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| Book cover for "The Year of Living Biblically" |
I read the book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs, and here are my thoughts on it. I wasn't planning to blog about this- I don't blog about every single book I read- and I thought the premise of this book was kinda silly and wasn't going to cause me to have any profound insights to post on the blog. But now that I've read it, it turns out that I do have things to say.
(Judging whether these are "profound insights" is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.)
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Overview
Jacobs sets out on this weird experiment/ performance art, where he decides he is going to extract every single command from the bible and try to follow them all literally, for 1 year. He also interviews a lot of Jews and Christians who claim to be following the bible- to some extent, he participates in the ways that they follow the bible, but overall he wants to be true to the literal text itself rather than later interpretations of it.
Jacobs is Jewish but wasn't religious before this. He felt this experiment would also help him connect with his heritage.
This book was published in 2008. I remember I saw this in a bookstore, years and years ago, when I was evangelical, and I kind of scoffed at it. I thought, "Here's a book where someone tries to 'follow the bible literally' to prove how ridiculous the bible is. This is NOT how you're supposed to follow the bible. Some rules apply to us now and some only applied to the original audience, and we have logical, reliable ways of knowing which is which. We're supposed to use this framework and only follow the ones that still apply to us now, not take every single command literally. He's totally missing the point."
Please note, Jacobs's goal was NOT "to prove how ridiculous the bible is." His initial thinking was, yeah some of the commands are silly and he's not going to get anything out of following them, but a lot of the commands really are meaningful, and it could be good for him to become more religious, and maybe he'll learn something.
I've heard that this book was part of the inspiration for Rachel Held Evans's book "A Year of Biblical Womanhood," (2012) where she spent a year literally following the bible's commands to women. (I have not read it, and I really want to. It's on my list.) Her goal was different from Jacobs's- she was coming from an evangelical background, where she constantly had to deal with other Christians claiming that women need to do certain things and be restricted in certain ways, because that's "biblical womanhood," that's "what the bible says." And she was making the point that no, these modern American Christian "biblical womanhood" people very much are NOT "just following what the bible says."
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The main thing I want to say is, Christians should learn from Jewish people
The bible is divided into 2 sections: the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. (Christians call the Hebrew Bible the "Old Testament" but here I am going to call it the Hebrew Bible because it belonged to Jewish people first.) Jacobs spends the first 9 months of the year focusing on the Hebrew Bible, and the remaining 3 months on the New Testament. The New Testament is the part about Jesus and the early Christians.
This makes sense, proportionally. The Hebrew Bible is much longer than the New Testament. But, reading this as a Christian, it surprised me. Jacobs wants to follow the bible literally, and then he spends 9 months seeking out Jewish people who are extremely dedicated to their faith, and he listens to them and follows their advice.
Why on earth did this surprise me? Isn't it OBVIOUS, if you think about it for a second or two, that if you want to take the bible very seriously and learn from it, you should talk to Jewish people? They were taking the bible very seriously for thousands of years before Christians came along.
In the section of the book focused on the Hebrew Bible, most of the experts that Jacobs talks to are Jewish, and there are only a few Christians. He interviews young-earth creationist Ken Ham (a Christian) in an early part of the book about the creation of the world. He talks about modern Christians who are obsessed with the "end times" and prophecies about a red heifer- and there are also Orthodox Jews obsessed with this, and they are working together with the Christians, even though they have very different beliefs about whether it will be good or bad for the Jews when they finally get that red heifer. And maybe a few other Christians here and there, but overall, in the section about the Hebrew Bible (which is the majority of this book), he's learning from Jewish people.
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The evangelical take on why Jewish people are wrong about the bible
In all my years growing up in the church, I don't think I ever came across the suggestion that we should learn about the bible from Jewish people. Obviously, Christianity is the right religion, and all the other religions are wrong- why on earth would we listen to other people's wrong religious beliefs?
