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 5

  In general Deuteronomy seems intent on trying to clean up the messes of the first four books. In the preceding chapter, it vetoed polytheism. Now Deuteronomy 5 resolves the mystery of the two Ten Commandments. As you recall, Exodus 20 lists the ten familiar “thou shalt nots” but does not describe those laws as the “Ten Commandments.” Instead, that name is given to a different decalogue issued in Exodus 34, a dreary set of procedures and rituals.

  Deuteronomy resolves the conflict by rewriting history. Moses reissues the “thou shalt nots” of Exodus 20, and declares them to be the Ten Commandments issued on Mount Sinai.

  From a theological and ethical perspective, there’s no question that these Ten Commandments are superior to the dull Exodus 34 rules. But I am still puzzled by the ambiguity. In Exodus it is pretty clear that the laws of Chapter 34 are the Ten Commandments. I wonder if the disagreement between Exodus and Deuteronomy reflects a conflict between two competing visions of Judaism. Could it be that there were priests and leaders, including the author of Exodus, who believed that the laws of Chapter 34—which outline essential ritual obligations, after all—were indeed the most important rules? And could it be that Deuteronomy—a later book—is attempting to refute that interpretation, and to claim that the grander, more elegant, universal “thou shalt nots” represent the true heart of God’s teaching? Even so, it’s a little creepy and Orwellian. The commandments in Chapter 34? What commandments? You must be imagining things. I’m struck, once again, at how often the Bible shows its seams. My childish notion was that the Bible was a singularity, a unified whole, but the more I read it, the more I see it wrestling with itself.

  chapter 6

  I was wrong. I have heard Deuteronomy in the synagogue before. In fact, I’ve heard Deuteronomy every time I’ve ever been to synagogue. That’s because, as I discovered today, the Shema—the most famous of

  all Jewish prayers—comes from Deuteronomy 6. It begins: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Again Deuteronomy preaches the absolute monotheism the earlier books only nod at.

  The Shema, which orders us to love God with all our heart and mind, is followed by rip-their- guts-out curses from God and Moses. That’s how the whole book goes: gorgeous invocations of faith alternate with lightning bolts. It’s like a biblical good-cop, bad-cop routine. At any given moment, it’s not clear if we’re supposed to love God or fear Him, so we’d better do both.

  Just a few paragraphs after the Shema, there’s another passage I’ve heard many times before—the instructions for what to tell your children when they ask about the Exodus from Egypt. Jews recite these verses every year during the Passover seder. “Then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . .’ ”

  I don’t think it’s an accident that so much of the ritual language in Judaism comes from Deuteronomy. (There are several other examples, which I’m skipping.) Deuteronomy seems intentionally written as a CliffsNotes for Judaism, clarifying and simplifying the murky first books. Most scholars agree that the author of Deuteronomy is not the same as the author or authors of the four preceding books, and it’s obvious on the page. The first books are a jumble of stories, rituals, and laws. They are choppy, episodic, scatterbrained, self-contradictory—and lots of fun. But Deuteronomy is a lawyer’s book, as tightly organized as a Supreme Court brief. It makes the clearest possible arguments, ties off loose ends, and elides problems. There are no sloppy asides, no incoherent stories with talking asses, no inconsistent patriarchs. Deuteronomy attempts to knit the chaos of the first four books, that random array of laws and stories, into a single coherent theology. Deuteronomy means “second law” in Greek, and that may be its name because it’s a second try at the same material—this time stripped to the bone, with all the ambiguities cut out. I understand why no one teaches Deuteronomy to little kids. In taking out all the inconsistencies, Deuteronomy also removes all the people and all the stories. There’s no one to root for in Deuteronomy.

  chapter 8

  Another line from Deuteronomy that everyone knows: “Man does not live by bread alone.”

  chapters 9–10

  Moses sounds like a new man in Deuteronomy, and I don’t much like him. The kindness and humility he displayed in the other books have vanished and have been replaced by saliva-spraying resentment. He rails against the Israelites for their defiance and inconstancy. What’s the reason for Moses’s insults? I can think of two. First, they’re a natural human reaction to his situation: he’s dying, he’s disappointed, and he’s jealous of the Israelites who will cross into the Promised Land, so he’s laying into them. Second, it’s a canny way to keep the Israelites motivated. Think of their position. God has told them they’re going to conquer Canaan with ease. They’re finally leaving the blasted desert for a land flowing with milk and honey, where life will be easy, the fi gs juicy, and the olive oil virginal. They’ve got their great laws, their four-star general Joshua, their ark, their commandments. They’re feeling pretty smug. Of course they think they deserve the Promised Land. Moses is vilifying them in order to dent that complacency. If they get cocky, they’ll lose their edge. They’ll go soft. They’ll fall for other gods.

  For perhaps the 387th time in Deuteronomy, Moses lays into the idolaters. It’s the usual speech—blessings for the faithful, certain death for the heretics—but then it takes a sharp turn. Moses suddenly starts talking about what to do if “your brother . . . or your son or daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your closest friend” urges you to worship a rival god. Moses leaves no ambiguity: “Show him no pity or compassion . . . but take his life. Let your hand be the first against him to put him to death.”

