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The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
by A. J. Jacobs
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Synopses & Reviews From the bestselling author of The Know-It-All comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible.
Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.
The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.
Jacobs's quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for The Know-It-All. His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations — much to his wife's chagrin.
Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle thetwenty-first-century brain.
Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, The Year of Living Biblically is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down. Review: "'What would it require for a person to live all the commandments of the Bible for an entire year? That is the question that animates this hilarious, quixotic, thought-provoking memoir from Jacobs ( The Know-It-All). He didn't just keep the Bible's better-known moral laws (being honest, tithing to charity and trying to curb his lust), but also the obscure and unfathomable ones: not mixing wool with linen in his clothing; calling the days of the week by their ordinal numbers to avoid voicing the names of pagan gods; trying his hand at a 10-string harp; growing a ZZ Top beard; eating crickets; and paying the babysitter in cash at the end of each work day. (He considered some rules, such as killing magicians, too legally questionable to uphold.) In his attempts at living the Bible to the letter, Jacobs hits the road in highly entertaining fashion to meet other literalists, including Samaritans in Israel, snake handlers in Appalachia, Amish in Lancaster County, Pa., and biblical creationists in Kentucky. Throughout his journey, Jacobs comes across as a generous and thoughtful (and, yes, slightly neurotic) participant observer, lacing his story with absurdly funny cultural commentary as well as nuanced insights into the impossible task of biblical literalism.' Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Review: "Surely the Bible can teach and inspire. But has it lost the ability to startle? To make us gasp? In our society, where 90 percent of households possess a Bible and more than a third of American adults say they've read from it in the past week, it's hard to see the text with fresh eyes. Even if you're in the small minority that admits to never having read it, you probably know something about it. Maybe ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) too little to embrace it. Or maybe too much. Eighty years ago, the Jewish philosopher and Bible scholar Martin Buber maintained that modern man cannot, if he is honest with himself, approach the Bible with the solid faith of previous generations. At the same time, Buber judged that one loses all that is biblical if one takes what the Bible has to say as merely figurative, metaphorical or allegorical. His solution was that 'modern man' must 'read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham statements that cited the Bible as their authority. He must face the Bible ... as something new.' Within the Jewish tradition, which emphasized reading the Bible through the interpretative lens of the ancient rabbis, this was a radical break. Part of Buber's rationale rested on his assessment of the Bible as literature. It is not that Buber viewed the Bible as mere literature; being literature was not incompatible with being a source of revelation. Rather, he argued that scripture 'uses the methods of story-telling to a degree ... that world literature has not yet learned to use.' And so, he said, 'it remains for us latecomers to point out the significance of what has hitherto been overlooked, neglected, insufficiently valued.' Despite the title, 'How to Read the Bible,' James Kugel does not offer us latecomers a new way to read the Bible. Instead, over some 700 well-written pages, Kugel goes through the Hebrew Bible (which Christians have traditionally called the Old Testament) alternating a discussion of how ancient interpreters understood key passages with what modern scholarship can tell us about the origins and accuracy of the text. This is wonderfully interesting stuff, extremely well presented. But what really drives Kugel — a former Harvard professor who says he's been writing this book for 30 years — is his need to reconcile modern knowledge with his own religious practice; he is an orthodox Jew committed to fulfilling all 613 commandments traditionally found in the Hebrew Bible. Essentially, Kugel exemplifies the quandary of 'modern man' that Buber discussed. For Kugel, biblical scholarship has played a decisive role in undermining the traditional view of the Bible as God's inerrant word. It has done this in myriad ways: by exposing traces of diverse human authorship, by showing the connection between biblical ordinances supposedly revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai and other codes embraced by earlier Near Eastern peoples, and by disputing the historical truth of key stories, such as that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt or that they conquered Canaan. But, in fact, we don't need modern biblical scholarship to doubt divine authorship. If we read the Bible free from the assumptions that religion brings to the text, we find that the first several books neither assert nor suggest God's authorship. On the contrary, they often portray Yahweh in such a critical light that it is difficult to believe this is how Yahweh would have presented himself. The ever-startling fact about the Hebrew Bible is that, from the Creation to the conquest of the Promised Land, it is dominated by a conception of God which is at odds with how God is understood in Judaism and Christianity. Kugel is aware of this, introducing the term 'God of Old' to refer to the earlier conception and focusing on God's lack of omnipresence and omniscience in Genesis and Exodus. But what Kugel does not take up is what immediately engages anyone who reads the Bible as a fresh story: the moral character of Yahweh. It is not merely that the Bible sometimes presents God anthropomorphically, but that Yahweh is presented as a distinct individual with a distinct personality and very human character flaws. The ability of Judaism (and subsequently Christianity) to conceive of the Bible as divine scripture, authored by a God who loves and deserves to be loved, rests upon a disciplined distortion of the core story. Kugel, who is remarkably clear-eyed about these early interpreters, has a different way of putting it. He explains that 'the very idea of the Bible' — a divinely inspired and perfect text that tells us what to think and do — is the product of an 'interpretive revolution' that took place in the last three centuries before the birth of Jesus. 