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

by David Plotz

  Second, what’s this “heaven” Elijah is ascending to? Until now, the only afterlife mentioned is “Sheol,” which is (1) down in the ground, and (2) where bad people end up. I suppose Elijah’s heaven could simply be heaven in the secular sense, as in “the heavens.” But that’s not what it sounds like. It sounds like a special destination, a holy place. Do we Jews actually have a developed notion of heaven, up in the sky, where God’s favorites go when they die? If so, it is news to me—and not good news. I’ve always enjoyed Judaism’s focus on the here and now. If a Jewish heaven exists, who gets to go there? Just Hall of Famers like Elijah? Or all good people? And what’s up there? Angels? Harps? Alternative theory: Elijah is not really dead, but in permanent retirement in the sky, and this is how he’s able to visit us on Passover every year.

  In the excitement, Elijah drops his mantle, and Elisha picks it up. He strikes the river with it. The waters part for Elisha, too. So this is where the phrase “picking up the mantle of the prophet” comes from.

  Now we come to the crazy, horrifying finale. As Elisha is walking to Bethel, a group of boys—“small boys”—starts mocking him: “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!” I’ve written before about the Lord’s profound affection for bald men. Here He demonstrates that His fondness for them has veered into lunacy. Elisha turns around and curses the taunting kids in the name of the Lord. After his curse, “two she-bears came out of the woods and mangled forty-two of the boys.”

  So, the Lord sends bears to commit a mass mangling, all because of a joke about baldness.

  After much head-scratching—bald-head-scratching, since I’m a bit of a Ping- Pong ball myself—I realized there’s one possibly sympathetic interpretation of Elisha’s behavior. He’s new at being a prophet. He hasn’t learned his own powers yet. Until he picked up Elijah’s mantle, he was a regular guy. His curses had no more effect than ours do. But now he has superpowers, and his every action has consequences. His passing curse, presumably tossed off the way you might give the finger to a tailgater, suddenly has potency it never had before. He learns the hard way—or rather, the forty-two boys learn the hard way—that you shouldn’t go around setting rampaging bears on every tyke who insults your haircut. In this charitable interpretation of the story, we must assume that Elisha is as horrified by the episode as we are, and that it helps him learn that he must use his powers only sparingly, and for good.

  chapter 3

  The bad king of Israel allies with good King Jehoshaphat of Judah to attack the Moabites. The Jewish armies end up in the desert without any water. The Israelite king begs Elisha to save them. Elisha says he would let the Israelites die without a second thought, but because he admires Jehoshaphat, he’ll help. (Again, Judah = good and Israel = bad.) Elisha then reveals himself to be a funky prophet: he can conjure the power of the Lord only when music is playing. A musician is summoned, and Elisha delivers a lifesaving flood of water.

  The besieged Moabite king, on the verge of defeat, sacrifices his firstborn son as a burnt offering in plain sight of the Israelites. This turns the tide of the battle, and the Israelites flee. The theology here befuddles me. If the Moabite made his child a sacrifice to his own god, not the Lord, then it shouldn’t have helped, since rival gods are presumably impotent. If the Moabite king made the sacrifice to the Lord, that shouldn’t have helped either, because the Lord has made it very clear that He loathes child sacrifi ce. The only theory that makes sense is that the child sacrifice did not work theologically, but did work strategically. It scares the heck out of the Israelites, who figure:

  If he’ll do that to his own son, can you imagine what he’d do to us?

  chapter 5

  This chapter marks the start of a long, complicated war pitting Israel, Judah, Aram, and Assyria against one another in various combinations. Brief geography lesson. Aram is the kingdom just north and east of Israel—around modern-day Damascus. Assyria is a larger empire north and east of Aram. The Aramean commander Naaman is a leper, and at the beginning of 2 Kings 11 he hears of the healing powers of Elisha. So, Naaman writes a letter to the Israelite king asking for a consultation with Elisha. The king assumes this is a trap, designed to provoke a war. (Imagine Kim Jong-il making an appointment at the Mayo Clinic.) But Elisha, who has apparently taken the prophets’ equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, has no problem prescribing treatment for the enemy: He says that seven baths in the Jordan River will clear up the skin problem. Naaman follows the advice and is healed. This persuades him that the Lord is God. He promises never to worship any other god, but begs Elisha for one free pass. He says that when the Aramean king forces him to go to the temple of Rimmon, the Aramean god, he will bow down in order to save his life and his job. Elisha says that’s OK. This is the first recorded example of “passing.” Naaman is the forerunner of the Marrano Jews, worshipping God in his heart but avowing another religion publicly. I always wondered about the biblical justification for this kind of deception, and here it is.

  chapters 6–7

  Elisha shows off to his disciples by making a metal ax float on water. This prompts a question: why can the prophets do so few tricks? They multiply food, they raise the dead, they purify foul or poisoned liquids, they manipulate water (walk on it, part it, have something fl oat on it). That’s it. And all of them seem to have roughly the same talents. Why aren’t the prophets more like the Justice League or the X-Men, with a diversity of God-given abilities? It would be more exciting if one prophet could stop time, another fly like a bird, another turn men into stone, another shoot fire out of his eyes, etc.

  chapter 8

  The Aramean king Ben-Hadad falls ill, and Elisha, again a doctor without borders, travels to Damascus to help him. While he’s there, Elisha has a conference with Hazael, the Aramean heir apparent. Elisha weeps during the meeting, because, as he tells the Aramean, he knows that Hazael will be an even worse king than Ben-Hadad, inflicting horrifi c agonies on the Israelites: “dash[ing] in pieces their little ones, and rip[ing] up their pregnant women.” This prophecy cheers up Hazael, who promptly returns to the palace, suffocates Ben-Hadad, and takes the throne.

  chapters 9–10

  The fi rst of several fiendishly complicated, soap-operatic chapters detailing the shenanigans of various Israelite and Judahite kings. One high point: the return of Jezebel. I’ve missed that hussy! A would-be king of Israel, Jehu, rebels against the current king, Joram, Jezebel’s son. They meet in the vineyard of Naboth, the land stolen by Ahab and Jezebel in 1 Kings. When Joram sees Jehu, he asks timidly, “Is it peace, Jehu?” Jehu shouts back, “What peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel continue?”

  That’s a “your mother” insult no loyal son would countenance, but cowardly Joram fl ees. Jehu shoots an arrow into his back, then chucks his corpse onto Naboth’s property. For good mea sure, Jehu also murders visiting King Ahaziah of Judah, making this a two-regicide day! (This is not the same Ahaziah as the equally unfortunate monarch who fell down in 2 Kings 1.) Jehu then marches to Jezebel’s palace. Jezebel, hearing of his approach, slathers on makeup. (She’s the first biblical character to wear makeup, and it is implicitly linked to her evilness. To this day, some American Christians associate makeup with wickedness and harlotry because of Jezebel.) Jehu stands beneath Jezebel’s window and yells, “Who is on my side? Who?” Jezebel’s eunuchs hear him and toss her out the window, where her corpse is trampled by horses, then eaten by dogs. This is why you don’t name your daughter Jezebel.

  In a sublime act of cunning—one our wit-loving God must have appreciated—Jehu announces that he’s going to worship Baal instead of the Lord. Jehu invites all Baal’s followers to a grand temple consecration. Once they’re assembled in the hall, Jehu orders his eighty guards, who have been waiting outside, to murder them. Creepy! Finally, Jehu’s men topple the temple and turn it into a latrine.

  chapter 12

  How’s this for confusion? A little boy named Joash seems to have
become King Jehoash of Judah, but he is also sometimes called King Joash. Meanwhile, the Israelites anoint a new king called Jehoahaz. When Jehoahaz dies, his son, also named Jehoash, becomes king. So, there are “Joash-Jehoash,” “Jehoahaz,” and another “Jehoash.” And the high priest is named Jehoiada. (On the other hand, there are four David Plotzes in my family, so I’m no one to talk.)

  Still, let’s not let a few confusing names distract us from the real significance of this chapter, which marks the official invention of fund-raising. The Temple is in disrepair, so Jehoash-Joash orders the priests to earmark certain sacred fees for fixing it. (The first building fund.) As you’d expect in a world without auditors or capital improvement budget committees, none of the repairs actually gets done. The priests spend the money elsewhere. (Versace sheets? Vacation homes?) So Jehoash tries an experiment: He places a box with a hole in the lid next to the altar, and the temple guards deposit all donations in it. When enough cash accumulates, the high priest counts the money and hires a contractor to do repairs. Invented in one short chapter are the building fund, the in-house auditor, and the collection box—all institutions that are still with us today.

  chapters 14–16

  Second Kings is the same story over and over again. A king does “what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Then he loses a war and is assassinated. Another king, who’s slightly less bad, replaces him and shatters idols erected by his pre decessor. Then there’s another war, and another bad king, and so on.