  In the popular imagination, the Bible is the most conservative of all books. But passages like this one are a reminder of the Good Book’s radical morality. According to Deuteronomy, fidelity to God is so much more important than family that it’s better to murder your friend or wife or child than to tolerate his or her faithlessness. I don’t think this is what people mean when they talk about the Bible’s “traditional family values.”

  chapter 20

  A sublime passage. Before battle, the priests walk through the army’s ranks, asking if any soldier has a house he has built but not consecrated, a vineyard he has planted but not harvested, or a woman he has paid a bride price for but not married. Anyone who does is sent home, so that, in case he is killed in battle, another man won’t occupy his house, or harvest his crops, or marry his girl. It’s a heart-stopping moment, at once sweet and dark. It’s lovely in the way it recognizes that young men must get the chance to live, to taste the joy of life, before the state demands that they die for it. A little later, Deuteronomy insists that a newly married man be given a year at home with his wife—“to gladden” her, as Robert Alter’s translation sweetly puts it—before he has to join the army.

  Unfortunately, the remainder of Deuteronomy 20 is pure sulfur. Moses establishes the rules for conquest. A city must be offered the chance to surrender to the Israelite army. If it does, all its citizens will be spared, but enslaved. If the city fights, then all its men will be executed when the battle ends and all the women and children will be taken as booty. But—and what a but this is!—these forgiving rules apply only outside the Promised Land. Within the Promised Land, it doesn’t matter if a city surrenders: “you shall not let a soul remain alive.” God’s law is genocide.

  And environmentalists, check this out: you should kill all the babies, murder the girls and boys, put the women to the sword, but you can’t touch a leaf on a tree. Yup, it’s God’s direct order: no cutting down the trees in the enemy’s orchards. And this is a moral rather than utilitarian instruction. It has nothing to do with preserving the tree for your own future harvest. Rather, chopping down trees is forbidden because the trees can’t make the choice to flee. But isn’t this a weird sort of morality, which says that trees should be spared be
cause they have no choice about where they’re rooted, but every baby must be murdered?

  chapter 21

  There’s a CSI: Judea moment at the start of Deuteronomy 21: if you find a dead body in the countryside and the killer is unknown, the elders of nearby towns must mea sure the distance from the corpse to their village. The elders of the closest town then have to find a heifer—and not just any heifer, but one that has never worked—break its neck, and wash their hands over its body while declaring, “Our hands did not shed this blood.” This absolves the town’s guilt for the unsolved murder. This ritual is at once Dada and oddly appealing. The contamination from a murdered, unclaimed body is so profound that it requires a superconcentrated dose of absolution, the triple cocktail of animal sacrifi ce and ritual hand-washing and prayer.

  Whoa, Nelly! Here’s a law that must give biblical literalists conniptions. If you have a disobedient son, then you can take him to the elders of the town and proclaim,

  “This son of ours is disloyal and defi ant; he does not heed us. He is

  a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon the men of his town shall

  stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst.

  When I bugged her about it, my rabbi advised me that we’re not to take the son-killing law literally. That may be so. I’ve certainly never seen anyone’s son getting stoned—stoned in that way, I mean. Even so, the more I read of Deuteronomy, the more it disturbs me. The first four books of the Bible are full of immoral behavior, divine fi ckleness, and savage laws, but all balanced by extraordinary stories of decency and courage, the wisdom of Moses, the underlying love of God, and some of the most beautiful words you will ever read about protecting the poor, weak, and innocent. But Deuteronomy is cold. The warmth and humanity have drained away, leaving nothing but icy laws and a vengeful prophet.

  chapter 22

  The law about killing a son is followed very quickly by one about killing a daughter. If a man marries a woman and then claims she’s not a virgin, there are two possible outcomes, both ugly. First, her father can prove her virginity by displaying the bloody sheet. “Here is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity.” In that case, the falsely accusing husband is fined and flogged. But if the charge can’t be refuted, the wife is brought to her father’s house and stoned to death.

  Cross-dressing—a huge no-no. Women must not wear men’s clothing, and men must not wear women’s clothing. It’s “abhorrent.”

  chapter 24

  Can we apply Bible stories to modern American politics? Let’s try. Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a staunch Republican and a committed Christian, married his wife, Cheri, in 1978, and they had four daughters. They divorced in 1994. She remarried but soon divorced her second husband. Then Mitch and Cheri remarried. A heartwarming love story, right? A testament to the power of marriage and family? Not according to Deuteronomy 24. If a husband and wife divorce, and she remarries and then divorces again, her first husband may not remarry her, “since she has been defiled—for that would be abhorrent to the Lord.” Governor Daniels, any thoughts?

