It's hard to remember, at the end of a book, what you were thinking when you started it. I suspect I picked this up because its title promised a light-hearted romp through some of the sillier contradictions and archaic nonsenses of the Bible. I'm an atheist with no tolerance for thoughtless bullshit, so I reckon this looked like an easy indulgence. Mind candy, an insubstantial piece of skeptical scorn.

But that's not what this book is. Sure, Jacobs finds plenty of bizarre shit in the Bible, but one of the first things he learns is that everyone knows the Bible is full of bizarre shit:

In Judaism, the biblical laws that come without explanation--and there are many--are called chukim.

Yup, there's a word for it. Jacobs tackles his task methodically, focusing changing his life a few commandments at a time, and adopts, piece by piece, as many of the trappings of religion as he can. By the end, after a few field trips, he's transformed himself inside and out. Transformed is, perhaps, dramatic. But he grows to think of himself as having an alter-ego, Jacob, the religious side brought out by this experiment. Jacob co-exists with A.J., who remains selfish and skeptical.

My alter ego's behavior points to one of the biggest mysteries of the Bible. 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." They're all jumbled up like a chopped salad.

Lots of the book is amusing, if not outright hilarious, as he struggles with the contradictions inherent in attempting to literally interpret an archaic translated oral tradition in the modern world. My favourite was his trip to the Creationist Museum:

The first thing I see is a life-size diorama of an Eden-like scene. There's a waterfall, a stream, and cypress trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cave girl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She's playing awfully close to a fierce-looking razor-toothed T. rex. Don't worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The T. Rex's scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas' teeth.

As an atheist, I am inclined to lump all religious people into the same bucket. But Jacobs makes it clear that there is huge diversity in approach to the Bible:

The creationists I met scoffed at intelligent design, the theory that the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of this as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo. [...] That was something I hadn't expected: moderate creationists who view other creationists as too extreme. But it will turn out to be one of this year's big lessons: Moderation is a relative term.

The book went long, I have to say: Jacobs is culturally Jewish and so he spends most of his time and interest on the Old Testament. He pays lip service to the New, but the fundamental premise of Christianity is the cult of Jesus and he just can't bring himself to get into it in the same way that he can groove on being Old Testamenter Than Thou. Everything after the Testamental transition was theologically bland, but required to close his narrative strands (the neighbour, the kids).

The insight I took away is summarized in this quote from William Blake:

Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white

As Jacobs adopts the exterior displays of piety, and fights to control his inner life of lust, envy, and negative talk, he discovers he is internalizing the other piety. For example, he works hard at consciously thanking God for every positive thing that happens:

"Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you." It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

He volunteers at a soup kitchen:

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.

And that's the big takeaway for me: hewing to the Bible, with its arbitrary constraints and coercive intrusion into life, is far from all bad. It provides a structure that encourages good works. When I lived in Colorado, my religious friends volunteered and helped more than the atheist ones. They ran the hunting group for disabled kids, they helped repair houses trashed by tornadoes, they ... well, ok, Mike did all these things and he's only one guy, but I didn't have THAT MANY religious friends. :)

The book was also full of lots of little takeaways. Jacobs' previous literary project was reading the encyclopedia from cover to cover, and he's the sort of chap who appreciates a good factoid and can emit a good turn of phrase. Here's my collection:

Of course, stopping an emotion is not easy. The prevailing paradigm is that we can't control our passions. As Woody Allen said when his affair with Soon-Yi Previn was discovered, "The heart wants what it wants."

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

Amos talks slowly and carefully, like he only has a few dozen sentences allotted for the weekend, and he doesn't want to waste them at the start. I read later in the Amish book Rules of a Godly Life that you should "let your words be thoughtful, few, and true."

Ninety percent of the horses the Amish have were once racehorses.

Wisconsin Jews are known as the "frozen chosen".

I'm drawn to the weird. In my last book, on the encyclopedia, I made seven references to philosopher Rene Descartes's fetish for cross-eyed women, which I think and hope is a record.

Most--but not all--Christians draw a distinction between "moral laws" and "ritual laws." They still adhere to the Old Testament's moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments (and, sometimes, the ban on homosexuality), but they scrap many of the ritual laws. There are dozens of rules that Jews no longer follow as well. The reason is different, though. According to Judaism, animal sacrifice can take place only at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. And when the temple was gone, so was the relevance of more than two hundred sacrifice-related rules. (Including blowing a trumpet to the new moon, which was originally done along with a sacrifice.) Plus, Americans are off the hook with regard to another forty-five laws that they believe apply only in the land of Israel--many of them dealing with agriculture.

(On not touching menstruating women) "This is absurd," she tells me, as she unlocks the door. "It's like cooties from seventh grade. It's theological cooties." [...] (By the way, the history of impurity laws is fascinating but complex. Let me try to cram an hourlong talk I had with a rabbi into eight lines: The purity laws date from the Jerusalem temples. Back then, you had to be pure to make a sacrifice. When the Second Temple was destroyed, many of the purity laws fell out of use. Many, but not all. Jewish men still steer clear of their wives during menstruation. But they cite a different motivation: Touching might lead to sex, and sex during that time of the month--temple or no temple--is forbidden by another law, Leviticus 20:18. Also, to be extrasafe, the no-touching ban has been extended from a week to about twelve days. OK, finished.)

