The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

When I left the lunch, I felt at peace for the first time in a week. Last week, you see, I had a bit of a mental breakdown about my Bible project. In the final stretch, I've been frantically trying to read every single book on religion, trying to interview every religious leader, trying to figure out how to obey every rule. What if I miss an insight? What if I overlook a potential translation? I haven't paid God five shekels to redeem my firstborn son. I haven't talked to a Seventh-day Adventist yet. What if they have the secret? I've barely made a dent in the Bible.

But maybe God will forgive me for my lack of omniscience. If Joelle is right, He'll still love me. I'll never know everything. I can't compete with Him. And if you want to see what happens when you try, just look at the overachievers behind the Tower of Babel.

Again she conceived and bore a son . . .

--GENESIS 29:34

Day 359. Today is the birth of our twins. The date is our choice. We scheduled to have them emerge onto God's Green Earth today, August 24, at nine in the morning. It's right there in Julie's computer calendar, like a routine eye exam with an ophthalmologist.

It seems highly unbiblical. I can't imagine that Rachel scheduled the birth of Joseph for the third day after the barley harvest. But our kids are positioned butt first in the womb, so the doctor says there's no choice but a Caesarian section.

It's all very civilized, this birth. Nothing like Jasper's. This time Julie has no contractions and lets out not a single lupine howl. She is wheeled on a gurney into the operating room with a little shower cap on her head. The anesthesiologist numbs her from the waist down, and that is it, she is ready to give birth.

I strap a surgical mask over my nose and mouth and join Julie in the OR.

"Uh-uh," says the nurse. "You need one for your beard."

She escorts me out and gets me a second mask for the bottom of my face. I return.

"We're going to take off your wife's gown now," the nurse says. "So if you want to leave, now is the time . . ."

"No thanks," I say.

An odd offer, I think. Oh, wait. She believes I'm an Orthodox Jew and might not want to see my wife's nakedness.

The atmosphere in the OR is an odd mix. It is, on the one hand, frighteningly gory. I'm stationed by Julie's head, and the doctor has hung a little curtain across the stomach so as to block the really messy stuff, though I still see enough to nearly make me pass out. On the other hand, the atmosphere is almost relaxed. The doctors are chatting about weekend plans as if they are having a chicken salad in the cafeteria.

"Hold my hand," says Julie.

"Well, you're impure for a week after the birth, so I can only hold it before the birth."

"Please don't--"

At 9:50 a.m. our doctor reaches in and scoops out one little man. At 9:52 she reaches in and scoops out another. I officially have a whole bunch of sons.

I look at my boys as they squirm around under a huge heat lamp. The boys themselves are another strange mixture. On the one hand, they're such little animals--tiny, naked, slimy little animals. They even sound like animals. Their crying isn't human, it's more like ducks quacking. On the other hand, I can already see something transcendent in them. When they pry their eyes open--blue eyes on both of them? where did that come from?--I spot what a nun I know calls "God's DNA." Those eyes are alive.

When the doctor plucks out our sons one after the other, I flash back to perhaps the most unforgettable delivery in the Bible. Yes, even in the OR, the Bible still colors my thinking. This was the birth of the twins Perez and Zerah. It goes like this: There was a struggle between the sons to see which one could be born first. One son--Zerah--stuck his hand out of his mother's womb, and the midwife tied a scarlet thread around his wrist. Then he pulled his hand back inside. The second son, Perez, then maneuvered around him and got out first. The Bible doesn't say who was considered oldest in this unusual scenario. I like to think it was Zerah, since he breached the womb with his hand, much as an NFL player scores a touchdown if he gets the ball over the line.

I'm glad I flashed to this story. Not because of the red ribbon twist. But because, if you remember, their conception is a good metaphor for my boys. Those ancient twins were conceived in complicated circumstances--the offspring of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute. Mine, too, have a complicated origin. But that doesn't, I hope, doom them.

And now that I type this up, I'm wondering if the Perez-Zerah story could be a Big Metaphor for my year. Maybe it applies to the Bible itself. The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas--but that doesn't mean the Bible can't be beautiful and sacred.

Little children, you are of God . . . --1 JOHN 4:4

Day 361. They released Julie and the twins from the hospital at eleven o'clock on the third day. It would have been sooner, but we lost about forty-five minutes to the hospital guards who double-checked and triplechecked our wrist bracelet IDs and social security numbers to make sure we hadn't swiped the wrong babies.

We've been home for two days now, and I've been spending the majority of that time snapping these little body suits on them. Man, these things have a lot of snaps. What the fudge happened to good old zippers?

Jasper has been dealing with his brothers with an interesting strategy: complete denial. He refuses to acknowledge them. Won't even look at them. They can be howling right in front of his face, but he'll use his X-ray vision to stare right through their skulls.

As for me, I know this will surprise you: I'm deliriously tired. Yesterday Julie was making a sandwich in the kitchen and I playfully patted her on the butt when I walked by. The only thing was, it wasn't Julie. It was my mom. My mom was visiting the twins. And in my bleary-eyed state, I had confused Julie for my mom. This is definitely forbidden by Leviticus.

I've barely been able to do anything biblical since the birth. I'm losing valuable time. I decided to extend my project another month, but Julie bargained me down to two weeks.