  The biblical fixation on female purity always puzzles me, and this is a particularly baffling instance of it. If female chastity is what matters, doesn’t the “defilement” occur when the woman marries her second husband? If you’re going to condemn her looseness, wouldn’t the second marriage be the event that troubles you? Why should the remarriage to the first husband be so offensive?

  chapter 25

  Levirate marriage is that between a man and his dead brother’s widow. (Remember it from the story of Onan in Genesis?) But if the man refuses to marry his brother’s widow, she “shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, pull the sandal off his foot, spit in his face, and make this declaration: Thus shall be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house!” The brother’s house will then be known as “the family of the unsandaled one.”

  chapter 26

  This is a very boring chapter.

  chapter 27

  First came the Ten Commandments. Now here are the Twelve Curses. I had never heard of this wonderful dozen—have you? Moses tells the Israelites that after they cross into the Promised Land they must assemble at various mountains while the priests proclaim twelve curses. The curses are magnificent: “Cursed be he who insults his father or mother. . . . Cursed be he who misdirects a blind person. . . . Cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife. . . . Cursed be he who accepts a bribe in the case of the murder of an innocent person,” etc. These curses cover less ground than the commandments—they mostly relate to sex crimes and unethical behavior, with very little about God or obedience—but they’re very exciting.

  chapter 28

  I thought Moses was rough when he cussed out the Israelites in Leviticus 26, but those threats were amateur hour compared with the bottle- and- a-half- of- tequila, waving- a-loaded- pistol threats Moses makes here at the climax of Deuteronomy.

  As in Leviticus, Moses begins by reminding the Israelites of the glories that await them if they obey the Lord: “Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the country. . . . You will always be at the top and never at the bottom.” Moses quickly drops the happy talk and moves on to imprecations. He begins calmly enough, with simple reversals of the blessings—“Cursed shall you be in the city”—but he soon becomes much more graphic and histrionic. Imagine being trapped in a stalled elevator with the world’s most unpleasant insult comic—not just Jackie Mason, but a divinely inspired Jackie Mason—and you will have some sense of what the next fifty-four verses are like. Let me pick out just a few lines at random.

  You shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your carcasses shall become food for all the birds of the sky. . . .

  The Lord will strike you with the Eg yptian inflammation, with hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from which you shall never recover. . . .

  You shall not prosper in your ventures, but shall be constantly abused and robbed. . . . If you pay the bride-price for a wife, another man shall enjoy her. . . .

  You shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival. In the morning you shall say, “If only it were evening!”; and in the evening you shall say, “If only it were morning!”—because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see. . . .

  She who is most tender and dainty among you . . . the afterbirth that issues from between her legs and the babies she bears; she shall eat them secretly, because of utter want.

  Holy hemorrhoids! Eating the afterbirth! I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as scary. I’m not easily spooked, but I actually start sweating while I’m reading this.

  It’s terrifying to contemplate a world without God. But it’s almost more terrifying to contemplate a world with a God who issues such threats. If this is what our loving God would do to us, well, God help us.

  chapter 29

  Moses gathers all the Israelites for a fi nal final speech, telling them that now is the moment they seal their covenant with God before crossing into the Promised Land. I’m confused about this covenant business. God made a bunch of binding covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all of which He applied to their descendants. He also made covenants with the Israelites when—forgive me if I forget one or two occasions—they left Egypt, received the commandments at Mount Sinai, and were spared after transgressing in the wilderness. Now they’re signing yet another agreement, just as they’re about to cross into Canaan. How many dratted covenants does one divinity need, especially since they all say virtually the same thing? Isn’t the whole point of a binding covenant that it’s binding—that it lasts forever and doesn’t need to be renegotiated every few chapters?

  chapter 30

  For most of the preceding three and a half books of the Bible, Moses has been battering us with thousands of rules, hundreds of warnings, dozens of legal anecdotes. But now, frustrated and near death, he boils all of God’s teaching down to a single sentence. As he builds up
to it, he sounds very much like a high school football coach giving a halftime pep talk to his losing team: It is “not too baffl ing for you. . . . It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us?’ . . . No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart.” Look, it’s simple, people! It’s a choice between “love and prosperity” and “death and adversity.” All you need is

  to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His

  commandments, His laws, and His rules, that you may thrive and

  increase, and that the Lord your God may bless you.

  That’s it. That’s all we have to do. I can imagine the Israelites muttering: Now he tells us! Why couldn’t he have said this before all those rules about lepers?

  chapter 33

  Moses says good-bye to the Israelites and blesses each of the tribes. This scene mirrors the end of Genesis, when the dying Jacob blesses each of his sons. The Mosaic blessings are very similar to Jacob’s, from the ripe animal metaphors—Dan is a “lion’s whelp” and Joseph a “firstling bull”—to the explanations for the geo graph ical location and economic interests of the tribes (e.g., Asher is said to bathe his foot in olive oil because the land where Asher settles is rich in olives).

  Among other things, this parallelism ratifies Moses’s place in the pantheon with Jacob. Unlike patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he is not the literal, biological father of the Israelites. Yet Moses is more interesting, powerful, and good than they were. It’s Moses who shaped the Israelites into a nation, led them to the Promised Land, and gave them their laws—the three acts that still define Jews today.