What can a year spent slug­ging through thir­ty nine books, 929 chap­ters and more than 600,000 words bag you? If you’re David Plotz and the tome hap­pens to be the Bible, the answer is a lot of tsuris and mishe­gas— and doubt in God.

Plotz, the edi­tor of Slate​.com and a self­pro­claimed ​“proud but not very obser­vant” Reform Jew, set out to dis­cov­er ​“what hap­pens when an igno­rant per­son actu­al­ly reads the book on which his reli­gion is based.” 

The result—Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilar­i­ous, Dis­turb­ing, Mar­velous, and Inspir­ing Things I Learned When I Read Every Sin­gle Word of the Bible—sees Plotz’s trans­for­ma­tion from ​“hope­ful, but indif­fer­ent, agnos­tic” to ​“hope­less and angry agnos­tic.” 

​“I’m bro­ken­heart­ed about God,” he writes at the end of his jour­ney through ancient geno­cide, plague, and enslave­ment. ​“I can only con­clude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He exist­ed, was awful, cru­el, and capri­cious. He is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.” 

Plotz isn’t shy about using an array of adjec­tives — from bor­ing to fun­ny to repel­lent— to describe the Bible’s yarns, nor is he coy about his ambiva­lence toward the Cre­ator, as he won­ders how to accept an errat­ic and vin­dic­tive God who smites the inno­cent. 

Plotz isn’t the first lax Jew to recent­ly under­take a bib­li­cal quest of self-dis­cov­ery (see The Year of Liv­ing Bib­li­cal­ly: One Man’s Hum­ble Quest to Fol­low the Bible as Lit­er­al­ly as Pos­si­ble by A.J. Jacobs, 2007), but he reminds us that the Good Book’s lessons are open to inter­pre­ta­tion. By doc­u­ment­ing his odyssey through Jew­ish his­to­ry, he has unearthed a breath­ing blue­print, a time­less guide to liv­ing, a book writ­ten by and about real peo­ple that cel­e­brates its nuanced heroes and vil­lains, and reminds us a lit­tle bit…of our­selves.

Read David Plotz’s Posts for the Vis­it­ing Scribe

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