The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

  A couple of minutes past eleven, Jimmy asks his friend Matthew to do a warm-up sermon. Matthew steps up. He's young--twenty-eight-- and looks a bit like the actor Steve Buscemi. He walks back and forth, his key chain jangling from his belt. He starts to preach.

  "People say to me, 'I keep the Ten Commandments.' That's good. But there are many other commandments besides those ten. We should keep everything the Lord says."

  Matthew's voice fills the church. He preaches hard, hunched over, his back almost parallel with the ground, as if he were doing a Groucho Marx impersonation.

  "I've heard people say the Bible means this or the Bible means that. But, my friends, the Bible means exactly what it says. If God wanted it changed, He would have had the prophets change it."

  "C'mon!" says Jimmy, who is sitting on a chair behind the altar. He lifts his hands in the air. "Amen!"

  Matthew's carrying a blue handkerchief. Every minute or so, he wipes his brow or the saliva from the corner of his mouth. He's working on three hours of sleep--he preached late last night at another church.

  Matthew was supposed to talk for only a few minutes, but it's been twenty minutes, and he's going strong. He jumps from topic to topic, wherever God takes him: healing, the chastening hand of God, his son's injured leg, Jesus' mercy, the war in Iraq ("We shouldn't be in Iraq, and God will punish President Bush").

  The Catholic and Lutheran services I've been to have been like wellorchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.

  "I was trying not to get started again," says Matthew, "but I believe in obeying the Holy Spirit . . . huh."

  Matthew punctuates every sentence with a pronounced exhale. Huh. In the beginning, it was distracting, but now it seems sort of natural.

  "Today is the day for salvation, huh. Right here in this church, huh."

  It's been an hour now. Jimmy is stamping his feet. Jimmy's wife, who is sitting behind me, is weeping and saying "Praise Jesus." Another woman a few pews back is speaking in tongues. "Shamamamamama," she says. Then her body jerks. "Shamamamam."

  I feel myself getting hypnotized by those repetitive huhs. I feel like the top of my head is being swept upward. For a minute, everything fades to white except for Matthew and his shirtsleeves and his blue handkerchief and his godly riffs.

  I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I'm not ready to surrender yet.

  Matthew preaches for an hour and a half before the Spirit moves him to stop. The warm-up act has gone on so long, there is no need for Jimmy's main event. Jimmy wraps up the service by anointing his parishioners with olive oil. Jimmy feels badly that I had come all the way down and missed the big show. Not a single snake had been handled, no strychnine drunk.

  "Let me see if the Holy Spirit moves me," he says. From under the altar, Jimmy slips out a wooden box with a clear plastic top. Inside, a copperhead, about three feet long, slithers over itself, flicking its tongue.

  Jimmy tells me he takes good care of the snakes. "I clean 'em, care for 'em, water 'em, and feed 'em mice." And afterward, he lets them go back to the mountains. (Regardless, my animal rights activist aunt Marti was furious at me for coming down here at all.)

  Jimmy sits on a bench and closes his eyes. "Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta," he says. He's speaking in tongues, a descending scale. "Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Oh, thank you Jesus Ha-ta-ta-ta."

  Jimmy opens his eyes and reaches down for the copperhead. He picks it up with one hand near the head, one near the tail, moving his hands in slow little circles. "Ha-ta-ta-ta." The snake just flicks its tongue. He does this for a minute, holding the serpent at eyes level. Then slowly, carefully returns the snake to its box. Jimmy is out of his trance. The weird thing is that his appearance has completely changed. He looks happier, fuller, transformed from two minutes ago. Maybe that's how Moses glowed when he came down from the mountain.

  "How did the snake feel?" I ask.

  "Not cold and slimy. More like velvet."

  "And what did you feel?"

  "It's joyful," says Jimmy. "Like a bucket of warm water pouring over your head."

  I don't handle the copperhead myself. I had promised Julie I wouldn't. If I really needed to fulfill that literal part of the Bible, she pointed out I could always handle a garter snake, since the Scriptures never specify venomous snakes.

  Afterward, Jimmy takes me to a picnic at his friend's house. We eat cake and chicken and look at his friend's brightly colored Chinese bird. We talk about family and black bears and the Apocalyptic times we live in. And then Jimmy hugs me and tells me I have to come down and stay with him for longer.

  As I drive back to the airport listening to a country song about Moses's showdown with the pharaoh on AM radio, two things strike me: First, when you're there, when you're in that one-room church, serpent handling doesn't seem as bizarre as I had expected. It's like a great quote I once read: Religion makes the "strange familiar and the familiar strange." Here the strange had been made familiar.

  My second thought is: I wish Jimmy would stop handling snakes. My college anthropology professors would be appalled. So would Ralph Hood, the religion teacher who hooked me up with Jimmy in the first place. He wrote a culturally relativist essay about how serpent handling is a valid mode of worship, how it lets the handler embrace life by conquering death. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

  But I still have my risk-reward mind-set, and here the risk to Jimmy's life cannot outweigh the reward of transcendence. He's one of my favorite people from this year, and almost every Sunday, he's tempting death. And why? Because of a literalist interpretation of Mark 16:18--a passage that some New Testament scholars argue was not in the original Scriptures. I want Jimmy to find transcendence through dancing or hymn singing or Sufi spinning. Anything.

