Rosner's Domain: David Plotz on reading the Bible for the first time

David Plotz' highly entertaining new book - Good Book - is about "The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible". Plotz is the editor of Slate and the book is based on "Blogging the Bible," a series he did for magazine. Before becoming Slate's editor in 2008, Plotz worked as a staff writer, political columnist, media columnist, and as the Washington editor for the magazine (more bio here).  

In a Newsweek article, Lisa Miller praised the book, writing this:

Amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, "The Good Book" succeeds because its tone straddles the line between irreverent and awestruck. Plotz is a naif wandering in a strange land full of eccentric people and incomprehensible rules. From Samson and Delilah, he takes away these lessons: "1. Women are deceptive and heartless." And "2. Men are too stupid and sex-crazed to realize this." The story of Abraham and Isaac brings him - as it does everybody with a beating heart - to his knees: "As a father, I find this nearly impossible to read. Abraham does not try to distance himself from Isaac, to separate himself from the child he must kill. Isaac remains 'my son,' 'my son'."

I agree with her assessment, and after reading the book, I sent David a couple of questions:

1. My first question is kind of insulting: how can an educated young (Jewish) man grow up without being familiar with the story of Shechem and Dinah. Is such ignorance common among your friends and relatives?

Ha! You're so Israeli to start like that. To answer the second part of the question first: Such ignorance is not merely common, it is practically universal. If you polled my friends, I would bet that less than 10 percent know the story of Dinah. How did I avoid it? I am a reform Jew, which means I didn't spend a lot of time with the Torah as a child. In religious school, we studied the moral lessons of Judaism, which have practically nothing to do with the stories told in the Bible. And when I went to a Christian high school and read a little bit of the Bible there, Dinah is also a story that never came up, because it does not have a nice moral. Religion as it is taught to casual Christians and Jews in america focuses on moral behavior, which means ignoring a lot of the Bible and teaching only its clearest stories.

2. Your assumption - backed by data - at the end of the book is that "biblical illiteracy is nearly universal among nonreligious people". But aren't most Americans religious? And if they are, why do they still need a shortened version of it?

Most Americans are religious, but most Americans are not Biblically literate. Of the major religious groups in the U.S., only evangelical protestants (and orthodox Jews, who are tiny) closely study the Bible. The other denominations do not focus on the Bible, instead picking and choosing convenient stories. And in my demographic--educated coastal elites--non religiosity is quite common.

3. Here's a very serious question: how significant to your reading was the fact that you're Jewish? Did and how this changed your way of reading - and interpreting - it?

It was hugely significant, by far the most important fact in my reading. Christians have the New Testament, which softens and explains and cleans up a lot of the messiness of the Hebrew Bible. Jews don't have Jesus to fall back on. The result, I think, is our amazing tradition of argument. We have a holy book that is full of immoral heroes and an erratic, vindictive God. How do we grapple with that? My Bible reading, though deeply ignorant and naïve, is very much in that Jewish tradition of addressing the holy book by arguing with it, rather than simply accepting it, sheep-like. Also, being Jewish allowed me to be more joking about it. I was not comfortable in blogging the New Testament because it might have been insulting for me to crack jokes about Jesus, a savior I don't believe in. Similarly, I'm not sure a Christian would have been comfortable writing about the Israelites and the God of the Hebrew Bible.

4. You're an editor (and writer) with a political mind. You wrote a lot about politics, you thought a lot about politics. Did you find the Good Book politically relevant?

Yes, in a couple of ways. The Bible is the book that guides tens of millions of my fellow Americans. They make their decisions about gay marriage, economic policy, education, abortion, etc based on the words in the book. If I want to be able to understand them, and to engage with them, I need to know what they believe. Also, the Bible has many episodes analogous to Biblical events. It's much easier to understand Bill Clinton having read about King David.

5. Did bible-reading change the way you see Israel?

Taking a Biblical trip to Israel did change the way I see Israel. For example, I went to Beit Guvrin park and stood on top of the hill while an archeologist pointed to the line of forts built by Rehoboam and others to protect Biblical Judea from the coastal tribes, and that was the first time I realized that, Oh, modern Israel actually occupies the land that was held by Israel's ENEMIES during Biblical times, and the West Bank--now held by Israel's enemies--was the land that was Biblical Israel. I knew this intellectually of course, but I never felt it viscerally till I saw that line of forts.

And it gave me a much greater appreciation for the richness of Israel's history. I usually spend time in Israel with my Tel Aviv in-laws, all Yemenite and Adenite, deeply secular, and not much interested in Israel's ancient history. So until I read the Bible and took the Biblical trip, I never much appreciated Masada or Qumran or  the City of David. Also, and I am rambling here, seeing Qumran was phenomonally moving--to see this place occupied by a totally freaky cult that at the same time helped our civilization survive, by preserving the book. As a writer and a Jew, that moved me deeply. Oh, and one more thing, visiting Israel on the Bible tour made me realize just how little evidence there is for the Bible, and how most of what is remembered from the Bible has no basis in archeology or history. That was odd.

6. One can't resist this temptation:

Your favorite story:

Ruth or Genesis 18, when Abraham argues with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.