  Let’s take just 2 Kings 15 as an example. One king catches leprosy and dies. Another is assassinated and succeeded by his assassin. A month later, this new king is assassinated and succeeded by his assassin. He dies, and his heir is promptly assassinated and succeeded by his assassin. Then this king is also assassinated and succeeded by his assassin.

  As the Israelites busy themselves with regicide, the Assyrians exploit the chaos. It’s very World War I. Anticipating an Assyrian invasion, the Israelites ally themselves with their old enemies the Arameans, who are also being harried by the Assyrians. The kingdom of Judah, in turn, signs a peace treaty with the Assyrians, swearing fealty to them. So Judah and Israel, the Lord’s two kingdoms, have become mortal enemies. Of course they’ve brought their misfortune on themselves by worshipping idols, abandoning the Lord, and selecting wicked kings. The alliance of Judah and Assyria—the southernmost and northernmost kingdoms—squeezes Aram and Israel in the middle. The Assyrians quickly conquer Aram and sack Damascus.

  Having conquered Aram and forced Judah into vassalage, the Assyrians prepare for the destruction of Israel.

  chapters 17–19

  Reading these last few chapters of 2 Kings is like reading a history of Germany in the 1930s. A terrible ending waits just around the corner, and you hope that it’s somehow going to be averted, that God will somehow redeem the situation. But He doesn’t. Chapter 17 brings the first blow: the Assyrians conquer Israel and deport all the Israelites to Assyria. This marks the end of the ten northern tribes of Israel. The Israelites deported to Assyria vanish from history. They are the “lost tribes.” Now only the people of Judah and its capital, Jerusalem, survive. They will endure to become the Jews of today.

  After the Assyrian conquest of the north, life briefly improves in Judah. King Hezekiah eradicates pagan shrines and demolishes the bronze serpent that saved the Israelites from the plague of snakes in Numbers. (Too many Judahites were worshipping the serpent as an idol rather than recognizing it as a tool of the Lord.) The Assyrians turn on their old allies in Judah. They march against Jerusalem. Hezekiah temporarily buys peace by paying a huge bribe. The Assyrians besiege the city again, and this time the Lord afflicts 185,000 enemy soldiers with a mysterious plague. The Assyrians withdraw, and aren’t heard from again. But Judah is not safe. A worse fate awaits it.

  chapter 20

  On his deathbed, King Hezekiah weepingly begs the Lord to grant him a reprieve. The Lord listens and sends the prophet Isaiah to heal him. Hezekiah has a terrible rash, so Isaiah prescribes a fig paste, and the king heals right away. Is there any medical foundation for this fi ggery? Does the fig contain some powerful medicine, some kind of figgy steroid? I doubt it, though the Fig Newton is a divinely good cookie.

  Hezekiah shows off his city and palace to a delegation from Babylon. This turns out to be a huge mistake, like introducing your hot girlfriend to George Clooney—your chance of keeping her immediately drops to zero. The Babylonians see Jerusalem, covet it, and start making plans to take it.

  chapters 22–23

  Judah makes one last, desperate attempt to save itself. The new king, Josiah, and his priests suddenly discover the “scroll of the Teaching” in the Temple. I cheated a little and checked the commentary on this, and there’s general agreement that this scroll is the book of Deuteronomy. (Some scholars believe Josiah had Deuteronomy written and then claimed to discover it; more literal-minded readers believe he actually rediscovered it.) Josiah reads Deuteronomy, and it hits him like a ton of bricks. He realizes his people are doomed unless they mend their ways. They are breaking every law on the scroll. No wonder the Lord is so furious at them. A woman prophet, Huldah, says the Lord has doomed Judah—the land will become “a desolation and a curse.” Josiah rends his clothes in sorrow.

  Still, Josiah tries to change God’s mind. He reads the whole scroll out loud to the Judahites, then topples all the idols (again), knocks down the temples of the male prostitutes, destroys the pagan monuments built by Solomon, unearths pagan cemeteries, and even restores Passover. Josiah is like no king before or after—so faithful that he’s almost a second coming of Moses—but it’s too little, too late. “The Lord did not turn away from His awesome wrath.”