It doesn't help matters that the boys--Zane and Lucas--are on completely different schedules and refuse to cooperate. Their rivalry is, yes, biblical. The younger one is tiny--barely five pounds--and the older is a big lug, almost seven, and they're constantly battling each other to get access to Julie's milk supply. The younger one is sneaky. I think he can sense when the older one is stirring, and he'll start wailing to make sure he gets first crack. He's the Jacob to his brother's Esau--the mischievous underdog. Is it bad that I root for him? I've rooted for underdogs all my life, so I almost can't help it. I'm sure it's temporary. It better be. I've seen what favoritism can do--Jacob favored Joseph, and it got Joseph tossed in a pit by his jealous brothers.

Forgive, and you will be forgiven. --LUKE 6:37

Day 363. I finally told my parents that I had met my ex-uncle and was including him in the book. I emailed them the sections with Gil so they could be prepared.

They weren't happy. They told me I didn't expose Gil's dark side enough. They asked if I had to make him such a prominent part of the book. They wanted me to be clear he was an ex-uncle. They disputed the part where I said Gil was the most exotic creature in the family. But in the end, they were forgiving. They didn't make me change a thing. "We'll live with it," Mom wrote. "We love you." Their son did the equivalent of eating the husks thrown to the swine, and they welcomed me home with a hug.

He that is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. --GENESIS 17:12

Day 366. My twin sons have been in this world for eight days, which means today is the day to follow one of the first biblical commands: Circumcision.

I actually knew quite a bit about circumcision even before my biblical adventure. Perhaps too much. For a year or so in my early career as a journalist, I wrote a surprising number of magazine articles about circumcision. It was my first real beat. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and my eccentric aunt Marti introduced me to some anticircumcision activists who saw the snipping of the foreskin as cruel and unnecessary. As Marti put it: "It's the only men's issue I care about."

The hardest of the hard core didn't just want to outlaw circumcision, they wanted to reverse their own circumcisions. I remember attending a support group meeting that was bizarre even by the standards of San Francisco support groups. They called themselves RECAP, short for Recover A Penis (a rival group was called BUFF--Brothers United for Future Foreskins).

The meeting was held in the basement of a church--either an extremely liberal church or a church that didn't know to whom it was renting space. A dozen men sat in folding chairs arranged in a circle. Some were ponytailed hippies, some resembled the Leather Dude in the Village People, a few were just plain vanilla guys who looked like they could have worked in the loan department at Citibank.

"I don't feel whole," said one. "I want to feel whole again."

Another asked: "Can you imagine what it's like to have sex with a foreskin? It must be like watching color TV." (I never was able to confirm this, but the claim is that circumcision blunts the sensation.)

Most of the time was spent discussing homespun methods that would allow the men to regrow their foreskins. I'll spare you the details. I'm sure the internet has plenty more information for those who are interested.

Sexual sensitivity aside, the medical aspect of circumsicion remains a matter of debate. The American Academy of Pediatrics makes no recommendation either way. Circumcision may reduce penile cancer, and there's now compelling evidence it lowers men's susceptibility to AIDS. (After my biblical year ended, the World Heath Organization recommended medical circumcision be practiced in high-risk locales.)

So when our first son, Jasper, was born, I had mixed feelings about circumcising him. I didn't think he'd end up in a San Francisco basement venting his anger, but why put him through the pain? There's no rational reason for it. At least there wasn't before this latest round of AIDS studies. And even if it makes good medical sense, should we really turn the procedure into a party with sesame bagels and veggie cream cheese?

My aunts fueled my confusion. I was subjected to dueling campaigns. On the one hand, my Orthodox aunt Kate left voice mails encouraging us to go ahead with it. On the other, Marti sent pamphlets with stomachchurning stories of circumcisions gone bad.

In the end, Julie put her foot down. Jasper would have a circumcision, and it would be at our apartment, and it would be done by a family friend, Lew Sank, a New Jersey pediatrician who also has mohel credentials.

When the day came, and the family gathered, I did my best to ignore what was actually happening. I deluded myself into thinking of it as a brunch, with a short detour into some minor medical procedure.

I distanced myself with jokes. Of which Lew--like all mohels--had plenty.

"Did you hear the one about the guy who converted to Judaism as an adult? He has to get a circumcision, but he's nervous about it. So he asks his Jewish friend Abe, does it hurt? And Abe says, 'Oy. When I had mine done, I couldn't walk or talk for a year.'"

The only terrifying moment was when I spotted a knife on the table the size of a small machete. It turned out to be for the cutting of the ceremonial bread. So that, too, turned into something of a joke.

During Jasper's circumcision, Julie and I refused to watch the actual cutting. We both went into our bedroom and shut the door, and held hands, and talked very loudly about whether the dolphin-themed mobile took AA batteries or C batteries so as to drown out the crying. Two and a half years later, circumcisions two and three are upon me. And despite the existence of bagels and the mohel Lew, these feel different: This time I plan to watch. If I'm choosing to do this to my sons--this, the fifth and final law on my list of Most Perplexing Rules in the Bible--I can at least face up to my choice.

Circumcision is a huge part of the Bible; it merits eighty-seven mentions. It was seen as the way to seal the covenant between God and humans. A signature in blood. Abraham was the pioneer. God appeared to him and instructed him to circumcise all males in his house, and all newborns after eight days. Abraham had no newborns at the time, so the first inductees were his elder son, Ishmael (who was thirteen years old), and Abraham himself, who was all of ninety-nine years old.

In the New Testament, circumcision becomes optional, at best. The Apostle Paul--whose mission was to expand the Christian faith beyond the Jewish people--said that circumcision wasn't necessary. You didn't need the physical proof as long as you changed your heart. The phrase he used was circumcised "in the heart." Some passages do indicate that Paul is fine with circumcision for those who are direct descendants of the Israelites.

"So are you going to do the circumcision yourself?" asks Julie's brother Eric.

