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

by David Plotz

  Visiting a nearby town, young Samson sees a Philistine girl and falls in love with her. Manoah and his wife then become the first Jewish parents in history to complain, You couldn’t find a nice Jewish girl? Truly. They say, “Is there not a woman among your kin, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” But their son just has a thing for pagan chicks. Samson insists that dad arrange a marriage with the Philistine babe.

  The Samson I met in Sunday school was brave, innocent, and holy.

  The real Samson, I’m dismayed to learn, is anything but. Samson is the original meathead—born 3,400 years too early to be a hockey goon, or the fraternity rush chairman. On the way to his wedding, Samson tears a young lion apart with his bare hands. Later he eats honey from the lion’s carcass. At the wedding banquet, Samson bets the Philistine guests they can’t solve his riddle, which is about the lion and the honey. The riddle stumps the Philistines for three days. Eventually they threaten Samson’s bride, saying they’ll kill her and her dad unless she coaxes the answer out of Samson. She nags and wheedles and cajoles her husband for four days. Samson, clearly not the sharpest sword in the scabbard, eventually tells her the answer. She immediately passes it on to the Philistines, who solve the riddle. This enrages Samson, who also seems to think the Philistines have slept with his wife. (He tells them: “[You] plowed with my heifer.”) So the furious judge murders thirty other, apparently innocent, Philistine men. According to Judges, Samson kills them while he is possessed by the “spirit of the Lord”—a kind of holy ’roid rage. It’s not at all clear why God would encourage such pointless murder.

  Now it gets really complicated. Following the slaughter, his father- in-law gives away Samson’s wife to Samson’s best man, and offers Samson his wife’s sister instead (echoes of Laban and Jacob). Samson, who must be off his meds, flips out at the wife swap. He catches 300 foxes, attaches torches to their tails, and releases them into the Philistines’ fields, where they burn the crops down. (Like so many mass murderers, Samson gets off on torturing small animals. No word, PETA friends, on the fate of the foxes.) One bad turn deserves another: the Philistines retaliate by incinerating Samson’s wife and father-in-law. Then Samson takes revenge by butchering a mess of Philistines. The Philistines give tit for tat by dispatching an army against Samson’s land, Judah. To stop the war, Samson agrees to let Judah hand him over to the enemy, but the minute he’s in Philistine custody, “the spirit of the Lord rush[es] on him,” he breaks his shackles, grabs a donkey’s jawbone, and massacres 1,000 Philistines with it. Is there a lesson in this escalating slaughter? I don’t see one, except perhaps: don’t tell riddles. That’s what started the war.

  And last we come to that sizzling hot temptress, the Mata Hari of the Middle East, Delilah. Judges doesn’t say Delilah is a Philistine, but given Samson’s addiction to foreign sexpots, and given her eager cooperation with the Philistine elders, it’s probable that she was. Samson falls hard for her. The Philistine bosses order her to discover the secret of his strength, so the Philistines can capture him. I always thought Samson revealed the truth about his hair to Delilah immediately. He doesn’t, and that delay shows him to be even more of a sucker than I remembered.

  Delilah asks him why he’s so strong. Not trusting her, he tells her that if he’s tied up with seven fresh bowstrings, he will become weak. She ties him up with seven fresh bowstrings—presumably while he’s sleeping—and brings in Philistines to seize him. He, of course, snaps the bowstrings and drives off the attackers. At this point, any man who’s not a complete moron or entirely whipped would dump the treacherous vixen. But not Samson, who appears to be the dumbest Jew in history. Instead, he again cuddles with Delilah. She again asks for the secret of his strength. He lies to her again. The Philistines try to capture him again, on the basis of the lie, and he defeats them again. This happens a third time, but still he doesn’t leave her. Finally she—like his dead first wife—nags him so much that he gives up his secret.