(I thought it was so cool, when I was reading the book "Womanist Midrash," how author Wilda Gafney brought in Jewish and Muslim sources, in addition to Christian ones. Other religions have useful things to say about the bible, and we can learn from them! I don't think I had ever seen anything like that in a Christian book.)
In general, Christians believe that the laws in the Hebrew Bible don't apply to us anymore, because Jesus changed all that and set up a whole new system. Christians have various schemes for how to define which laws from the Hebrew Bible still apply- basically if it's a "moral law" (rather than a "ceremonial law"), and if it's reaffirmed in the New Testament, then it still applies. I always got the impression that this categorization scheme was uncomplicated and self-evident and totally made sense, and therefore the people who are trying to score points on the internet by pointing out weird laws in the bible are just uninformed and missing the point. But NOPE, turns out that stuff about "moral law"/"ceremonial law" is just somebody's fan theory.
So my point is, Christians believe we don't have to worry about all those bizarre laws. Just the obvious things, like pray, and love your neighbor, and don't be gay. Just the simple obvious things. (sarcasm)
More important than following the laws, though, is to believe the right things about Jesus. I thought it was very interesting when Jacobs discussed this in the book. When he got to the last 3 months and started to work on following the New Testament, he wondered if it was enough to just follow the laws, or if he would also have to believe in Jesus. He got different answers about this from the different Christians he asked- on the more evangelical end, people told him that the most important thing was to believe in Jesus, and if you're not doing that, the rest is meaningless. On the moderate/mainline side of Christianity, people told him that following Jesus' teachings is a good thing and can help us be better people, even if you don't believe in Jesus. For his part, Jacobs didn't want to believe in Jesus, because it felt like abandoning his heritage as a Jewish person. (In contrast, when he followed the rules in the Hebrew Bible, he felt like he was connecting to his family heritage.)
And in my experience, Christians have nothing but eye-rolling and mockery and pity when we see Orthodox Jewish people following strict religious rules. Rules about what to wear, what to eat, not doing any work on the Sabbath. We always looked at it like, they're spending so much effort keeping all these meaningless rules that are just silly and don't matter, and they're missing the whole point of what God wants us to do.
I had a Jewish friend in college that I used to discuss the bible with, let's call him Isaac. He told me that he had gone through phases in his life where he tried to be really serious about keeping the Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and also phases where he didn't do all of that. Thinking about it now, I would love to ask him what motivated him to sometimes choose to follow those rules, and does he think he benefitted from it? But at the time I didn't ask him anything like that; I was evangelical, and evangelicals don't want to actually understand people, they want to talk them into converting.
He told me about some of the rules for kosher foods. Exodus 23:19 says, "Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk." Whenever I had read that in the bible, I thought to myself, well I'm never cooking any young goats at all, so I don't have to worry about if I'm breaking this rule or not. But, Isaac explained, the principle behind this rule should apply not just to goat meat but other meat too. And, it doesn't just mean don't literally boil the meat in milk- it means don't eat the meat of an animal together with dairy products made from its mother's milk. And really we should just never eat any meat and dairy together, because you never know. Like, what if by some coincidence, the cow your burger came from is the offspring of the cow that produced the milk used to make the cheese on your cheeseburger? You never know! So that's why you can't eat meat and dairy together.
And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous and overly-literal and misses the point, and is like the Pharisees. Ah, yes, Christians have this stereotype about the Pharisees (whom Jesus interacted with in the bible), that they were working so hard to keep all these meaningless religious rules, and they were missing the point of how God actually wants us to live. I believe this is an anti-Semitic stereotype- yeah, I know it's in the bible, but it's still an anti-Semitic stereotype.
Evangelical Christians believe that, when people follow religious rules which are more strict than the ones we follow, they are being legalistic and missing the point, and that's bad. And when they are less strict than we are, they are being wishy-washy and watering down the gospel and being led astray by our sinful culture. *Our* rules were the exact right level of rules. *Our* rules had actual good reasons, unlike those legalistic people who were just following rules for the sake of following rules.
Here, a sampling of some of the evangelical rules: You shouldn't say "oh my god." Girls shouldn't wear a 2-piece bathing suit. Girls shouldn't wear tank tops that don't cover up the bra straps. Probably you shouldn't lay on a bed near your boyfriend because what if "one thing leads to another"? Also, every day you need to read your bible. And there was a whole culture war about the Harry Potter books and how they PROMOTE WITCHCRAFT and so you SHOULDN'T READ THEM.
Well, those things aren't "legalism"! When *we* make weird little rules, they have good reasons behind them! When *other people* make weird little rules, it's for no reason and it's legalism.
Here, I'm gonna blow your mind: What if other people's weird little rules also have deep reasons behind them? What if they are the same as us- they are doing their best to follow the bible, out of a genuine desire to obey God, like us?
Even if we think they're wrong, we should still learn from them. They are the same as us. If they're wrong, maybe we're wrong in the same ways.
The Jewish experts that Jacobs talked to in this book, who walked him through the nuances of how they understand and obey obscure biblical rules- I think if I had read this as an evangelical, I would have been really dismissive of this. Like, the whole thing is pointless. All the effort they are putting into following these literal rules, which God doesn't require us to follow. But now I feel like... I can recognize their motivations, their feelings. I know what it is to feel like "I would do anything for God" and "God must have a good reason for this rule, so it truly is in our best interest to obey it." To feel connected to God as I put in the work to obey Their rules.
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The literal words vs the traditions
Jacobs's main goal was to literally follow the bible. In pursuit of this goal, he felt it would be useful to interview Jews and Christians who also claim to be following the bible, so he could get insight on how to interpret and obey the biblical rules.
There were many cases where Jewish people told him about traditional interpretations of bible passages, which don't follow the literal meaning but soften it or apply it to totally different situations. (Seriously, Jewish people have been discussing this for thousands of years. They have a lot of insights!) Sometimes he ended up following his own understanding of what the literal words said, and sometimes, if that was impractical, or if a later tradition seemed interesting or meaningful, he followed the later interpretations.
Evangelicals make a big deal about how we're simply following the bible, NOT imperfect human traditions. We're Protestants. Those Catholics are all wrong, the way they treat their church history as important and meaningful, rather than only following the bible. Sola scriptura.
What this means in reality, though, is evangelicals *do* follow our own traditional interpretations, built up over generations, very much influenced by our own culture, rather than just "following the bible"- but we can't be honest about it. We don't even realize we're doing it- we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're just following the bible, that our modern American [white] way of reading the bible is the obvious one and there aren't other interpretations.
I want to share a quote from the book here. This is the part where Jacobs was hosting a Passover dinner with his relatives. He made sure to follow the rules that Moses gave for the first Passover- eat with your sandals on and your staff in your hand, paint blood over your door, etc. (Turns out it is illegal to sell lamb's blood, so Jacobs used the drippings from the meat instead.) But he also learned about his own family's memories of Passover dinners over the years, and found that was more meaningful than just following the literal commands himself. This is from pages 235-236:
I close my Bible and let the story sink in. "Does anyone else have anything they want to say?" I ask.
My dad does. He has brought a packet of photocopied handwritten pages. They are a collection of childhood memories that his mother-- my grandmother-- had written before she died. My dad reads the section about her memories of family sedars in the 1920s.
Before the sedars, my mother would buy a very large live carp and bring it home (how, I don't know). She put it into the bathtub to swim until it was time to prepare the gefilte fish we all relished so much. We kids loved watching it swim, but it was so big it could barely (and sometimes not at all) negotiate a turn at the end of the tub. We all took our showers downstairs until after the fish was removed.
She wrote about how the kids would file up and down the stairs carrying kosher-for-Passover dishes, "all of us like ants, trip after trip, one after the other." And about how Uncle Oscar once ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs on a dare. About how, when the sedar dragged on, the prayers went "express, no local stops."
