The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible

by A.J. Jacobs

I wouldn’t just be studying religion. I’d be living it.

I didn’t expect to, as the Psalmist says, take refuge in the Bible and rejoice in it.

The first was Reverend Elton Richards, my friend David’s father, who just retired as minister of his Lutheran congregation in Des Moines, Iowa. He calls himself a “pastor out to pasture.” I told him about the doubters. “You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and a thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and thirst. So they shouldn’t judge you.”

“She told me she’d be happy to stare into his eyes all day,” said my grandmother. “That’s not how a marriage should be. You should be side by side, facing the world, not looking into each other’s eyes all day.”

Moderation is a relative term.

“We dance for our animal nature,” says Gershon, as we step across the puddles. “The Torah is for both sides of the nature. The reading is for the divine side, and the dancing is for the animal side.”

“Remember,” he says to me as we shake hands goodbye on the street corner, “sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It’s like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you’d see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the weirdness, to what it means.”

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

I 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.

The interesting thing is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.

“In an odd twist of logic, many religious Americans dismiss the Jewish dietary laws as outdated legalism, invalid for the modern era. Yet they embrace the fundamental truths of the Ten Commandments as universal and timeless.”

More and more, I feel it’s important to look at the Bible with an open heart. If you roll up your sleeves, even the oddest passages—and the one about edible bugs qualifies—can be seen as a sign of God’s mercy and compassion.

In Karen Armstrong’s terrific book A History of God, she says that the ancient Israelites weren’t really monotheists. They believed in the existence of many gods: Baal, El, and so on. It’s just that Yahweh is the boss of all Gods. Hence the command “You shall have no other Gods before me.” It doesn’t say “You shall have no other Gods at all.”

And then I am hit with a realization. And hit is the right word—it felt like a punch to my stomach. Here I am being prideful about creating an article in a midsize American magazine. But God—if He exists—He created the world. He created flamingos and supernovas and geysers and beetles and the stones for these steps I’m sitting on. “Praise the Lord,” I say out loud.

Judaism has a slogan: deed over creed. There’s an emphasis on behavior; follow the rules of the Torah, and eventually you’ll come to believe. But evangelical Christianity says you must first believe in Jesus, then the good works will naturally follow.

The problem with a lot of religion, says Campolo, is that people have “interpreted the Gospel so much, we’ve started to believe the interpretations instead of what Jesus said.”

Armstrong says that the ancients viewed the world simultaneously in two different ways. One was logos, the other mythos. Logos was the ancients’ rational and practical side, the factual knowledge they used in farming or building houses. Mythos was the stories that gave their lives meaning.

The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas—but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.