"I hear there are some nice flint rocks in Central Park," adds her other brother, Doug.

"Very good," I say.

I'm not in the mood for jokes; I'm too anxious. My forehead is damp.

I mutter something about how the Bible doesn't mandate that the father perform the ceremony.

Actually, we're about as far from a flint rock as possible. Lew has come with a case full of gleaming metal equipment, which he's laid out on our dining room table. He snaps on his white surgical gloves, ties on a yellow apron, and pulls out a box of alcohol wipes.

"Who's first?" asks Lew.

"Zane?" I say.

"OK, bring him over."

He looks so tiny on the table, as small as a soup bowl at a dinner setting.

I glance around the room. My sister-in-law is staring out the window. My mom is flipping through a Thomas the Tank Engine brochure. Julie has her back to the table. No one is looking at Zane.

I gaze back at my son, who has started to cry. A bus rumbles by in the background. My teeth are clenched. I'm squinting, some sort of compromise between open and closed eyes.

Lew attaches some clamps. More crying. He takes out a brown leather strap. And scalpels. Drops of blood stain the towel. Zane is now wailing, openmouthed.

In a sense, it's all very hygienic, medical, sanitized. And yet . . . nothing can disguise the fact that what is happening on that table is deeply primitive. It's the most primitive thing I've seen in my entire biblical year.

There, on a patch of white gauze, is a piece of my son. He has sacrificed a part of his body to join an ancient community. Lew reads a prayer from a xeroxed sheet of paper. "May He who blessed our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon, bless this tender infant . . ."

These are no longer just meaningless names. These are the men I'd spent my year with. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. This was a chain that--if Lew continued spouting names for several hours--would presumably reach Charles Jacobowitz and Arnold Jacobs and A. J. Jacobs. Who am I to break thousands of years of tradition? Circumcision is a crazy, irrational ritual. But here's the thing: It's my heritage's crazy, irrational ritual. So maybe I shouldn't dismiss it.

So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. --MATTHEW 7:12

Day 372. A few days ago, right before Labor Day weekend, the hallway outside our apartment began to smell.

"It's like rotten turnips," Julie said. "You smell it, don't you?"

I did, but told Julie it was probably nothing. Our mysterious neighbor in 5R--a woman I've never met--loves to cook exotic dishes made from animals unknown. This was probably just a recipe gone awry. But the smell didn't fade by morning. Julie called the building staff; they "checked it out" and found nothing. Over Labor Day, our neighbors all left Manhattan. The building was empty except for me, Julie, our kids, and that smell. Which got worse. And worse. You couldn't tell where it was coming from--it seemed to soak the hall.

When Julie and I would go out for a walk, we'd dart from our apartment to the elevator, our mouths and noses covered with our shirt collars. Julie called the maintenance staff again. They promised to look into it.

On Tuesday morning, I woke up to banging in the hallway. I opened our door a crack and peeked out. The building handyman, Victor, was outside apartment 5I--the one owned by our sweet hippie neighbor Nancy--trying to pry open her front door with a hammer. I could hear Nancy's dog barking. Four medics lingered nearby, occasionally clicking their walkie-talkies and speaking in low voices.

I knew before one of the medics asked me that question: "Have you seen your neighbor in the last few days?"

It took Victor a half hour of pounding before he broke down the door. He went in, reemerging a few minutes later.

"Alive?" I asked.

He shook his head.

They wheeled Nancy's body out on a stretcher covered with a sheet. They snapped a padlock on the door, along with yellow police tape ribbon and a Day-Glo sticker warning people not to even consider trying to come inside. They brought an industrial strength fan at the end of the hall to clear the smell.

I told Julie when she woke up. She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands and didn't talk for what seemed like two full minutes. Finally she looked up, her eyes red.

"I saw her a week ago and she was all worried about me and how I was holding up."

I just shook my head.

"What'd she die of?"

"They don't know yet."

"I told them there was a smell," said Julie. "I told them. This is what I was afraid of."

Whenever something happens, I always try to think of a biblical precedent, a story that will help me put it into perspective. But with Nancy's death, there is none, really. The Bible doesn't talk much about living and dying in solitude. Adam starts out alone, but God doesn't let that last long: "It is not good for a man to be alone." In biblical times, the smallest unit of society wasn't the individual. It was the family. Nancy had no family, no husband, no children, just a handful of friends, few of whom she saw very often.

That night, Julie and I lie in bed, too spent to do much reading.

"Maybe we could . . . say a prayer."

Julie looks at me like I had just proposed a threeway with the waitress at Columbus Bakery.

"You serious?"

"A prayer of thanksgiving. I find them helpful. We don't have to call it a prayer. We just give thanks."

Julie paused. "OK."

"Maybe we'll start out simply."

"I'm thankful for our health and our kids," Julie says. "I'm thankful we got to know Nancy," I say.

"I'm thankful you're ending your project soon."

The memorial service is held a couple of days later. It's in the apartment of a woman who knew Nancy just a little bit--they were both members of the building's informal dog owners' clique. Since Nancy had no family, Julie did most of the organizing, tracking down her few friends, posting a notice in the lobby.

About ten people show up. Her high-school friend Dan reads letters she'd written over the years, painfully honest notes about her loneliness and how she still has "the bends" after emerging from the sixties. We pass around the album cover she designed for Jimi Hendrix. Several people say something along the lines of: "She had a troubled life, but at least she found some peace at the end with her dog Memphis."

And we talk about the crushing irony, a twist that sounded like it was out of a Chekhov play but was true: She died of heart failure and asthma. The asthma was brought on by her dog.

