Book Review: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs
I am about as non-religious as a person can get. If it were not for my amazing matzoball soup and bagels, the MOTs would have taken my Jew-card away decades ago. In fact, I intentionally flunked out of Hebrew school (my mother was the principal), and I only agreed to a bar mitzvah (for grandma) on the condition that my parents never gave me shit about religion again. That of course only lasted until the following year when I was kicked out of the house for eating a Papa Gino's pizza during Passover. So, the decision to read The Year of Living Biblically was not taken lightly. I caught A.J. Jacobs on a TED and was so intrigued that when the book came in recently to Treehugger Dan's I stole it for myself to read first. In short, it was one of, if not the best book I read in 2011. Not only was it funny, it was fascinating and I learned a lot about items and practices I never understood in Judaism, as well as the Christianity.
A.J. Jacobs, a writer for Esquire Magazine and agnostic Jew, decided to live the Bible literally, both Old and New Testaments, for one year. Every moral and ritual law in the Bible would be followed, to the best of his ability, for a year. Jacobs identified about 70 laws to keep, from the sanction against wearing clothes with mixed fibres, go forth and multiply, no winking (four warnings), not shaving facial hair, only eating fruit from trees at least 5 years old, wearing tassels on the edges of clothing, to stoning adulterers (one of the funniest scenes in the book). However, before he could even start, there was the question of which version of the Bible to follow. I knew there were at least two, the King James (which made it more readable taking the thees and thous out), and the Good News Bible we are all familiar with from hotel rooms. The Good News Bible was produced in 1961 as a more accessible version for non-native speakers of English and missionary work. In fact, there are an estimated 7000 versions of the Bible just in English! There is everything from a hip-hop Bible, to one with the cover of a teeny magazine so one would not be embarrassed reading it on the metro. There is a Bible bookstore in Manhattan that stocks 3000 different Bibles. I do not know what Bible we used in our religion classes at Xaverian Brothers High School (Jesuit), but I never noticed passages highlighted in red. These red selections are attributed to Jesus' spoken word, the important bits for literal "Red Letter" Christians. William Tyndale's first English translation of the Bible was used as the basis of the King James, but Tyndale was choked, impaled and burned at the stake for his "heretical" efforts in 1535. The mundane becomes fraught with hundreds of little decisions each day in an effort to uphold the Biblical laws, and A.J. gathered a number of spiritual advisers from many beliefs to advise him.
Several field trips were made to places like the Creation Museum, Amish, Israel, snake charmers, Samaritans, Jehovah's Witnesses (fastest growing biblical literalists in the world at 6.6 million and 300000 new converts annually), and Jerry Falwell's church. Obviously he could not visit all the different Christian and Jewish denominations, but I did miss research into some of the major interesting divisions such as the Unitarian Universalists (instrumental in counseling draft dodgers during the Vietnam War), Canadian Anglican (one of the most tolerant and open-minded), Scottish Anglican (so religious that not only is sex banned on the sabbath for humans, but the farm animals are also separated), missionary organisations, Baptists, Mormons, the Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism)... Nor was I aware of all the different groups within Judaism. I knew of course about the reformed, conservative and orthodox divisions, and a little about Hasidim, but what about Lubavitchers and Karaites?
When I was a kid I got a silver mezuzah on a chain from somewhere and wore it until I saw it was turning my skin greenish-blue. Only now do I know what it was. At the end of the forty year journey, Moses commanded the Jews to inscribe God's words on their door frames. The words were the Shema, the prayer my grandmother always made my brother and I say before in before she gave us our breakfast orange juice. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one." The Shema is written on parchment and rolled up inside the mezuzah. There are 4649 instructions to making a mezuzah!
Animal sacrifice, Kapparot, used to be real big among the Old Testament Jews. However, destruction of the Second Temple on the Mount by the Romans in 70 CE, the only religiously legal place for sacrifice rendered it impossible to continue with this practice. Most of Christianity saw the destruction of the Second Temple as making clean slate and freeing them from Old Testament ritual laws. Some continue to perform Kapparot, even in Brooklyn, whereby the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl, before Yom Kippur. The bird is ritually sacrificed, then donated to the poor.
