The Year of Living Biblically

by A.J. Jacobs

suspicion was that almost everyone’s literalism consisted of picking and choosing. People plucked out the parts that fit their agenda, whether that agenda was to the right or left.

It’s impossible to immerse yourself in religion for twelve months and emerge unaffected. At

I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn’t spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn’t shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, and fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia. No one has been executed for translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It’s intimidating, to say the least.

And right when water was about to get up to his nostrils, the sea parted. The point is, sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in.”

For most of my life, I’ve been working under the paradigm that my behavior should, ideally, have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true.

The problem is, a lot of religion is about surrendering control and being open to radical change. I

The God of the Bible is an amazingly interactive deity. He’s not aloof—He talks to people all the time. God

The Bible, in fact, has made me more reverent of life.

The joy of religion; that’s what David was feeling, and that’s something I underestimated—or pretty much ignored—in my secular life.

I tell you, I’ve never seen such pure joy. It is thick, atmospheric, like someone had released a huge canister of nitrous oxide into the room. Here

I feel something transcendent, something that melts away the future and the past and the deadlines and the MasterCard bills and puts me squarely in the moment. At least for a few seconds, there is no difference between me and Jacob, my biblical alter ego.

They were fearless. They literalized metaphors. They turned their lives into protest pieces. They proved that, in the name of truth, sometimes you can’t be afraid to take a left turn from polite society and look absurd.

It’s hard to be passionate about a lack of belief.

It’s exactly what I was always most afraid of with religion. To embrace religion, you have to surrender some control. But what if it’s a slippery slope, and you lose all control, slide right past the Judeo-Christian mainstream, and end up in a yurt kneeling in front of a guy wearing a tablecloth who has renamed you Lotus Petal?

think there’s something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I’d never come close to communing with the divine.

Baruch Spinoza said, if triangles could think, their God would be eminently triangular.)

“Evolution says that we are the product of random processes. That we evolved via pond scum. When we say that, we’re not applying much value to humanity. If we say we’re a product of accidents and random processes, how much purpose and hope does that give to our youth?”

Life is a jigsaw puzzle, he told me. The joy and challenge of life—and the Bible—is figuring things out. “If a jigsaw puzzle came numbered, you’d return it to the store.” Same with life.