If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18--"You shall love your neighbor as yourself"--well, you can't. That would mean putting your neighbor's dreams, career, children, pets, and finances on par with your own. This is why it's usually reinterpreted in the less extreme--but infinitely wise--version known as the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

While she was alive, I didn't do so well with the Golden Rule and Nancy. Here she was, my literal neighbor. Two doors down. And I had made a half-assed effort. I never invited her to dinner. I never rolled up my sleeves and helped her get her Jimi Hendrix book published. I never bought her a gift to repay her for the ones she bought Jasper. I never fulfilled my mission to do a mitzvah for her.

I got my chance to partially redeem myself. Nancy's beagle Memphis still wasn't adopted. He had a temporary home at another neighbor's apartment, but that family couldn't keep him long. So the next day I began a frantic quest: Find Memphis a home, and in so doing, make myself feel less powerless.

I clicked on to craigslist to put up a dog-adoption notice. But while there, I read a notice from the ASPCA. It warned of psychos who adopt dogs and then, for amusement, shoot them or toss them in the river. This didn't help my mood. Instead, I sent an email blast to everyone I could think of. I included a photo of Memphis. I had snapped the photo earlier in the day--the dog was born with a droopy face, but now it was positively dragging on the ground. Will anyone adopt such a forlorn-looking mutt?

A friend of a friend responded. He wanted to meet the forlorn dog. He came over, dressed in a suit and tie, his wife and children in tow.

"Let's think about it," said his wife, as the kids scratched Memphis's head.

She may have had a prudent idea. But the kids weren't about to wait, so just like that, Memphis was off to a suburban house with a yard and a porch.

The next day I felt like I'd at least done something Nancy would have liked. But I also flashed back to a question Nancy asked me months ago:

Did I help because the Bible told me to, or because I really wanted to?

Did I find the dog a new home as a pat and tidy way to quantify some moral progress for my book? Quite possibly.

I consulted one of my spiritual advisers about this--Greg Fryer, a Lutheran minister who lives in my parents' building. He told me the following:

"C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive." In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing. Not only was this a great quote, but it also included dog imagery, so I thought it must be fated. I thanked Rev. Fryer and C. S. Lewis for letting my conscience off the hook.

A few days later three men in white Hazmat suits came to clear out Nancy's apartment. They had stuffed everything--her clothes, her frying pans, her papers--into black plastic garbage bags, about a dozen of which lined the hall. And they were just getting started.

I tied a red bandana to my face, put on some yellow dishwashing gloves, and stepped past them into the apartment.

"Just looking for something real quick," I said before they could ask for identification or permits.

I wove my way through the mess on the floor, and there, on a table in the corner, I found a stack of papers. I flipped through it. It was a very rough draft of her memoir. I took it.

"Thanks!" I said as I walked out.

When I got back to my apartment, I sat on my couch and read the handwritten pages. It's a tough but lovely book. It's also highly unfinished, sometimes with but a sentence fragment scribbled on top of a page. I don't know if it'll ever get published. I hope so. But in case it doesn't, here's a sentence on page forty-one that stopped me short. It is about her sketch of Jimi Hendrix, the one that became the cover to one of his albums.

"Eventually, I sold the original to the Hard Rock Cafe, not only because I needed a little money, but because I was afraid that, if I would die, it would be put on the street, like all stuff is put on the street when people die, in a black plastic bag. Now it was safe."

. . . It was in my mouth as sweet as honey. --EZEKIEL 3:3

Day 374. My niece Natalia is having her bat mitzvah in New Jersey today. As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn't the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it's the theme. You've got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever. I recently went to a bar mitzvah called Zach Wars: Revenge of the Torah, which seemed at odds with Leviticus's ban on vengeance. Natalia's theme is Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

She and her mom have gone all out. The invitations were wrapped around a chocolate bar. Her mom spent weeks making twenty-two papier-mache Oompa Loompas. Bowls of Skittles and M&M's cover the tables.

Jasper is getting fidgety, so I carry him onto the dance floor, where we joined all the thirteen-year-old classmates and sixty-eight-year-old cousins twice removed. We are dancing to some Beyonce song, and I feel something happen. I feel something envelop me and then envelop Jasper. And then I feel it keep going. I feel it spread out like a drop of cranberry juice in a glass of water, sweeping through the room, swallowing my nieces and nephew and Julie and my parents. Here I am, at this gloriously silly ritual, surrounded by giant Twizzlers and Milk Duds, my defenses down, and this feeling has seeped out of my brain through my skull and filled the room. And kept going. For all I know, it has swept out the doors and windows and into the parking lot and through the driveway.

I'd had some close calls this year. There was that hypnotic trance while watching the serpent-handling preacher. But I've never fully let myself go, always hovering a few feet above ground like a hot-air balloon still stuck to its tether.

So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son's hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I'd say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy. And that joy was like joy concentrate, far more intense and warmer than what I felt that night of dancing with the Hasidim. Maybe now I've finally felt what King David felt when he danced before the Lord. During those moments, nothing could have bothered me. If my garments flew up around my waist like King David's did, it wouldn't have mattered. At least to me. The joy would steamroll right on through.

My altered state only lasted all of ten seconds. Maybe less. And then it faded away. But not totally. There's still some background radiation--which I hope to God stays for weeks, months.

Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy's death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real. Farm-bred salmon is better than no salmon at all. Or to put it another way: My year was a controlled experiment, but sometimes experiments produce results precisely because they create extreme circumstances. If Gregor Mendel (a monk, incidentally) had let his pea pods grow willy-nilly, he never would have understood genetics.