Her writing is vivid, fresh. The references to the customs are no longer confusing or foreign. The whole thing felt familiar. My Biblical rituals-- the door painting and sandal wearing-- were interesting on an intellectual level, but, frankly, I wasn't as moved as I hoped I might be. I didn't feel like I had been swept back to the time of the Pharaohs.
But this writing from my grandmother-- that did sweep me back. Perhaps to make a ritual resonate, I can't skip directly from my stain-resistant dinner table in New York to a desert three thousand years ago. I need some links in between. I need my grandmother and her memories of the leviathan-sized carp of Hinsdale Street in Brooklyn.
Maybe religious rituals are meaningful because they connect us to other people, to history, to our ancestors, to our culture. Maybe the point isn't that God said to do this, so you as 1 individual have to do it, following the exact instructions found in the bible.
It's not "just you and God" (as evangelicals like to say). You live in the context of your culture, and that matters, and you connect to God through that culture. Through your family, your history, your traditions. Through people, and the things that have been emotional and meaningful to people for many generations.
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A few weird commands I want to mention
Leviticus 19:23-25 says that when you plant a tree, you shouldn't eat the fruit from it until the 5th year. I've never spent any time thinking about how to follow this command because I don't plant fruit trees, I just buy fruit from the store, so surely it doesn't apply to me. But Jacobs wanted to follow it, so he contacted fruit companies to ask them about how old their trees were. He received replies that said they aren't able to tell him the ages of the specific trees that specific pieces of fruit came from.
He did more research into the life cycles of fruit trees, and found that some kinds of trees will bear fruit after just 2-3 years- he then avoided those fruits. But cherry trees take over 5 years to mature and bear fruit, so he would be safe if he only ate cherries.
Another weird one: Deuteronomy 22:6-7 says, "If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life." In this book, Jacobs says this is generally interpreted to be about kindness to animals. *But* some Jewish people have a ritual related to this, explained in this quote from page 186:
But the actual wording of Deuteronomy 22:6 is solely about birds and nests, and it is this formulation that Mr. Berkowitz-- along with others in his community-- has taken to the literal limit. He has set up two pigeon nests on his third-floor windowsill in his northern Manhattan apartment. Whenever there's a newly laid egg, he allows a faithful seeker to come over, pay one hundred dollars to charity, shoo the mother pigeon away, pick up the egg, hold it aloft, say a prayer, place it back in the nest (or, in some cases, eat it), and thereby check off this commandment as officially "fulfilled."
Jacobs goes and actually does this. It's so strange and I love it.
And one more thing I want to mention: In researching some of the biblical commands, Jacobs found that the intention behind them was to help the poor. For example, locusts are kosher. You can eat them. The bible says you can eat them. In this book, Jacobs buys chocolate-covered crickets and eats one.
He says, even though the bible says people are allowed to eat locusts, that doesn't mean it was actually a common thing back then. He came across one interpretation that says maybe the purpose of this bible passage is to provide for people if their crops have been eaten by locusts. Instead of starving, you are allowed to eat the locusts. So, commands which seem extremely weird might actually be based in a desire to help people.
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Conclusion
The reason I wanted to blog about this book is because Jacobs got a lot of good input from Jewish sources, which felt surprising to me, but then I realized, well, OBVIOUSLY. You want to talk about how to take the bible extremely seriously, you need to talk to Jewish people. When I was evangelical I never did that, though, because only Christians had the "truth" and all other religions were wrong, so why would we listen to them.
Also, I was interested in how this book explores religious traditions and rituals as a way to connect to a tradition, a culture, a history, a family. Maybe the point is not just doing it so you as an individual can be a person who obeys God correctly. Maybe it's about human connection and knowing our history.
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Related:
"Ceremonial Law/ Civil Law/ Moral Law" is Just a Fan Theory
Maybe Jesus Was A Pharisee