Of the many things that piss me off, religion trying to control my eating habits and sexuality are near the top of my list. However, this book opened up a new perspective on the food issue. I already knew some of the kosher laws were in place to help prevent health problems. Jacobs maintains that food laws were also a way to distinguish the many religions in the region, like marking one's territory. In fact, most people I know observe some kind of food restriction, be it vegetarian, no-fat/low-fat, no cow milk products, kosher, vegan, low-carb, organic, biodynamic...but at least they had freedom of choice. Many Christians believe that Jesus's sacrifice freed them from the Old Testament dietary laws.
Of course, there is still much to learn from the Bible. For example, religiously mandatory early welfare systems such as gleanings and tithes. Gleaning is when one leaves the corners of their fields unharvested for the poor. Tithes are when one gives 10% of their annual annual earnings to charity.
One of the oddest insights from the book is the chapter about the red cow. Apparently, in order for the world to be purified a perfect red cow is necessary. Purification is necessary before the Third Temple is built, thus making way for the Jewish Messiah and the Day of Judgement. To this end, both Jewish and Christian breeders are pouring resources into creating an unblemished red cow. The Christians believe that the Jewish Messiah would be a false prophet, or Anti-Christ, whose losing battle with Christ would bring about a thousand years of peace on earth and are trying to hurry it along.
A few more interesting tidbits:
- Spock's split-fingered "Live long and prosper," is a sacred sign of the kohanim, or Jewish priestly class .
- The Samaritan Bible is exactly like the Hebrew one, except that one of the Ten Commandments states that an altar must be built on Mount Gerizim on the West Bank. Mount Gerizom is the most sacred place for the Samaritan faith, being the location they believe Noah parked his ark, and where Abraham almost sacrificed his son.
- Certain fundamentalist Christians ban the imbibing of alcohol, claiming that the wine drunk in the Bible is grape juice. In steps temperance advocate Thomas Welch, partly responsible for my childhood addiction to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (Welch's grape juice and grape jelly), who marketed his grape juice as "unfermented wine" in the 19th century.
- The story of Jacob - "profound and extraordinary fact that the entire Judeo-Christian heritage hinged on a bowl of soup."
- A placket is the part of a man's shirt that covers the buttons
- The Bible mentions homosexuality twice, whereas it mentions circumcision about 87 times. "Is homosexuality really something people need to waste spiritual capital on?"
- When we try to avoid taking God's name in vain, or swearing we may still be doing so. Gosh and golly are 1700s euphemisms for God and God's body; Jimminy Cricket and Gee Willikers used to be wicked code words for Jesus; and tarnation is a combination of eternal and damnation. It all puts a new twist on Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz, among other things.
- Biblically, all were vegetarian (Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel...) until Noah, the first to eat animal flesh.
- There are also Karaite (fixing the holidays to the new moon) and Samaritan calendars. The Jewish calendar consists of a nineteen year cycle, seven of which are leap years, the Samaritan calendar however contains eleven leap years. Furthermore, the Samaritan calendar year starts on the date the Israelites entered Canaan while the Jewish one starts with the creation of the world. The leap years in the Jewish and Samaritan traditions are not parallel, thus approximately every three years Samaritan holidays might be celebrated up to a month later then their Jewish equivalents.
- It was only after the Gutenberg Bible was printed did followers start taking the contents literally
- Oral tradition, or a midrash, tells a variation on the parting of the Red Sea. It says that Moses did notraise his staff and part the sea, but instead, he hesitated. One of his followers, Nachshon, waded up to his nose, and then the sea parted.
The book is at Treehugger Dan's (Csengery u.) if anyone wants to grab it for some excellent holiday reading. And Bibles are still one of our best sellers if you want it in one of the originals.