Without my year, I wouldn't have been open to that feeling I got on the dance floor. And for that alone, all the craziness and Handy Seats and locusts and snakes might have been worth it.

The end of all things is at hand . . . --1 PETER 4:7

Day 378. One day to go. I've decided not to go on a Bible binge this last day. I don't want to waste it running around like a kaparot chicken. I try to make it a slow day, a day of meditation. I want to try to get a little perspective. Such as:

Did the Bible make me a better person? It's hard to say for sure, but I hope it did. A little, at least. The other day I handed out flyers at a Save Darfur rally, but then got angry at the people who walked by without acknowledging me. I came up with elaborate revenge fantasies in which they read about the rally in the New York Times and felt guilty for not taking my flyer, even tracking me down to apologize. In other words, I'm pretending to be a better person, which is a good first step, if C. S. Lewis is to be believed.

I'm more tolerant, especially of religion, if that helps my case. Here's how I know this: When Jasper was born, my Orthodox aunt Kate gave him a bunch of building blocks with Hebrew letters and paintings of biblical scenes. I didn't want Jasper using them because I was worried the blocks would somehow imprint on his brain and eventually convert him to Hasidism. Nowadays I'm not just OK with him playing with his Bible blocks, I like it. I want him to know his religion.

And the Bible itself? What do I think of it after my yearlong immersion?

When I started my project, Elton Richards made that majestic food analogy: He said my quest was like a banquet table, and not everyone would sit with me at my banquet table, but I have a hunger and thirst, so I deserve to nourish it. I loved the way he talked. I decided that by year's end, I would employ an extended food metaphor of my own. I think I have one now. It may not be majestic, but here goes:

There's a phrase called "Cafeteria Christianity." It's a derisive term used by fundamentalist Christians to describe moderate Christians. The idea is that the moderates pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to follow. They take a nice helping of mercy and compassion. But the ban on homosexuality? They leave that on the countertop.

Fundamentalist Jews don't use the phrase "Cafeteria Judaism," but they have the same critique. You must follow all of the Torah, not just the parts that are palatable.

Their point is, the religious moderates are inconsistent. They're just making the Bible conform to their own values.

The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion. It's not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too. They can't heap everything on their plate. Otherwise they'd kick women out of church for saying hello ("the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak . . ."--1 Corinthians 14:34) and boot out men for talking about the "Tennessee Titans" ("make no mention of the names of other gods . . ."--Exodus 23:13).

But the more important lesson was this: there's nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren't bad per se. I've had some great meals at cafeterias. I've also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones. Religious leaders don't know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can guide you to what is fresh. They can be like a helpful lunch lady who--OK, I've taken the metaphor too far.

Now, this does bring up the problem of authority. Once you acknowledge that we pick and choose from the Bible, doesn't that destroy its credibility? Doesn't that knock the legs out from under it? Why should we put stock in any of the Bible?

"That's the big question," says one of my rabbis, Robbie Harris. I put the question to Robbie as well as every other member of my advisory board. There's no simple or totally satisfying answer. But let me offer two interesting ideas from them:

The first is from the pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards. Here's his metaphor: Try thinking of the Bible as a snapshot of something divine. It may not be a perfect picture. It may have flaws: a thumb on the lens, faded colors in the corners. But it still helps to visualize.

"I need something specific," says Elton. "Beauty is a general thing. It's abstract. I need to see a rose. When I see that Jesus embraced lepers, that's a reason for me to embrace those with AIDS. If he embraced Samaritans, that's a reason for me to fight racism."

The second is from Robbie himself. He says we can't insist that the Bible marks the end of our relationship with God. Who are we to say that the Bible contained all the wisdom? "If you insist that God revealed himself only at one time, at one particular place, using these discrete words, and never any time other than that--that in itself is a kind of idolatry." His point is: You can commit idolatry on the Bible itself. You can start to worship the words instead of the spirit. You need to "meet God halfway in the woods."

Which brings up another question: Do I believe in a traditional biblical God? Well, not in the sense that the ancient Israelites believed in Him. I could never make the full leap to accepting a God who rolls up His sleeves and fiddles with our lives like a novelist does his characters. I'm still agnostic. But in the words Elton Richards, I'm now a reverent agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.

I come away from this year with my own cafeteria religion. I'll be doing things differently than I did thirteen months ago, things both big (resting on the Sabbath) and small (wearing more white clothes). And I'll keep on saying prayers of thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I'm thanking, but I've become addicted to the act of thanking (see the overlong acknowledgments section).

There is . . . a time for every matter under heaven.

--ECCLESIASTES 3:1

Day 381. My favorite book, Ecclesiastes, has these famous lines:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.

This is the time for me to uproot my topiary.

I've been anxious about this for weeks. First of all, I'd heard nightmare stories about kids who didn't recognize their fathers postshave. Some of these kids went on extended crying jags. They'd scream about this strange man in their house. The relationship took weeks to recover.

I'm so paranoid about this, I came up with an idea of how to prep Jasper for the day of defoliation. It involved breaking the Second Commandment--you shall not make any images--but I did it anyway. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Staples and printed out a large color photo of my face circa 2005, from the era of smooth cheeks. I attached the photo to a Popsicle stick. Then, every morning, for an hour while I fed him breakfast, I'd hold the photo in front of my face like a mask. I made holes for the eyes and mouth. He seemed a little weirded out.

Now the day is here. I spend the morning inspecting my beard. I go into the living room to get in some last-minute prayers. Julie's in there.

"You OK?" asks Julie.

"Not really."