'Most of what makes the Bible biblical is not inherent in its texts,' he writes, 'but emerges only when one reads them in a certain way.' And further, 'It was this way of reading, as much as the texts themselves, that Jews and Christians canonized as their Bible.' Kugel's lucid explanation of this point is a major contribution to popular understanding. In contrast to Kugel's tight focus on ancient interpreters vs. modern researchers, Karen Armstrong's 'The Bible: A Biography' tackles the entire history of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament in scarcely more than 200 pages. Her volume belongs to a series of short primers on 'Books That Changed the World' and may have suffered from that format. Nonetheless, it has definite strengths. Not least is her success in describing the radical freedom that the early rabbis took in their non-literal approach to the Bible. She relates one tale in which Rabbi Akiva's fame reached Moses in heaven, and Moses decided to come down to earth to attend one of the rabbi's classes: 'He sat in the eighth row behind the other students, and to his dismay found that R. Akiva's exposition was incomprehensible to him, even though it was said to have been part of the revelation he had received on Mount Sinai.' As he returned to heaven, Moses proudly mused, 'My sons have surpassed me.' Armstrong's final chapter is on 'Modernity,' which she dates from the late 17th century. Like Kugel, she sees modern-day biblical literalists as breaking with centuries of religious interpretation. Implicit is her agreement with both Kugel and the ancient interpreters that the Bible should be read as a guide to life. But for Armstrong, crucially, each reader is an agent, and interpretive choices must be set within the political realities of our world. Thus she writes, 'Because scripture has been so flagrantly abused ... Jews, Christians and Muslims have a duty to establish a counter-narrative.' In a far lighter spirit is A.J. Jacobs' zany project, 'The Year of Living Biblically.' He set out to spend 12 months following all the rules in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. He began by making a list of more than 700. These he intended to follow literally, except where they are clearly figurative. Jacobs is a humorist, and at times he had me laughing out loud. To stop ogling women, he silently recited Bible verses; when his 2-year-old son hit him, he chose to overlook Exodus 21:15 ('Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.'). Still, his focus on following the commandments is in the long Jewish tradition of putting doing before understanding. In the end, he emerged from his year without experiencing revelation, but in the perfectly sound place of embracing Shabbat — or in his closing words, 'a quiet Friday night.' Yet if one gets serious about this lighthearted book, one must ask about its key presupposition, that the Bible should be read as God's guide to life. This brings us back to Kugel's problem: how to accept modern scholarship and 'yet not lose sacred Scripture in the process.' Kugel's answer is that the purpose of Scripture, to show us how to serve God, is more important than its historic truth. Believing that the Bible is, at least in part, divinely inspired, he views it as 'the most accessible avenue' to God and 'a basic program for the service of God in everyday life.' Kugel is content with this, but for skeptics, I would suggest an alternative way of approaching the Bible. Don't assume that it is a guide to life, and don't worry about modern research. Instead, try to read the Bible as you would an unknown novel. You may be startled. You may, in fact, gasp. And its human power may even transform you. Jerome M. Segal is the author of 'Joseph's Bones: Understanding the Struggle Between God and Mankind in the Bible.'" Reviewed by Jerome Segal, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Readers will cheer for this oddball who grows a beard, avoids wearing mixed-fiber clothes, and carries his own three-legged miniature seat onto the subway." Library Journal Review: "If he starts out sounding like an interminable Ira Glass monologue, smarmy and name-dropping, he becomes much less off-putting as the year progresses, for he develops a serious conscience about such quotidian failings as self-centeredness, lying, swearing, and disparaging others. He may not be, he may never become, a moral giant, but he certainly seems to be a nicer guy." Booklist Review: "The Year of Living Biblically is an extremely compelling book, appropriately irreverent and highly entertaining. More significantly, it is a tale of an intense and intelligent spiritual search that will speak powerfully and instructively to a generation of seekers." Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College Review: "A.J. Jacobs has written a — how else to put it? — Good Book. Let me take my review from the original, Psalm 2, verse 4: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.' And let me suggest that readers, whether they know their Bible or not, get to know A.J. Jacobs. But not in a biblical sense, please." P.J. O'Rourke Review: "Seeing that most people violate at least three of the ten commandments on their way to work — even people who work from home -— says a lot about the scale of A. J.'s feat. The fact that you need to buy six copies of this book to unlock the code to save all humanity...well, that's just pure genius." Ben Karlin, co-creator of The Colbert Report" and co-author of America: The Book Review: "A biblical travelogue-and far funnier than your standard King James." Kirkus Reviews
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780743291477
- Subtitle:
- One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
- Author:
- Jacobs, A. J.
- Publisher:
- Simon & Schuster
- Subject:
- Religious
- Subject:
- Topic - Religion
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- Christian Life - General
- Subject:
- Biblical Studies - General
- Subject:
- Christian Life
- Edition Description:
- S&s Hdcvr
- Publication Date:
- October 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 388
- Dimensions:
- 9.25 x 6.25 in
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