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

by David Plotz

  chapter 26

  The first two verses of Leviticus 26 are: Don’t make idols, and keep the Sabbath. If I could boil down the Bible so far into two sentences, they would be: Don’t make idols. Keep the Sabbath. I haven’t kept a tally, but I’d bet that the Bible has already issued this pair of laws at least fifteen times. By contrast, “Thou shalt not kill” rates only half a dozen reminders.

  Why do idols and the Sabbath dominate the Torah? Let me hazard a guess. A key purpose of the Bible was to distinguish the Israelites from those around them, to make them feel different from the nearby peoples who worshipped Baal or Molech. But the most obvious big laws—don’t kill, steal, covet, etc.—are nearly universal. Even those loathsome Molechites probably had laws against stealing. The laws that the Bible keeps noodging us about, by contrast, are those that separate Israelites from their neighbors: No idols, a seventh-day Sabbath, no eating blood, etc. Not killing doesn’t make you different from a Molechite, but not working on Saturdays does. The unusual rules are the ones Israelites must observe if they’re going to remain a distinct, inde pendent people. They are the laws that keep Israelites from becoming Molechites.

  What happens when Jews don’t observe those unusual laws? Just look around you. Or just look at me. Those unusual laws go unobserved by American Jews like me, and the result is that we are largely indistinguishable from American Christians and atheists. We and the atheists and the Christians keep the same big laws—we’re not killing people or dishonoring our parents or coveting—but since we ignore the defining Jewish laws about the Sabbath or eating bacon, our identity blurs. And that, I assume, is why the Torah keeps bothering us about them.

  OK, back to Leviticus 26, which is among the finest bits of writing in the Bible. It’s divided in two parts. In the first, the Lord tells the Israelites what glories await them if they obey His laws. They’ll get rain for crops, bumper harvests, easy victory in war. In the second part, God warns what will happen if they disobey Him. This bifurcation enables us to weigh precisely how much God values love and fear. His rewards for good behavior take up eleven verses. His punishments for bad behavior go on for twenty-seven verses. God cursorily promises milk and honey. But he waxes enthusiastic about suffering. Let’s sample just a few lines. This must be the most menacing speech ever recorded:

  If you reject My laws and spurn My rules . . . I will wreak misery upon you . . . you shall sow your seed to no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it. . . . I will break your proud glory. I will make your skies like iron and your earth like copper. . . . I will go on smiting you sevenfold for your sins. I will loose wild beasts against you, and they shall bereave you of your children . . . though you eat, you shall not be satisfi ed . . . your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.

  It’s a bunny boiler! The threats are incredibly scary but also a little bit funny. It’s a shaggy dog story of divine vengeance. Just as you think it’s finally about to end, God suddenly remembers another comeuppance (“the land of your enemies shall consume you”) and flies off the handle again.

  chapter 27

  If the author of Leviticus had an editor, the book would end with the thunderclap of Chapter 26. Instead it finishes with a whimper: this extra Chapter 27, about taxation and tithing. We are ordered to tithe one-tenth of our harvest and animals to the Lord. Is this law still in force? Are Jews still supposed to obey it? If so, here’s yet another way I’m falling short. But how am I supposed to tithe one-tenth of two cats?

  FOUR

  The Book of Numbers

  The Source of All Jewish Comedy

  In which the Israelites take a census, complain a lot, send spies to the Promised Land, and annoy God so much with their griping that He condemns them to forty years in the desert; Moses quashes two rebellions, then is himelf banned from entering the Promised Land; a prophet named Balaam rides his donkey and refuses to help the Israelites’ enemies; the Israelites enrage God by “whoring” with Moabite women, prompting Moses to order a mass slaughter of enemy women and children.

  chapters 1–4

  hey weren’t kidding when they called this book Numbers. It starts with a tribe-by-tribe census. Demographers will be enthralled to learn that there are a total of 603,550 Israelite men. Hmm. This is exactly the same number of men counted in the first census, taken a year earlier and mentioned in Exodus. That’s fishy, don’t you think? Women, of course, aren’t counted at all.