  This seems very unfair of God. Josiah does everything possible to restore his people to God’s good graces. He follows all of God’s orders. By the time of Josiah’s death, the Judahites are as holy as they have ever been. Even so, God doesn’t forgive! It seems oddly merciless. If He won’t save the faithful, what’s the point of believing?

  chapters 24–25

  The end. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invades and makes quick work of Judah. His army takes the king prisoner, deports all able-bodied men to Babylon, sacks the Temple, and executes the priests. Jerusalem is turned into a ghost town, with only its poorest inhabitants left to till the fields. The hope and opportunity presented in the first fi ve books of the Bible have been squandered. Ten tribes have been wiped off the Earth by the Assyrians, and the few remaining Jews have been packed off to exile in Babylon. Yet this turns out to be Judaism’s finest hour. On the brink of annihilation, Jews sustain their faith. The survivors believed so deeply that they wrote down holy books—the very books we read today—preserving the memory of God’s love through the exile to come.

  The book of 2 Kings ends with a heartbreaking vignette. After the conquest of Judah, the new king of Babylon—the delightfully named Evil-Merodach—releases the deposed king Jehoiakim from prison and keeps him as a courtier in Babylon. King Evil lets Judah’s former monarch eat at his table and gives him an allowance. The last king of Judah is a pet, a domesticated animal, serving a pagan master. This is the fate of God’s Chosen People.

  TWELVE

  Digging the Bible

  In which I search for the Bible in Israel.

  s I’ve been reading the Bible, I have been feeling an overwhelming urge to see it. I don’t mean I want to go spelunking in caves in search of the lost ark of the covenant or that I expect to discover the remains of Noah’s boat, but I want to stand where the Temple stood, and walk where David walked. I don’t exactly know what I would get out of being in the land of the Bible. Would I suddenly believe it all when I see where it happened? Could I get closer to the truth of the Bible by visiting the Promised Land? I’m not sure, but I want to go, so I hop a flight to Israel.

  The morning I arrive, I take a walk through Jerusalem and stumble on the Monastery of the Cross, a 1,500-year-old Eastern Orthodox chapel in a scrubby
valley about a mile from the Old City. In a doorway of the monastery, I come across an extraordinary sign. It tells the following story. After Lot committed incest with his two daughters in Genesis, the sign says, he asked Abraham how he could absolve himself of the sin. Abraham owned three staffs, gifts from the angels who visited him to announce the coming of Isaac. (Those angels were, in fact, the Trinity.) Abraham handed the three staffs to Lot, and told him to plant them in this valley and irrigate them with water from the Jordan River. (The Jordan is thirty miles across searing desert from this valley, you protest? Just be quiet and enjoy the story!) Lot did as he was told. Though the dev il himself tried to stop him, Lot eventually coaxed the staffs to blossom. They wound themselves around each other and became a single tree of three woods: pine, cedar, and cypress. Some 1,800 years later, that tree was chopped down and fashioned into the cross on which Jesus was crucifi ed.

  Needless to say, I don’t believe a word of the sign, and I can’t imagine how anyone could. (It’s not a story mentioned anywhere in the Bible.) But I soon realize that wishful thinking is the foundation of Bible tourism. From the very beginning, travelers have been coming to Israel to see the Holy Land, and they discover what they want to fi nd.

  I’m hardly the first person to come to Jerusalem with a Bible jones. In the early fourth century after Christ, Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, came here for some biblical investigation. She is said to have discovered the site of the crucifixion of Jesus, the remains of the true cross, and possibly the tomb of Adam; and she built a church that still stands today. Not a bad month’s work. And what were the Crusades if not a very long, ill-planned Bible tour, complete with surly innkeepers, overpriced food, and an unrealistic itinerary? With the dawn of scientific biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, explorers returned to the Holy Land to prove the Good Book by finding archaeological evidence. Some of their discoveries were spurious; some were real. Explorers found several Mount Sinais and several Mount Ararats. On the other hand, explorers on the Dead Sea located Masada, the site of the famous Jewish mass suicide, which had been lost to history for 1,400 years. And some findings were unfalsifiable. There’s a “valley of Elah” in Israel, but is it the place where the future King David defeated a giant named Goliath? Who knows? But you can visit it today, and collect five smooth stones from the streambed, just as David might have.