The Year of Living Biblically

OK, my brother mentioned to me last night that he wearies of reading my regular rants on matters of health (at my age, though, it does become a real concern, especially when your friends begin dropping dead at far too premature ages!), and he wished for more book and music reviews. So I'll write here about a book I just finished reading that was both very funny and moving in its own way. It's called "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs, who writes for Esquire Magazine, and who previously authored "The Know-It-All" about his experiences of reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica, from start to finish. Jacobs has obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes his foray into these kinds of adventures a perfect thing for someone of his ilk, and so he sets about trying to live the Bible literally for an entire year, following each and every obscure rule in it. Naturally, this doesn't exactly sit well with the wife, who is Catholic and has to patiently put up with her husband's obsessive need to follow the Bible's more obscure laws and rules. He has spiritual advisers to whom he goes to consult from time to time as well as to answer questions about some of the things he finds confusing in the Bible. One of the funniest of the bunch is a Mr. Berkowitz, who is even more obsessive about making sure that Jacobs follows things right down to the letter of the law, while Jacobs sometimes finds those things to be pretty tough to do, having been raised in a secular Jewish home.

I can perfectly identify, in particular, with the difficulty of praying and believing that prayers are being heard by some distant god-like being that I have a hard time even believing exists from time to time. And Jacobs wrestles with the same issues as I have, making it easily identifiable for me to follow his struggles through faith and to find out what it's all about. I enjoyed seeing how Jacobs gradually comes to accept some modicum of faith, not the obsessive variety, but a new appreciation for some the the laws ascribed in the Bible and why some people still find them relevant today. Most of the book is devoted to Jacobs' journey through the Old Testament, and when he gets to the New Testament, he is confused by the things written in its books and how the "New Covenant" set down by Jesus was somehow supposed to overturn a lot of the stuff from the Old Testament. It's these kinds of contradictions and many others in the Bible that I have often found confusing. Even the four Gospels can't agree on many things and I've often wondered if Jesus was illiterate and why he didn't write things down himself and instead seemed to rely on his apostles to do the deed much later on. That the Bible has been translated into so many tongues over so many centuries makes it a very confusing document and Jacobs even wrestles with which version or versions to follow, because there are so many of them. In the end, he chose the Revised Standard Edition, a more modernized version of the King James but without all the "thees" and "thous" of that particular edition. This book makes for a fascinating read and I'd recommend it even to the hardcore skeptics like me. If nothing else, you will come to an appreciation of what the Bible is all about from varying viewpoints as Jacobs journeys through its many chapters and rules. It's also very witty and you'll find yourself laughing yourself silly as you follow a 21st century man trying to live as they did thousands of years ago. Now I guess I'm going to have to read his first book about reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica!