"Lock the doors and close the blinds -- we're going for a ride..."

I just completed a pretty amazing book: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs.

A bit of background:  Jacobs's previous book (which I haven't read yet) chronicled his experience reading the entire Encyclopedia Britainica from A to Z. He has a unique, creative, witty writing style (he writes for Esquire as his day job), and he decided to up the ante a bit with this one:  Not only did he decide to read the Bible cover-to-cover, but he also made a commitment to spend an entire year following every single commandment written within.  Jacobs is a secular Jew, (one of the clever lines has him defining himself as "a Jew, but in the same way that the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant), but he decides to explore and follow the rules laid out in both the Old and New Testaments.

He spends a lot of time talking about his beard.  Normally a clean-shaven guy, he follows the prohibition against cutting one's beard (Leviticus 19:27). So he lets it grow. And grow. He lives and works in New York City where you can see this type of thing quite a bit, but towards the end of his year he notices that even for Big Apple standards he's looking quite weird. The beard was the most profound physical appearance change for him, but it wasn't the only one -- he wasn't cutting the corners of the hair from his temples (ibid) and started wearing white clothes (Ecclesiastes 9:8) which were not made of a two-fiber blend (Deuteronomy 22:11).

But his actions changed as well.  Certain ones had to do with the way he handled his finances. Or the way he interacted with his wife and two-year old son.  He decided early on that he wouldn't follow commandments which were illegal, such as animal sacrifice. But he tried to follow the rest to the letter of the law as much as possible -- which became a bit surreal and funny when he came to ones such as stoning adulterers. (There's an excerpt available online at http://www.ajjacobs.com/books/yolb.asp?id=excerpt which discusses this.)  But he's doing the best he can to live his life as regularly as possible while adhering to these guidelines. After all -- a good number of folks on the planet do it.  The difference: he's not looking at the source from a Canonical point of view. He's a self-described agnostic looking for meaning within the passages.

Which becomes quite difficult when he tries praying.  It's something he had never done before. He starts with certain prescribed texts and lets it become habitual. Eventually, he finds comfort in the notion of praying: he doesn't acknowledge it as to a specific deity, but he enjoys the reflection.

I mentioned this book to someone at work -- especially the notion that an agnostic would go about this experiment. Her first question to me: "Is he mocking the Bible and its followers?"  I don't think he is. In fact, he treats the text with a great deal of respect. He talks with many, many different followers of Judaism and Christianity (as well as some other smaller offshoots such as Karaites and Samaritans), some of whom consist of his advisory board as he takes this journey. He explores the way certain religious groups revere and interpret the Bible -- from dancing in an ultra-Orthodox Chassidic festival in New York celebration to being part of a church service ministered by a snake handler in Tennessee. He hangs out with an Amish family and sits in with a group of gay Evangelicals.

One of his themes is that the followers of the Bible -- even the ones whom we would describe as the most Fundamentalist -- do their share of picking, choosing and interpreting from the written text on some level. If anything, this book made me more aware of the vast spectrum of people who follow the Bible on some level and use it as a means to shape the way they live their lives. People can (and do) use passages in the Bible to substantiate both pro-life and pro-choice stances, for example.  And they'll be arguing about it for a long time.

It also made me far more aware of certain tenets of Christianity as followed by those across the board.  It's been a long time since I've read a sizable chunk of the New Testament, and those were just the Gospels. I'm thinking about reviewing them again -- as well as the other books as well -- rather than taking a look at specific verses out of context. (Come to think of it -- I really should do the same with the Qur'an as well.)

This was a great read, I highly recommend it. There were parts which made me feel defensive about the way I live my life -- perhaps it's a good thing. It's a good balance between cutesy/entertaining and deep/thought-provoking.

Has anyone else read it?