Take THIS Literally

Based on the excerpt I read in the last Christian Century, I ordered The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs and started reading it last week. If you're not familiar, the premise is this: Jacobs, an agnostic who grew up culturally Jewish ("I am officially Jewish," he writes, "but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant") decides that he will spend a whole year trying to follow every single law given in the bible. Every single one. Which is a lot, by the way.

He wants to explore the power of the bible; what makes it such a driving force for so many people. He wants to try and learn something about the God behind these laws, though he's not sure a real conversion is on the books for him. And he wants to get deeply into the idea of literalism when it comes to scriptural interpretation. That last bit is why I bought this book.

First off, this guy is funny. ("How can these ethically advanced rules and these bizarre decrees be found in the same book? And not just the same book. Sometimes the same page. The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It's not like the Bible has a section called, 'And Now for Some Crazy Laws.'") "Funny" is not a word which comes up too often in a sentence also involving "book about reading the bible." For a girl who enjoys both Walter Brueggemann and Bridget Jones, this is a nice change of pace.

But he's on to something. At one point, during his concern about the whole mixed-fiber thing, he confesses, "I'm worried I could spend the whole year on the strange parts of the bible and neglect the parts about goodness and justice." Preach it.

The bible is a bizarre and lovely book. Powerful and incomprehensible and glorious and, occasionally, just plain outdated or silly. Silly to us, anyway. We live in a time when you are generally presented with two options for reading this thing: either a.) You must claim to take the whole book literally; or b.) You think of it as an antiquated book with some good ideas about justice, but basically slightly more than one of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

I have more thoughts on this than I'm going to write at the moment, partly because I want to see where Jacobs goes with this experiment. If anyone else has read this book and has reactions, post a comment.