  We all know what happens next. A very bad haircut. The Philistines arrest him and gouge out his eyes. The Philistines—apparently not brainiacs either—allow him to grow his hair again, then bring him out to dance at a celebration of their god Dagon. Shaggy Samson calls on the Lord to return his strength. He pushes down the banquet hall, killing all 3,000 guests and himself. Even in death, he remains an unappealing figure. He’s chosen by God, but he’s entirely ungodly. He looks out only for himself. His campaign against the Philistines—which costs the lives of innocent Israelites and Philistines—has no holy or pragmatic purpose. He doesn’t seek the good of Israel or the glory of the Lord; he seeks only private revenge.

  chapters 19–21

  Each time I think Judges can’t get any more gruesome, it proves me wrong. Here’s the story. A Levite man’s concubine runs away from

  him. (Actually, the text is ambiguous about whether she is his concubine or his wife.) The Levite follows her to her father’s house in Bethlehem and persuades her to reconcile. They begin their journey home. Late in the afternoon, they approach a non-Israelite city, but the Levite refuses to spend the night there. “We will not turn aside into a city of foreigners, who do not belong to the people of Israel.” (Remember this decision!) So they go on to the Israelite town of Gibeah, where an old man offers them shelter. Like a terrified bit player in a horror movie, he warns them to avoid the town square. They bunk at the old man’s house, but when night falls, the men of the town, a “perverse lot,” pound on the door and demand that the Levite come out, “so that we may have intercourse with him.” You remember the story now, right? This is what happened in Sodom, when the townsmen demanded to rape Lot’s guests. In that case, God intervened and brimstoned everyone.

  Not this time.

  As in the story of Lot, the host tries to protect his guest, offering his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine to the mob instead. The mob refuses them. The Levite, desperate to save himself, grabs his concubine, and shoves her out the door to the mob. “They wantonly raped her, and abused her all through the night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go.” She collapses at the door of the house. In the morning, the Levite opens the door and finds her lying on the threshold. Does he offer an apology for sending her in his place? Does he offer her a word of comfort? Nope. He says, “Get up . . . we are going.” She doesn’t answer, so he tosses her on the back of the donkey and starts toward home. By the time they get home, she has died.

  (Every now and then you hear about an eight-year-old who has memorized the whole Bible. It makes you think: parents let kids read this?)

  And it gets even sicker. He cuts her body into a dozen pieces and sends them throughout Israel, demanding that the twelve tribes aid his revenge. “Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt?”

  What is the point of this shocking reworking of the tale of Lot? In Lot, it was the wicked Sodomites who committed the crime. Here, God’s own Chosen People are the rapists. (Had the Levite and the concubine stopped in that town of foreigners, they would have been safe.) In Genesis, God intervened to save Lot and his family from the mob. Here God is absent, presumably disgusted with the moral decay of His people. And the Levite himself, though a victim of the mob, is almost as wicked as they are: he’s a coward who surrenders his woman to save himself, then cruelly neglects her after the gang rape.

  An army of 400,000 Israelites demands that the tribe of Benjamin turn over the Gibeah rapists. The Benjaminites refuse, and after three days of bloody fighting, the town of Gibeah is eradicated, and all the Benjaminites except 600 men are dead. The other Israelites refuse to let their daughters marry any of the Benjaminite survivors, but they feel “compassion” for the men, because they don’t want the tribe to go extinct. So how do the Israelites show their compassion? They besiege a nearby city, and slaughter all the residents except 400 virgin girls, whom they give to the Benjaminites. They’re still 2
00 wives short. So the Israelites tell the unmarried Benjaminites to kidnap 200 more girls from the town of Shiloh.

  And then the book ends, with a marvelous, hit-the-nail final verse: “In those days there was no King in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” This perfectly captures the pessimism of Judges. Men who abandon God—and reject earthly authority—will find themselves in a chaotic, frightful land, a place of hideous crime and persistent idolatry, a place where law is dead, and only personal vengeance remains.

