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Loading... Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring…by David Plotz
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Olin new BS533 .P56 2009   coolmama | Sep 10, 2009 |  David Plotz described himself as a proud, if unobservant Jew. He had his curiosity piqued by the macabre story of Dinah and so set out to read the entire Old Testament. Plotz does what he sets out to do which is to create a journal of an amateur reader of scripture. (  ) bendersgame | Aug 10, 2009 | Author Plotz writes for Salon, and this book began as a blog, called Blogging the Bible. Like The Year of Living Biblically, it is written by a Jewish man raised non-observant who gets curious about the Bible and decides to read it through. In the end, I think his most important point is that most people are pretty ignorant of the Bible, that the most known parts of it are the "prettier" parts. As a whole, the Old Testament or the Tanakh, or whatever you want to call it, has a God who is violent, sometimes capricious. Here's a quote from his summary: "What I've been doing, I think, is arguing with the Bible as it actually is, not as we want it to be. By reading the whole book, I have given myself a Bible that is vastly more interesting that 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." Thought-provoking, and kind of fun. (  ) reannon | Jul 26, 2009 | A sometimes disturbing, sometimes entertaining, but always heartfelt look at the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of someone really reading it cover-to-cover for the first time. The author does not intend to tear apart, nor to apologize for what he has read, but does express his dismay at some of the stories, and his joy at finding some of the true heroes in the Bible. (  ) aiyume | Jun 20, 2009 | Plotz does in this book exactly what the title says: he read the whole Bible (something that most Christians and Jews report never having done) and records his thoughts about each chapter. With caveats: The Bible he reads is the Jewish Bible, which ends at 2 Chronicles. He says he’ll leave the New Testament to a non-Jew, but I would love to see a sequel or a revised edition that includes his impressions of the NT. Plotz finds and is comforted by the moments of beauty in the Bible, but he is horrified at God’s punishment of the people who are most faithful to him, the encouraged murder of innocents, and the surprise endings to the most famous Bible stories–where most of the stories end and the indiscriminate killing begins. He seems to gloss over some of it–there are some horrid verses in Deuteronomy 22 about punishing rape victims that he does not address–but he touches on some of the big stories, like the rapes of Dinah and Tamar, and the mauling of the children by the bears. This is a great book for Christians and Jews who do not understand how people can be offended by the very substance of their religions, or how one could possibly leave the faith if they “truly knew” God. The way most people read the Bible is not the way they would read any other book; they open the Bible to a particular chapter or to a random page and read until they feel better. When one reads it as they would read anything else, from cover to cover, one learns a lot, and is often disappointed and even “brokenhearted,” as Plotz is, at the brutality and fickleness of God and his people. Eris Reads, my book blog ( )1  discordia | Jun 8, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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Like many Jews and Christians, David Plotz long assumed he knew what was in the Bible. He read parts of it as a child in Hebrew school, then at-tended a Christian high school where he studied the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck with him—Adam and Eve, Cain versus Abel, Jacob versus Esau, Jonah versus whale, forty days and nights, ten plagues and commandments, twelve tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, he absorbed from all around him other bits of the Bible—from stories he heard in churches and synagogues, in movies and on television, from his parents and teachers. But it wasn't until he picked up a Bible at a cousin's bat mitzvah—and became engrossed and horrified by a lesser-known story in Genesis—that he couldn't put it down.
At a time when wars are fought over scriptural interpretation, when the influence of religion on American politics has never been greater, when many Americans still believe in the Bible's literal truth, it has never been more important to get to know the Bible. Good Book is what happens when a regular guy—an average Job—actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based. Along the way, he grapples with the most profound theological questions: How many commandments do we actually need? Does God prefer obedience or good deeds? And the most unexpected ones: Why are so many women in the Bible prostitutes? Why does God love bald men so much? Is Samson really that stupid?
Good Book is an irreverent, enthralling journey through the world's most important work of literature.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:54 -0400)
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