Charles Darwin married his first cousin.

After seven consecutive Sabbath cycles--forty-nine years--something even more radical happens: the Jubilee year. During the Jubilee year, you must return all property to its original owner (Leviticus 25:10).

The Red Sea is a mistranslation of the "Sea of Reeds." The idea that Moses (and his descendents) had horns comes from a mistranslation of the Hebrew word qaran. It actually means that Moses's face was shining, or emitted beams of light.

the Protestant idea that you can interpret the Bible yourself, without mediation. Sola scriptura, as it's called.

a friend of mine said that even observing the Sabbath might be breaking the Sabbath, since my job is to follow the Bible. That gave me a two-hour headache.

Bertrand Russell--the famously agnostic philosopher-- said there are two kinds of work in this world: altering the position of matter on earth, and telling other people to alter the position of matter on earth.

In Hebrew, evil tongue is called Lashon hara, and the rabbis compare it to murder. As the Talmud says, "The gossiper stands in Syria and kills in Rome." [...] Many Christians have a similar concept about negative speech. As Paul says in Ephesians 4:29: "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."

The Second Commandment played a huge part in the Protestant Reformation. Several Protestant leaders--including John Calvin--urged the removal and/or smashing of paintings and statues from churches. Riots erupted in Switzerland and Scotland, among other places. Aside from provoking idolatry, images were thought to be a sign of human vanity. People were trying to compete with the God of creation. [...] Some Jews of fourteenthcentury Germany wouldn't draw people, though they did find my favorite loophole: They illustrated their texts with bird-headed humans. You see, the commandment forbids the likeness of anything in heaven or earth--and, technically, bird-headed humans don't exist in heaven or earth.

We are made in God's image. (As the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, if triangles could think, their God would be eminently triangular.)

"You shouldn't use the word sacred, because it comes from the same root word as sacrifice. As in animal sacrifice." "And bless comes from the Old English word bletsian, which means 'consecrate with blood.' "What about Bible?" "I'm not sure about that one." "It comes from byblos, the Greek word for papyrus. Made from the corpses of once-living plants."

Ecclesiastes says that life is uncertain. "Vapor of vapors . . . all is vapors." (This is a more accurate translation of the phrase usually rendered: "vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity.")

"In the first season [of Happy Days], Fonzie wore white because black leather was considered too menacing,"

Emily Dickinson, who became a recluse in the 1870s and refused to wear anything but white.

There are an astounding 4,649 instructions that go into creating a certified mezuzah. You must write with a quill taken from a kosher bird, like a goose or a turkey. The scroll must have twenty-two lines.

on Yom Kippur, the Israelites transferred their sins to a goat and ran it over a cliff. It's the origin of the word scapegoat.

My hope had been to leave cucumber "gleanings." The idea of gleanings is one of my favorites in the Bible. It goes like this: When you harvest your field, don't reap the entire field. Leave the corners unharvested so that the leftovers--the gleanings--can be gathered by the poor.

sea creatures must have both fins and scales to be edible; shrimp, clams, and their cousins have neither

crickets, which are apparently called "the other green meat" (high in protein, low in fat). [...] Fluker's Farms, which describes its crickets as "oven roasted to perfection and then covered with the finest chocolate available to create one truly unforgettable exotic snack." Plus, you get an "exclusive" I Ate a Bug Club button.

Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth. It's both very funny and wildly sacrilegious. At one point Twain says he doesn't understand why the Bible so despises those who piss against a wall. He's referring to this verse in the King James version of the Bible: And it came to pass, when he began to reign, as soon as he sat on his throne, that he slew all the house of Baasha: he left him not one that pisseth against a wall, neither of his kinsfolks, nor of his friends (1 Kings 16:11). Twain writes: "A person could piss against a tree, he could piss on his mother, he could piss on his own breeches and get off, but he must not piss against the wall--that would be going quite too far."

The Bible's antiwinking bias (there are at least four warnings against winkers)

They point out that there are more passages in the Bible about the poor than any other topic save idolatry--several thousand, in fact. "The Christian call is to share," says Campolo. "There's nothing wrong with making a million dollars. There is something wrong with keeping it." Some megachurch pastors subscribe to a doctrine called the Prosperity Gospel. The idea is this: Stay faithful, go to church, pay your tithes, and God will bless you by making you rich. God wants you to be successful. God has nothing against a Gulfstream jet and a private tennis court. The Red-letter Christians call this heresy. "Christianity is not a watered-down version of middle-class morality," says Campolo.

"Fudge" seems clearly within bounds, but what about words like "heck"? Those are more morally ambiguous, but probably should be avoided as well. In the 1600s "criminy" was considered a curse word for being too close to "Christ." Same with "gosh" and "golly" in the 1700s, which were meant to evoke God and God's body, respectively. Later, "Jiminy Cricket" and "Gee Willikers" were wicked code words for Jesus. "Tarnation" began as an offensive combination of "eternal" and "damnation." And "heck" was an only slightly better alternative to "hell." A minister's daughter recently told me that when she was growing up, they used "Cheese and rice" instead of the name of her savior, which I imagine would also have been banned in the eighteenth century. Land mines lurk everywhere in the English language.

Religion makes the "strange familiar and the familiar strange."