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Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, And Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word Of The Bible (2009)

by David Plotz(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0061719951 (ISBN13: 9780061719950)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

HarperLuxe

review 1: I found this fascinating. David Plotz, nominally Jewish, schooled as a child in Hebrew school, and as an adolescent in an Episcopalian high school, was pretty sure he knew the Bible well. But at his cousin’s bat mitzvah, picking up a pew-rack Torah and thumbing through, he was startled by the story of Dinah’s rape, a story he never remembered having read, or even heard about. Further, this wasn’t the happily-ever-after sort of Bible story he was accustomed to hearing. His curiosity piqued, Plotz decided to read the Bible (the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament), and this book is a distilling of his gut-reaction journal, kept as he read. It’s an eye-opener for me, a sort of complacent Bible reader, raised on the Sunday-school versions of th... moreese stories. I have read the whole Bible, even studied it, but always guided by a book by some Christian writer or other who explains what it means. To see it through Plotz’s eyes, to read his thinking and reaction to the words on the pages, is to me to hear another voice entirely, one without an agenda to teach me something, or to make me see the Bible as he does. He says, “By reading the whole book, I have given myself a Bible that’s vastly more interesting than the vanilla-pudding version I was fed by Sunday school teachers and the popular culture. The Bible’s gatekeepers have attempted to dupe us into adopting a Bible with a straightforward morality and delightful heroes. The real book is messier, nastier, and infinitely more complex. In other words, it’s much more like life.” He urges us all to read the Bible, for the cultural, literary, and intellectual references that inform Western society. On a personal level, it did not make him a “true believer” of any ilk. He writes, “I came to the Bible hoping to be inspired and awed. I have been, sometimes. But mostly I’ve ended up in a yearlong argument with my Boss. This argument has weakened my faith, and turned me against my God. Yet the argument itself represents a kind of belief, because it commits me to engaging with God.” I laughed out loud in some places. I thought about things I had never thought about before when reading the Bible, or thinking about religion. Well worth the read.
review 2: When I began reading this book, I was sure I would be left feeling even more “Bible illiterate” than before, but I found the author to be enlightening and entertaining. I found him to be humorous, yet he seemed more real to me than many other authors who take on this type of commitment. I read the Old Testament as a child, but have to admit that I’d forgotten more than I realized, and never understood much of what I’d read. I also found it interesting that the church tends to pick pieces from the Bible to teach, ignoring the outer edges of the circumstances. For example, the church teaches children about the story of Daniel and the lions…but leaves out the fact that the people who turned him in for not praying to the king—along with their spouses and children—were thrown into the den after Daniel walked out. I also find it disturbing that women were rarely given attention (or even given a name), and a great many of them were prostitutes. Most women were lying, conniving, and evil. It honestly makes me wonder why women seem to be more willing to follow the Bible than men…when we get so little respect within its pages. The thing I like the most about this book is the author’s summary. He doesn’t make it sappy, and doesn’t try to explain it to fit within his ideal. He is clear and straightforward, allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind about the stories told within the Bible. less

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