  chapter 5

  Another Monty Python–style episode. If a husband suspects his wife of adultery, he takes her to the tabernacle. A priest casts a spell upon holy water, then makes her drink it. If nothing happens to her, she’s innocent. But if her belly distends “and her thigh shall sag,” she’s an adulteress.

  chapter 7

  Numbers 7, in which tribal chiefs deliver their offerings to the tabernacle, reminds me of a question that’s been bugging me ever since I came across the sublime name Zillah in Genesis. (She was the wife of Lamech.) Why do parents limit themselves to just a few biblical names (Isaac, Ezekiel, Samuel, Rebecca, etc.), and ignore so many other marvelous ones? This chapter alone has Eliab, Zurishaddai, Eliasaph, Gamaliel, Ochran, Gideoni, and Ahira. Wouldn’t life be better with fewer Davids and Pauls and more Ahiras and Zurishaddais?

  chapter 8

  God’s abhorrence of body hair continues. In Leviticus He praised bald men and ordered healed lepers to depilate. Now He mandates that His tabernacle servants purify themselves by shaving off all their body hair. (And on the eighth day, the Lord created the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.) A couple of days after reading this verse, I happen to watch United 93, in which the 9/11 hijackers are shown shaving their body hair before the suicide mission. In Islam, shaving body hair is a martyr’s purification ritual, perhaps rooted in Koranic instruction. It is an eerie parallel to this instruction in Numbers, and a sickening reminder of the way ancient rituals can be turned to modern evil.

  chapters 9–11

  After a book and a half of rules, the desert drama finally resumes. The Israelites set off again toward the Promised Land. Naturally they start

  griping. After just three days of walking, the Israelites are already “complaining bitterly.” Fed up with their whining, the Lord sends a ravaging fire into their camp. Moses prays, and the fire dies. The people soon start moaning again, this time about the food: “Nothing but this manna,” they grumble. “If only we had meat to eat!” Like a mean babysitter, God tries an old trick: “You want chocolate? I’ll give you so much chocolate you’ll puke.” He says, “The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome for you.” God sends a fl ock of kamikaze quail, who crash to their deaths around the camp, forming piles several feet deep. As the Israelites gorge on the birds—“the meat was still between their teeth, not yet chewed,” as Numbers puts it, vividly—the Lord afflicts them with a plague, and the greediest die.

  chapter 12

  A fascinating episode of racism, with God and Moses on the right side (sort of). The jealous siblings Miriam and Aaron are grumbling against Moses because he married “a Cushite woman.” My Bible says that “Cushite” means she’s from Nubia or Ethiopia—African rather than Semitic. Aaron and Miriam insinuate that they deserve to be prophets on a par with the unsuitably married Moses. God hears their bellyaching, and summons all three siblings to the tabernacle for a powwow. He fires both barrels at Aaron and Miriam. How dare they compare themselves to their brother? Moses, He tells them, is nothing like their pathetic selves. “My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My house hold.” (“Trusted throughout My household”—I love that phrase.) Moses gets to talk to God “mouth to mouth. . . . He beholds the likeness of the Lord.” The Lord leaves the tent in a huff (or perhaps in a puff, since He appeared as a cloud).

  As He departs, Miriam’s skin is eaten away with “snow-white scales.” This is a delicious irony: havin
g criticized the black wife, she turns agonizingly white, not unlike Michael Jackson. Moses intercedes on her behalf, imploring God to heal her. God answers that she’ll have to wait: “If her father spat in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days?” So Miriam is expelled from camp for a week until her white sores disappear.