  EIGHT

  The Book of 1 Samuel

  The Bible’s Bill Clinton

  In which the prophet Samuel rules Israel and anoints Saul as the first king; Saul quickly loses God’s confidence; Samuel decides that the young shepherd David will succeed him; David defeats the giant Goliath and becomes Saul’s greatest general; the jealous Saul tries to kill David, who flees into exile; the Philistines defeat and kill Saul.

  chapters 1–3

  t’s no wonder priests, ministers, and rabbis have spent so much time, during the last two millennia, discouraging regular folks from reading the Bible on their own. The Good Book makes most of its clerics look like sleazeballs. The first high priest was Aaron, the Fredo Corleone of the Sinai. Then Aaron’s two priest sons dissed God so badly that He smote them. Here at the beginning of 1 Samuel—“First Samuel,” as it’s pronounced—we meet Eli, Israel’s top priest, who also does the profession no favors. Sitting in the temple one day, he observes a visibly distressed woman, Hannah, praying for the Lord to give her a son, because she’s barren. Eli sees her lips moving, but can’t hear her speaking. Does he ask her what’s wrong? Does he offer succor and counsel? Uh, no. He accosts Hannah angrily and says, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.” What a welcoming man of God!

  Rather then telling Eli to stick it where the Lord don’t shine, Hannah apologetically insists that she’s not drunk, but “pouring out my soul before the Lord.” (A lovely description of prayer, don’t you think?) Eli tells her that God will grant her plea for a son, and He does. Hannah dedicates little Samuel to God. She drops him off at the temple as soon as he’s weaned; this seems a little rough on both mom and baby, if you ask me.

  At the parting, Hannah sings a lovely poem of praise to the Lord. (A small sample: “He raises up the poor from the dust; He lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”) Here’s a question. There are few women in the Bible, yet they sing many, even most, of the book’s great songs: Miriam’s celebration after the Red Sea crossing, the song of Deborah, and Hannah’s hymn here, to name a few. Why would songs and poetry particularly belong to women? And, as a cultural matter, did women, who are otherwise so silent, really take public roles as singers and poets?

  Eli and his priest sons raise Samuel and do just as lousy a job with the boy as you’d expect three men to do (Three Priests and a Baby). The sons are “scoundrels” who steal the animal sacrifices, eat the burnt offering, and sexually harass and seduce the temple’s girl assistants. Eli, a feckless father, weakly chastises his sons, but doesn’t stop their misbehavior. An angel tells Eli that his family will be tossed out of the priesthood; his sons will die on the same day; and a faithful new priest—Samuel, we realize—will take their place.

  And, lo, it comes to pass. God begins talking to Samuel, and he soon becomes Israel’s top prophet.

  chapters 4–7

  Raiders of the Lost Ark, the prequel. The Philistines rout the Israelite army, so the Israelites dispatch the ark of the covenant—the sacred box containing the Ten Commandments and other holy objects—to

  the battlefield in hopes of harnessing its divine power for victory. A curious thing happens: the ark fails the Israelites. (This contradicts everything Steven Spielberg taught me about the ark’s absolute power. What kind of world do we live in, where you can’t even trust Spiel-berg?) Initially terrified of the ark, the Philistines recover and outfight the quavering Israelites. They capture the ark and kill Eli’s two sons, who were guarding it. When Eli hears of his son’s deaths, he falls backward out of his chair, breaks his neck, and dies. Then Eli’s daughter-inlaw, who’s in labor, hears of her husband’s death and also dies, but not before giving birth to a son, Ichabod, whose name means, “The glory has departed from Israel.” Now that’s a kid with bad karma.

  OK, back to Raiders. The jubilant Philistines place the captured ark in the temple of their god Dagon. In the morning they fi nd the statue of Dagon facedown before the ark. They return Dagon’s statue to its pedestal, but the next morning they find it on the ground again, this time with the head and arms chopped off. And the ark is just getting started with the poor Philistines. It then inflicts hemorrhoids on the people of Ashdod. (So Spielberg was also wrong about the ark causing your face to melt. It works its magic on your other end.) The Philistines move the ark to Gath, and sure enough, the Gathites soon have hemorrhoids, too. The ark goes to Ekron, and, yup, it’s Preparation H time there as well. (The “H” stands for “holy.”) With Ekronites dying, the Philistines are desperate to return the ark. Their priests advise sending it back with a “guilt offering” to appease God. What’s the gift they come up with? Five gold mice and five gold hemorrhoids! What would a gold hemorrhoid even look like?