  Well, there's an old mountain saying that Ralph Hood quotes: "If you don't believe in serpent handlers, pray for them." That I can do.

  Month Eleven: July

  "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink." --JOHN 7:37

  Day 306. I spend the morning at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen again. I've been studying who gets which job and why. I've noticed something: The beverage station--which is the very first stop in the main room, right next to the front door--is almost always given to . . . a hot female volunteer. Is this a coincidence? Or are they trying to give the place a little sex appeal?

  My hunch is the latter. Which could be unbiblical. Aren't we supposed to be concerned with the spirit, not the flesh? I am stationed right next to today's official pretty lady. I pour the pink lemonade, she hands it out. She's a short, blond woman in a yellow T-shirt, the leader of a church youth group from Abilene, Texas. She hands out lemonades with a "Have a great day" and a smile out of a cruise line commercial. She seems to be doing well, but the soup kitchen elders can be tough. "Don't step forward when dispensing the lemonade," snaps a veteran volunteer. "It slows up the line. Just hand it to them."

  The blonde nods, chastened.

  There's almost always a church youth group at the soup kitchen. I have yet to see an atheists' youth group. Yeah, I know, religious people don't have a monopoly on doing good. I'm sure that there are many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular groups like Doctors without Borders.

  But I've got to say: It's a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good. Back in high school, my principal--a strict guy who wore disconcertingly festive pink glasses--started something called "mandatory volunteering." Every week students had to spend two hours doing good if they wanted to graduate.

  We students were outraged. Mandatory volunteering is oxymoronic! You can't legislate morality! It must be cultivated naturally. Plus, the policy came from the administration, so it had to be wrong.

  But I wanted to graduate, so I went to a soup kitchen
and cleaned trays. And it wasn't so bad. Looking back, I realize that mandated morality isn't such a terrible idea. Without structure, I would have been at home playing Star Raiders on Atari 800 or scouring at my dad's censored Playboys. Maybe Congress should take a page from my high school--or Mormon missionaries or the Israeli army--and require good citizenship from Americans. You graduate high school, and you get shipped off to AmeriCorps for a year--it's the law.

  Make an incense blended as by the perfumer . . . --EXO D U S 30:35

  Day 309. Only two months left to go, which freaks me out. I have way too much to do. There are dozens of commandments I have yet to follow. And despite my shepherding and locust eating, I still haven't submerged myself enough in a primitive lifestyle. This month I vow to do just that. So I take out my thin, brown hardcover copy of Daily Life in Biblical Times, and get to work:

  * Incense. I've started burning myrrh every morning. As you probably know, myrrh is one of the three gifts the wise men brought to Jesus. It's also mentioned several times in the Old Testament-- God told Moses to make a sacred anointing oil using myrrh, along with cinnamon, aromatic cane, cassia, and olive oil (the recipe is so holy, you were exiled if you used it for nonsanctioned purposes).

  I bought my myrrh at a shop on Broadway, a cramped place filled with oriental rugs and brass jewelry and a surly guy behind the counter who was angry that I was wasting his time by having the gall to purchase items from his store when he had important sudoku to attend to. The myrrh comes in several congealed cones the size of a chocolate truffle, and I light one on the kitchen table when I wake up.

  Julie scrunches her face and says, "It smells like a cathedral in here."

  Yes. That's exactly what it smells like: the nave of Notre Dame or St. Paul's. It's not a frivolous smell. It smells old and serious and holy.

  * Hospitality. They knew how to treat a visitor back in biblical times. If you're looking for the best host in history, Abraham has to make the short list. When three visitors appeared at Abraham's tent door, he ran and got them veal, cakes, and milk. He sat them under the shade of a tree. He stood nearby while they ate, just in case the veal was undercooked or they ran out of cakes.

  This turned out to be a clever move. The strangers revealed themselves to be divine, so Abraham's hosting was not for nothing.

  The zeal for hospitality continues in the present-day Middle East. When I was in Israel, it got to be oppressive, quite honestly. I peeked into a shop in the Old City section of Jerusalem, and the shop owner insisted that I come in, sit down, and have tea with him.

  "I'd love to, but I actually have to run."

  He looked at me like I had just taken a golf club to his car's windshield.

  "Sit down and have tea."

  It was not a request. I sat down and had tea.

  Food and drink aside, the proper biblical host offered something else: water for the guest's feet. Everyone wore sandals, it was desert conditions--it's a nice thing to do. For the last two weeks, I've been trying this out.

  "Come in!" I said to Julie's friend Margie. "Can I offer you food? Drink? Care to wash your feet in a bowl of water?"

  In modern times, this always comes off creepy, no matter which gender I'm offering it to. I've realized that foot washing is a surprisingly intimate and private thing, like gargling. In other words, no one's taken me up on foot washing. Margie went the furthest: She agreed to have a bowl of water brought out, but it just sat there forlornly on the table.