  The Cushite episode speaks well for the Lord’s attitude about race, but not for his attitude toward gender. It’s heartening that God doesn’t tolerate the grousing about Moses’s African wife. On the other hand, he punishes only Miriam for her rebelliousness. Weak-willed, traitorous Aaron, who learned nothing from his disloyalty during the episode of the golden calf, walks away unscathed.

  chapters 13–14

  Preparing to conquer the Promised Land, Moses dispatches a dozen spies, including Joshua, to reconnoiter Canaan. Is the soil rich or poor? Are the inhabitants strong or weak? Are the cities mighty or feeble? The scouts spend forty days in Canaan and return with an evenhanded report. The land is flowing with milk and honey, but the cities are fortified. When the spy Caleb says that the Israelites can certainly conquer the land, the other spies (except Joshua) recant their story. They turn on Caleb and began spreading lies: Canaan is actually filled with giants—bloodthirsty “Nephilim,” the offspring of human women who married angels.

  The Israelites immediately quail. “If only we had died in the land of Egypt . . . or if only we might die in this wilderness. Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword?”

  What’s with the histrionic fatalism of the Israelites? Whenever Moses or his people run into even the slightest trouble, they wail the 1500 BC equivalent of, “Kill me now!” or “I wish I were dead!” (In Numbers 11, for example, Moses cries to the Lord, “If you would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg you.”) I hope my fellow Jews won’t take offense, but it seems to me that this is a distinctively Jewish form of complaint. “Kill me now” is a foundation of modern Jewish humor— the mother who sticks her head in the oven when her son drops out of medical school or dates a Christian girl, for example; or the entire oeuvre of Woody Allen. I suspect the Torah is the source of this exaggerated fatalism. What began as genuine, if melodramatic, anguish in Exodus and Numbers has, over thousands of years, and by millions of irreverent yeshiva boys, been tweaked into comedy.

  Anyway, back to the Israelites, who are now weeping and demanding to return to Egypt. Joshua and Caleb yell at the Israelites to pull themselves together, insisting that they’ll easily conquer Canaan if they just obey the Lord. Listen carefully to how Joshua and Caleb describe the inhabitants of Canaan, the people who possess the land the Israelites want to seize: “Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey.” Prey—that’s a breathtaking and sinister word! Again we’re reminded that the Bible is not aspiring to be a book for everyone. It is not preaching universal truth for all men. This is the work of a single tribe at war with everyone around it.

  The inconstancy of the Israelites again peeves the Lord, who threatens once more to abandon His covenant. Moses talks Him out of it, reminding Him that He is “slow to anger and abiding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression.” Now, as I’ve discussed, this is a deeply inaccurate description of the Lord, who is quick to anger and short on kindness, but the flattery works. God agrees not to kill off the Israelites, though He doesn’t let them walk free, either. He says that none of the Israelites who came out of Egypt will be allowed to enter the Promised Land. They must all wander the desert for forty years (forty again). This is one ruthless deity: “Your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness. . . . Thus you shall know what it means to thwart me.” God spares brave Caleb and Joshua—they alone will survive to enter the Promised Land.

  Who deserves our sympathy during this terrible episode? The Lord is impatient and remorseless with His Chosen People. But can you blame Him? The Israelites are impossible: faithless, childish, and cowardly.

  But can you blame them? One lesson of America’s recent wars is that people who’ve been oppressed for generations are not immediately ready for rational self- government. They have habits of violence and intolerance that can’t be shrugged off in a moment. The Israelites were in bondage for 430 years: it’s unreasonable to demand that they immediately govern themselves and trust in God. God abandoned them for twenty generations, yet now He expects absolute loyalty after just a few months of wandering. So I sympathize with the Israelites’ fears. They need, perhaps, a gentler God. But for the same reason, it’s very hard to argue with God’s forty-year plan. Just as it took a generation for Korea and Germany to shake off their war trauma, so the Israelites need a generation in the wilderness. The freed slaves are too timid and unstable to conquer the Promised Land. The testing of the desert journey—the self- sufficiency it requires of the young Israelites—will harden them for conquest. So God is being cruel but practical, ruthless for a purpose.