"Well, you're making me really happy. Try to focus on that."

The shave itself is scheduled for two o'clock on September 18. The publisher sent a photographer over to get before and after shots, so I spend a few minutes staring at the camera and trying not to look too much like a terrorist. Don't want to scare off potential book buyers.

Luckily, the photographer doesn't ask me to smile. This would have been hard. My mood is black for several reasons. First, there's always an immediate postpartum depression after finishing a big project. I felt it Uwhen I read the entry on Zywiec in the encyclopedia. I feel unmoored and a little scared. What do I do? I don't have structure. Second, my beard has been with me for so long, it's taken on its own identity, almost become a living organism. I feel like I'm losing a pet rabbit.

And third, I'm not just shaving my beard, I'm amputating a large part of my identity. In a couple of hours, I won't be Jacob anymore. I'll be back to being a regular old, unremarkable New Yorker, one of millions.

It's two o'clock when I take the first snip out of my beard. It's not easy, the logistics of shaving this thing. You can't just put on some cream and whip out the razor. First, I hack away at the beard for forty-five minutes with a big silver pair of scissors. The clumps of hair float down, turning the sink black and making the floor look like a Supercuts franchise. The beard eventually shrinks down to the length of putting-green grass. I sweep up all the tufts and stuff them into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Not sure what I'm going to do with this bag of hair. Maybe give away patches with the first one hundred copies of the book.

And now for the razor. Actually, I bought a new razor for the occasion. In this year, a lot has happened in the razor industry. Back when I was shaving regularly, they had a mere three blades. Now these newfangled five-bladed ones have popped up. I lather up, jut out my chin, and put the razor to my neck. I hear that familiar scrape. A stripe of skin appears. And another. After ten minutes, I wash off the rest of the shaving cream, and there it is. My face.

Man, I look weird. I feel naked, vulnerable. My cheeks are tingling, like my face just got out of a yearlong steam bath.

Julie has been watching the last five minutes. "You look like you're fourteen!"

And it's true. Maybe it's an optical illusion--like how a little circle looks even smaller when it's next to a huge circle--but I could pass for an eighth-grader.

Julie grabs my cheeks and pulls me toward her. I kiss her for the first time in two months. Which is lovely. I had forgotten how her lips felt.

The photographer was kind enough to bring champagne. He pops it over our sink and pours some glasses for me, him, and Julie. I'm about to take a sip, when I pause. I say a silent prayer of thanks for the champagne. The prayer feels good, different, unforced. I'm off the clock.

He shall restore what he took by robbery . . . --LEVITICUS 6:4

Day 387. It's been a week since the shave. The first day was the worst. I felt unanchored. Too many choices. It reminded me of the overwhelming freedom I experienced on that first day of freshman year at college, but without any of the exhilaration and double the dread.

Oh, and lots of guilt. I felt like I was getting away with all sorts of transgressions. I went to the barber and had my hair washed by a woman. All the while I was thinking, "Can I really do this? Can I really flip through the People magazine while she's trimming my sideburns? Can I really buy a banana on the way home without worrying if it's from a tree that's more than four years old?" It still seemed wrong.

Every day the guilt recedes a little. Every day I get a bit more accustomed to choice. Choice isn't necessarily a bad thing, I tell myself. And at least my year helped narrow my choices.

I'll never be Jacob again. I'll never live with so many restrictions. But a part of my biblical alter ego has carried over. If my Bible self had a footlong beard, what remains is barely a five o'clock shadow, but it's there. I think it'll always be there.

Right now I'm at the post office, Jasper in tow. I told him I was running an errand, and he insisted on coming, since he's somehow gotten the idea that errands are as exciting as the Central Park merry-go-round. We wait fifteen minutes before getting to the front of the line. I slide a brown bubble-wrap package onto the scale. Six dollars to go to Monte Sereno, California. I pay my money. In three days my ex-girlfriend will open her mailbox to find her black leather Bible with its tissue-thin pages and faded gold embossing, the 1,536 pages that have shaped my year.

Jasper and I leave the post office, turn left, and head toward home for a quiet Friday night.

A Note from the Author

All the events in this book are true. Some of the sequences have been rearranged, and, in certain cases, the names and identifying details have been changed. Unless otherwise specified, the Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Forgive me. I know I used the I'm-as-Jewish-as-the-Olive-Garden-is-Italian line in my last book. But it just happens to be the best description of my ethnicity.

THE PREPARATION

It's nearly impossible to get an accurate count on the number of different Bible editions. "In English, there are more than 3,000 versions of the entire Bible or portions of the Bible," writes Kenneth C. Davis in Don't Know Much About the Bible. Kevin Phillips's book American Theocracy gives a much higher number: 7,000.

Thanks to professor Julie Galambush for tipping me off to the anesthesia brouhaha.

To be precise: The Protestant Old Testament has 39 books, but the Jewish and Catholic versions have a different count. The Hebrew Bible comes in at 35 books, because several books--like Kings and Chronicles--are not split into two parts. The Catholic Old Testament totals 46 books, since it contains sections not found in the Protestant version, such as Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees.

The term midrash has a couple of meanings. It can be used to describe Jewish folklore such as the Nachshon tale. But it also has a wider meaning, namely, the collection of rabbinic sermons and commentaries on the Bible. For more, see the Encyclopedia Judaica's midrash entry, which comes right after the entry on Bette Midler.

DAY 2

Other suspects that have been mentioned as the actual forbidden fruit: the fig, pomegranate, grapes, and wheat.

For more on Genesis' fertility themes, see Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman.

