Israelites, what upheld these laws? The knowledge that the Lord—the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, the God of the ten plagues, the Really Supreme Smiting Court, was there to enforce them. “I am the Lord. You shall observe My laws.”

  Hmm, I just noticed a contradiction. How can I reconcile this praise of the laws in Leviticus 19 with what I wrote a few paragraphs ago about the antigay law in Leviticus 18? A minute ago I was bemoaning that law and looking for ways for gays to subvert it. Here I’m praising other Levitical laws. But Leviticus isn’t consistent—why do I have to be? The laws in Leviticus are a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous—and the repellent. Just after the incredible “I am the Lord” passage, for example, come bizarre laws against mixing fabrics and crossbreeding animals. These laws, in turn, are followed by wonderful statutes about respecting the elderly, being kind to strangers, and doing business with honest weights and mea sures. And those, in turn, are followed by draconian laws imposing death for idolatry, adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality.

  Where do I get off deciding that certain Levitical laws are glorious and universal, true 3,000 years ago and true today (You shall not render an unfair decision; do not favor the poor or show deference to the rich), whereas others are archaic and should be tossed away (Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence.)? Fundamentalists solve this problem by accepting all the laws as true. But the rest of us must pick and choose. Unless you’re willing to live in a Taliban-esque world of moral absolutism, in which adulterers and homosexuals are dragged from their beds and murdered, you have to take some laws and chuck others. We talk about the Bible as if there is only one. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from these months with the Good Book, it’s that we all have our own Bible. We linger on the passages we love and blot out, or argue with, or skim the verses that repel us. My Bible, I suppose, has a very long Leviticus 19, and a very short Leviticus 18.

  chapter 20

  My Bible probably has a short Leviticus 20, too. This chapter is like Law and Order: SVU—in which the Lord specifi es punishment for sex crimes. The sentence that appears most often is “They shall be put to death.” Execution is the price for sex between adulterer and adulteress, man and stepmother, man and daughter-in-law, man and man, man and beast, or woman and beast. A threesome of man, woman, and her mother is singled out as especially heinous: the punishment is not just death but death by burning. God allows a few tender mercies: marrying a sister is punished only by excommunication; sex with a menstruating woman incurs only banishment; and sex with an aunt or sister-in-law merely guarantees that the culprits will die childless.

  chapter 21

  Out with the Martin Luther King Jr. God of Leviticus 19, who spoke up so movingly for the blind and deaf. In with the Martha Stewart God—a finicky Lord who’s peeved by human frailty and offended by illness. God’s fussiness shows up when He issues His rules for the priesthood: no one who’s blind, a hunchback, or a dwarf; or who has scurvy, a broken leg, a boil-scar, one leg longer than the other, or crushed testes can join God’s squad. “Having a defect . . . he shall not profane these places sacred to Me.”

  chapter 25

  Every seven years, we’re required to give the
land a Sabbath, a rest from planting. God promises to deliver bumper harvests in year six so that no one goes hungry. And every fifty years, there’s a jubilee year, which is another year with no planting and is the time when land is returned to its original owner. As I read it, farmland couldn’t be sold permanently; it could only be leased until the next jubilee year, when the original owner could redeem it. Good intentions, bad public policy. I don’t need to tell any of my readers who own real estate what folly this must have been. Such half-century leaseholds would have discouraged land improvements, prevented economies of scale, kept property in the hands of lazy owners, and suppressed entrepreneurship.

  Like most first-time readers of the Bible, I’ve been stunned by the amount of slavery in the Good Book. The second half of Leviticus 25 is particularly shocking. At first it sounds quite tolerant, because it specifies all the ways in which indentured Israelites must be well treated. You can hold them only until the jubilee year: they can never become property. “You shall not rule over [them] ruthlessly; you shall fear your God.” This is all very apples and honey.

  But note whom the passage is not talking about: all the non-Israelite slaves. They, by contrast, become property “for all time.” Leviticus says you may not treat Israelite slaves “ruthlessly.” But what does that imply about non-Israelite slaves? Want to be ruthless? Be ruthless!

  Ironically, a nice riff about equality in law comes right before the passage on slavery: “You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike.” Great stuff! Of course Leviticus doesn’t really mean it. Every so often the Bible nods toward a universal brotherhood of man. These are the “kumbaya” verses that are quoted by modern politicians and civil rights activists. But they are aberrations. Most of the time, the Bible conceives of a tribal world, a world of a Chosen Us, and a nearly subhuman Them—an Us who can never be slaves, but a Them who can be exploited ruthlessly, a Them who are property, a Them whose firstborn can be smitten.