  I’m apparently not the only one who wondered about the gold hemorrhoids. As I was finishing this chapter, Biblical Archaeology Review published an article speculating that the hemorrhoids were actually phalluses, and that the real affliction which struck the Philistines was not hemorrhoids but erectile dysfunction.

  Samuel leads a religious revival in Israel, persuading his people to tear down their statues of Baal and return to the Lord. Thus inspired by God, the Israelites reconquer the Philistines. Let’s pause for a second to note the profound difference between Samuel and the judges in Judges. The judges fought battles and deposed enemy tyrants, but rarely exhorted the Israelites to love and fear God. As a result, their success was temporary. The Israelites backslid as soon as the judges died. Samuel reminds the Israelites that they will thrive only insofar as they obey God. Worldly success is always caused by faith. So Samuel, unlike the judges, is actually judging his people.

  chapter 8

  Yet more bad men of the cloth: Samuel’s sons follow him into the priesthood, but they “took bribes and perverted justice.” Again the Bible is reminding us of the evils of inherited power. In Numbers, the Lord made the priesthood hereditary. That was clearly a mistake. Every priest so far—Aaron, Eli, and now Samuel—has had wretched, undeserving sons. The Bible is refreshingly meritocratic: again and again it mea sures the worth of men by their deeds, not their bloodlines. Except for the original patriarchs, none of the great Jewish biblical stars has gotten a leg up through nepotism. Moses is a self-made prophet. We know nothing of Joshua’s parentage. Gideon is the youngest son in the weakest clan of the feeblest tribe. Samson came from nothing; Samuel, too. One reason why Americans read the Bible more enthusiastically than, say, Europeans may be that we are a deeply meritocratic people, and the Bible affirms that equal opportunity is God’s plan, too.

  Even so, the Israelites want a monarch. Weary of war and fearful that Samuel’s corrupt sons will succeed him, the Israelites beseech the aging priest to anoint a king to rule them. Samuel bristles and gives a brilliant, moving sermon against monarchy: “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots. . . . [H]e will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of 50s, and some to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers,” etc.

  It’s very convincing, yet “the people refused to listen.” They continue to demand a king. The Lord tells Samuel: Go ahead, give them their king.

  Re
ally, can you criticize them for wanting a monarch? We just finished a book, Judges, which is all about what happens when there is no leader—mass murder, gang rape, anarchy, and so forth. The Israelites had lived through that nightmare. Samuel’s theoretical warnings against kingship fail against the lived misery of Judges. Kings may be corrupt and brutal, but the Israelites aren’t stupid for choosing monarchy over anarchy. I would have done the same.

  chapters 9–10

  Samuel is keeping his eyes peeled for a suitable king. The Lord tells him that His favored candidate is about to visit. It turns out to be a young man named Saul, who has lost a donkey and wants Samuel to help divine its whereabouts. These two details perfectly sum up the character of the future king: Saul’s the kind of person who loses the animal he’s supposed to watch and then wastes the time of Israel’s most powerful man in order to find it. He’s at once incompetent, careless, and entitled. But Samuel only notices that Saul is the best-looking man in his tribe and the tallest Israelite around, and so he has him anointed king in a private ceremony.

  Samuel convenes all the Israelites to crown the new king. When he announces his choice of Saul, the young man has vanished. A search party discovers him hiding in the luggage. A sympathetic reading of this episode is that Saul is a modest young man, showing proper humility in the face of God’s extraordinary demand. A less forgiving reading is that he’s not merely careless and incompetent but also deeply phobic. How many warning signs do you need? Even Samuel recognizes that Saul isn’t qualified to rule. Rather, he merely observes that Saul is very tall: “There is none like him among all the people.”