I got concerned that my memory had distorted the meaning of cognitive dissonance. And there are a bunch of definitions nowadays. But I found the original 1959 paper establishing the theory, and it says that when there is a conflict between a person's thoughts and actions, the "the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence with the overt behavior." See www.psych classics.yorku.ca/Festinger/index.htm.

DAY 6

My wife's ex-boyfriend's gadget is called a Light Wedge, in case you want to buy one.

Yes, I know the whole "Eskimos have lots of words for snow" is kind of an urban legend. See Word Myths by David Wilton, p. 53, which says, "So, how many Eskimo words for snow are there? The answer is either a few or a lot, depending on how you count." Does that clarify it?

The rabbi who talks about coveting Jaguars is Joseph Telushkin, author of Biblical Literacy, as referenced in Don't Know Much About the Bible.

DAY 23

For an excellent article on Proverbs and spanking, see www.religioustol erance.org/spankin13.htm.

DAY 31

Speaking of calendars, I didn't pay proper attention this year to the intricacies of the biblical calendar. Forgive me. I could have spent a year unraveling the debates on this topic alone. There's the well-known Hebrew calendar, but also the Karaite calendar and the Samaritan calendar.

DAY 40

I still have no idea what that "Don't Look Back" sign at the airport was all about. If you do, let me know.

The polls in question include Gallup and CBS News. Here's a good article on it: www.straightdope.com/columns/061110.html.

DAY 42

The Jubilee year hasn't been observed since the time of the Temple (The Second Jewish Book of Why, p. 262). The Sabbath year is still observed in some form, but only in Israel (ibid., p. 320).

DAY 44

I first learned about the "domino" phrase in the book Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench, a very interesting look at fundamentalism.

The history of literalism is actually far more complex and subtle than my thirty-second summary. (I know, shocking!) There's much debate over how literally the ancients took the Bible. Some religious scholars--including Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg--argue they didn't take it literally at all (see the discussion of mythos and logos in Day 272). These scholars say the ancients saw the Bible stories as myth--true on a deep metaphorical level, not as hard fact. It wasn't supposed to be reportage like The Wall Street Journal. Borg quotes a Georgian aphorism: "It is true, and it is not true."

Most scholars agree that at some point--after the Gutenberg Bible was printed? after the Renaissance?--believers started taking the Bible as factual, literal truth. And it was this literal interpretation of the Bible that spawned the dueling worldviews of modernism and fundamentalism. To complicate matters further, there are many alternatives to modernism and fundamentalism. For instance, geneticist Francis Collins wrote The Language of God, about how religion and science can be reconciled.

In Jewish biblical interpretation, the literal meaning of a passage is sometimes called "pshat" and the interpretation is called "derush." And if you want to get really technical, there are four levels of biblical interpretation in traditional Judaism: "pshat (the literal meaning of the text), remez (its allusions), derush (the homilies that can be derived from it), and sod (its mystical secrets)." They spell out the acronym "pardes," which means orchard (from the Lubavitcher website sichosinenglish.org).

I did, in fact, smash an idol. I took a hammer to a faux Oscar statuette that my wife bought as a party favor once. I got out some of my hostility toward celebrity culture. But frankly, it didn't feel like it merited a chapter.

DAY 45

Sorry. I used the line about my dad working through the Apocalypse in my previous book. That's the last time in this book that I'll recycle a line from The Know-It-All.

DAY 46

Actually, in Judaism, life trumps all except for adultery, murder, and idolatry. Traditionally, you should choose to die before committing those. Also, I probably shouldn't say that all rabbis would allow pig's valves, since religion has a way of making a mockery of absolute statements. But I have yet to hear of a rabbi who would ban this.

DAY 50

If you want to be nitpicky about the whale/big fish thing: The Book of Jonah says "great fish," though when the story is referenced in Matthew 12:40, the word whale is, in fact, used.

DAY 64

I should note that Orthodox Jews today say prayers both before and after a meal, as do some Christians.

DAY 70

The book with the broad definition of evil tongue is The 613 Mitzvot by Ronald L. Eisenberg.

DAY 82

The "vapor of vapors" translation is from Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg. In fact, I was helped enormously by Borg's brilliant section on the conflict between the conventional wisdom of Proverbs and the more nuanced wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job.

DAY 87

Other Catholic objections to IVF include: (1) it usually involves masturbation; and (2) it sometimes involves discarding fertilized eggs. For more on that see Day 314.

DAY 93

The Apocrypha contains such texts as Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, and Ben Sira. In Judaism and Protestant Christianity they aren't considered part of the canon. But in Catholicism they are and go by the name Deuterocanonical works.

DAY 110

The two most zealous propolygamy Jewish web pages: www.polygamy.com/ articles/templates/?a=28&z=; and www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_ 4.html.

DAY 117

Later parts of the Bible seem to reject the notion of intergenerational punishment. Most notably, Ezekiel 18:20: "The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son."

DAY 120

Incidentally, Tamar's second husband, Onan, is most famous for being the originator of the Sin of Onan. I had always thought the Sin of Onan was masturbation. But technically, that's not the case. Onan incurred God's wrath when he stopped midway through intercourse with Tamar and spilled his seed on the ground. Onan didn't want Tamar to get pregnant because, according to custom, the child would be considered his late brother's, not his own. Onan showed disrespect for his dead brother and for God by wasting his seed. So that is the literal Sin of Onan.

DAY 128

For more on whether the commandments actually total ten, I recommend the fascinating book How to Read the Bible by Marc Brettler.

DAY 131

The scavenger hunt company is called Watson Adventures. The hunts are great. And I'm not just saying that because I sleep next to the company's vice president.