  chapter 16

  An astonishing rebellion against Moses. A Levite named Korah and a few sidekicks denounce Moses for hoarding God’s love. The rebels declare: “For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation?” Moses challenges the rebels to a divine duel. Korah and his 250 followers are to show up (at dawn, of course) and the Lord will choose who is truly holy. The next morning, they gather outside the tabernacle—not just the 250 rebels, but all the Israelites, who now support Korah against Moses. This is a very bad decision. Again, the Israelites face the prospect of becoming seriously un-Chosen. The Lord cautions Moses and Aaron, “Stand back from the community that I may annihilate them in an instant.” But Moses once more intervenes to save them, rebuking God exactly as Abraham did about Sodom: “When one man sins, will You be wrathful to the whole community?” God agrees (again) not to kill everyone but orders the Israelites to move away from the tents of Korah and two other rebel leaders.

  Moses then explains to the Israelites how he’ll prove that the Lord speaks through him alone. He tells them, “By this you shall know it was the Lord who sent me to do all these things. . . . If [the rebel leaders] die as all men do, if their lot be the common fate of all mankind, it was not the Lord who sent me. But if the Lord brings about something unheard-of, so that the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up . . . you shall know these men spurned the Lord.” And lo and behold, the ground “burst[s] asunder” and the earth swallows up Korah, his fellow leaders, and all their wives and children. The other 250 rebels are engulfed by fire.

  Despite his defeat, Korah raised a critical question: Why should the few priests and prophets monopolize God? What’s so great about Moses that he should control access to the divine? In the 3,500 years since, many religions have come down on Korah’s side, deciding that God belongs to the masses, not to an anointed elite. (See Martin Luther, for example.) But the Bible disagrees. It rules emphatically— smitingly—for Moses, for the few rather than the many.

  I have neglected to mention the most interesting word in the chapter: Sheol. Moses says that when the earth swallows the rebels, they will fall into Sheol. I cheated and looked at the commentary, which says that Sheol is the “netherworld, the abode of the dead.” This challenges one of my strongest held (and favorite) beliefs about Judaism— that we have no afterlife. Ignoring the hereafter, I always thought, makes Judaism and Jews more concerned with life on Earth. If there’s no salvation, you’d better make the most of the present. But Sheol knocks all this down. Does this mean that Jews have a heaven and a hell? Can we get saved, too? And damned? How important is Sheol to our theology, anyway?

  chapter 17

  The Israelites still haven’t learned their lesson. The very day after Korah’s execution, they complain about it. As you can imagine, God is not pleased. As in a summer rerun, the Lord tells Moses and Aaron to stand aside so He can annihilate the Israelites—this time with a plague. Moses and Aaron soothe the Lord by burning incense, but not before 14,700 Israelites are killed.

&n
bsp; Let us pause here to discuss an obvious puzzle in the text. Time and again, according to the Bible, the Israelites have witnessed the Lord do something utterly miraculous that ought to end their doubts about Him, yet time and again the Israelites keep kvetching. They beg for food: He supplies them with manna. They need water: Moses brings it forth from a rock. They must cross the Red Sea: He pushes the ocean back. Over and over and over again, He presents evidence of His absolute power. Just one day before, He had caused the rebels to be swallowed by the earth and consumed by fire. Isn’t that pretty convincing evidence of His absolute power? I don’t know about you, but had I been an ancient Israelite and witnessed such awesome doings, I would have been a fervent Torah-thumper. Yet the Israelites remain faithless and fi ckle.

  This leads me to the following line of inquiry. If you’re still dubious after witnessing all that has been described in the Torah, either:

  (1) You are a faithless, cynical skeptic. or:

  (2) You didn’t actually witness the events that you are supposed to have witnessed.

  Both of these explanations are problematic for anyone who believes that the Bible is literally true. If the Israelites are so faithless that even the most obvious miracles won’t convince them, then they’re truly hopeless, and stupid. The second explanation seems to be the commonsense account of the Israelites’ behavior, but it’s troublesome, too. If the described miracles never occurred, then the Bible is made up, and that would be an even bigger mess for a believer.