  * Olive oil lamp. An olive oil lamp isn't just biblical, you'll be happy to know. It's also environmentally friendly. As it says in the appropriately named web magazine TreeHugger, "Olive oil lamps are a pleasing way to light your home. Olive oil is a renewable, nonpetroleum fuel which burns without fumes or odor. You can also burn any vegetable oil, or liquid fat, or grease in these lamps."

  I ordered a replica of an ancient "Samaria" lamp from Israel; it's terra-cotta, about the size of a grapefruit, comes with a thick white wick, and looks like a genie might puff out of it at any minute.

  I use it at night. I'm typing right now by olive oil lamp. The flame is solid and steady and casts a healthy glow over the table, but it's also disturbingly high. I can't figure out how to properly adjust the wick, so I've got this thing that could be carried in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. I burn through a lamp full of olive oil in a half hour. Perhaps it's not so economical after all.

  * The robe. I've been wearing white for a few months now--or offwhite, by now--but I started to feel that wasn't enough. Before the end of the year, I wanted to sample some real biblical attire. I ordered a white robe off eBay, but when I tried it on, I looked like I was about to sing in a gospel choir. It wasn't working at all.

  The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn't cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd's robe. It is white, with a V-neck, a belt rope. It's surprisingly comfortable. A man rarely gets to walk around in public with his legs unencumbered by pants. It's a nice change.

  When I took it for a spin this week, I learned that a robe is a polarizing garment. At times I was treated as if I were a D-list celebrity--two Austrian teenagers asked to have their photo taken with me. At other times, I engendered not just the usual suspicion but flat-out hostility. As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins's book?

  I've felt absurd many times throughout in the last ten months, but wearing a white man-skirt was a particularly embarrassing part of the experiment. My beard has drawn attention, but it is also--paradoxically--protective, since it shields my face. A robe is not. A robe makes me vulnerable.

  My friend Nathaniel told me about a rabbi in nineteenth-century Lithuania who required his students do ridiculous things. He'd make them go into a bakery and ask for a box of nails. Or go into a tailor and ask for a loaf of bread. The idea was that he was trying to break down their ego, which he saw as a hurdle to true spirituality. That's what I try to think of when I walk around with my shepherd's robe, which sometimes billows up like Marilyn Monroe's white dress: I am breaking down the ego.

  * The slave/intern. My slave-slash-intern started a couple of weeks ago. And it could be among the top ten best things that ever happened to me.

  I've had assistants before, but this is a whole other league. Kevin is a nice boy from Ohio. He's well-scrubbed, has dark blond hair, and looks like he stepped out of a commercial for herpes medication (I mean that as a compliment, by the way; they always cast the most vigorous American types, you know?). He's also part of an a cappella group that sings Jay-Z tunes. I heard them on his iPod, and they're really good.

  And, man, has he thrown himself into this role of biblical slave. Yes, he does a lot of regular intern stuff, like researching, making phone calls, and data entry (he set up an eBay account for me so I could sell some of my possessions--mostly DVDs and flannel shirts--and donate the proceeds to charity). But he also sends emails like this:

  "Need any shopping done? Any baby clothes or things like that?"

  Or:

  "I'm willing to work eight hours a week or eighty."

  I felt a bit guilty at first, but that faded soon enough. It's hard to complain when a guy zips off to the hardware store whenever a lightbulb blows out.

  He also sent me this email yesterday: "If I can use your kitchen--mine's too small for these purposes--I'd love to bake you a loaf or two of Ezekiel bread tomorrow morning or afternoon, so that you can enjoy them over the weekend and on the Sabbath. Is this OK?"

  Today I come home from a meeting, and Kevin is in my kitchen, his hands covered in flour, mashing a mixture of grains with a mortar and pestle. Ezekiel bread is one of the few recipes in the Bible. God told the prophet Ezekiel to bake a bread made with wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet, and spelt. Kevin's Ezekiel bread was quite good. It reminded me of a less-cru
nchy graham cracker. Kevin later confessed that he tweaked the biblical recipe and added honey, but I felt it would be petty to rebuke him.

  "Maybe we should give some to your neighbors," Kevin says. "That would be the biblical thing to do."

  We knock on some doors, but no one's home. Well, actually, my neighbor Nancy is home, but she calls out from inside: "I'd love some, but I have a cracked rib, so I'm not getting up." I remind myself: I've got to get to work on that Hendrix proposal when she's better.

  Kevin says he'd like to take a portion of bread to give away on his walk home. He reminds me of the good servant in Jesus's parable. The parable says that a master left for a trip, and gave five bags of money to his good servant and five to his bad servant. The good servant invested the money and doubled it to ten bags. By contrast, the bad servant buried his bag of money, which meant no increase at all. A good servant is proactive. Kevin would have doubled the money, maybe tripled it.

  If a man begets a hundred children . . .

  --ECCLESIASTES 6:3

  Day 314. We go out to a Chinese restaurant with Julie's dad and stepmom. Julie is big enough now that the top of her stomach juts out at a ninety-degree angle, pretty much parallel with the table. She slides into the booth with impressive grace.