DAY 140

The expert of all experts on kosher crickets is Natan "the Zoo Rabbi" Slifkin, whose website is zootorah.com. According to him, not all crickets are kosher, just one variety favored by Yemenite Jews.

DAY 153

The Bible says to attach tassels (or fringes) to the four corners of your garment. Where are my garment's corners? During my DIY phase, I usually went with the two corners at the end of my Oxford shirtsleeves and the two corners at the bottom of my shirt front. If I was feeling bold, I'd go with the corners on the shirt collar.

DAY 157

The upright posture quote comes from The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred J. Kolatch.

DAY 168

For more on red heifers and the apocalypse, I recommend a great New Yorker article, "Letter from Jerusalem: Forcing the End," by Lawrence Wright, July 20, 1998.

I've just skimmed the surface of the debates over Revelation. For an excellent summary of two ways of reading Revelation, I once again recommend Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. He argues strongly that Revelation was not a prediction of events yet to come (the futurist view), but was written as a short-term prophecy about the Roman Empire (the past-historical view). There are also many people who believe in some combination of the two.

To be precise, the documentary hypothesis refers only to the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses. But the same idea--multiple authors, multiple editors--applies to other parts of the Bible as well.

For a remarkably in-depth analysis of the Dr. Laura email--including more on the overliteralization of the word pigskin--you can read "President Bartlet's Fallacious Diatribe" by Hank Hanegraaff in the Christian Research Journal, volume 23, number 3 (2001).

DAY 202

There are several other differences between the Samaritan Bible and the Hebrew Bible. They're pretty technical, but if you're interested, here are two websites: www.lulu.com/content/186110; and web.meson.org/religion/torahcom pare.php.

DAY 205

Speaking of the Naked Cowboy, I did a photo shoot for this book in Times Square. The publisher rented a sheep and had me in a white robe and carrying a staff. For forty-five absurd minutes I drew more onlookers than the Naked Cowboy himself. I think that will forever be the zenith of my fame.

I think Gil misspoke when he said "Jacob was buried with Rachel," because Jacob was actually buried with Leah. I'm guessing he meant "Abraham was buried with Sarah."

DAY 223

Actually, the notion of booze-hating Puritans is a bit of an exaggeration. Some did, but others believed it was OK in moderation. In the words of Increase Mather, "Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness."

DAY 229

Regarding the lamb juice: A kosher lamb is drained of its blood, in accordance with the Bible's taboo against eating blood. But I can't imagine there isn't some residual blood left in there, even if it's just a hint.

DAY 233

For more on the oft-forgotten male impurity laws try reading the article on Taharat Hamishpachah at www.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Projects/Reln91/ Blood/Judaism/new%20family/purity.htm. Also, in case you really, really want to know: I tried to comply with Leviticus 15:16, which says "And if a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening." It wasn't so bad. I have no objections to extra bathing, and Julie didn't take this one personally.

DAY 234

A confession: I cut way back on movies this year, but never successfully eliminated them from my life. I saw this one, plus a whole bunch of Bible-themed films. Also, for a good, basic section on the fifth commandment (Honor your father and mother) see Don't Know Much About the Bible, p. 120.

DAY 237

Thanks to the rock-and-roll rabbi Robbie Harris for the insight that the Bible is a "minority report."

As is de rigueur with all things relating to The Da Vinci Code, the notion that a married Jesus is a more human Jesus is a controversial one. One of my spiritual advisers (who asked to remain unnamed) emailed me: "There is no scandal in supposing that Jesus married and had children. It is a stupid reading of the scriptural text, and it is very doubtful historically, but not troubling theologically. And that Dan Brown supposes that it is reveals that he does not have a clue about Christianity and that he has a very low opinion both of humanity and of the holy estate of marriage. Jesus is a man--that's the point of the holy incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity."

DAY 264

The New York Times article on the Reverend Boyd is "Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock" by Laurie Goodstein, July 30, 2006.

DAY 277

The King James version cleans up Ezekiel 23:20. But the New International Version gives a more earthy, and accurate, translation: "There, she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."

For more history of cursing try "Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore" by Natalie Angier, September 20, 2005. And "Tarnation Heck!" by William Safire, February 12, 2006. Both in the New York Times.

DAY 287

See A Practical Handbook for Ministry by Wayne E. Oates for more on mentally ill patients who try to pluck out their eyes.

DAY 297

Thanks to Roadside Religion by Timothy K. Beal for first introducing me to the quote about religious study making the "strange familiar and the familiar strange" (p. 299). It's an interesting book about religious tourist destinations.

Many scholars--including Bart Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus--contend that the Gospel of Mark originally ended with the verse 16:8. Or else, it continued, but the real ending has been lost.

DAY 314

The translation of Exodus 21:22 is notoriously difficult. If you translate the Hebrew word for "lose her offspring" as "a miscarriage," the passage seems to bolster the pro-choicers. If you translate it as "premature birth," then it can be used by pro-lifers. For more on this, see www.religioustolerance.org/abo_biblh .htm.

Here are some other websites that deal with abortion and the Bible from both sides:

www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/bible.html; www.priests forlife.org/brochures/thebible.html; www.elroy.net/ehr/abortion.html; www .jimfeeney.org/pro-life.html.

By the way, here's an etiquette tip: Do not say "Mazal tov" to a Karaite. The phrase mazal tov means "good stars" or "good constellations," which they see as violating the Bible's ban on astrology.

The C. S. Lewis quote is from Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), p. 192.

DAY 378

For more on women being banned from talking in church, see Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John Shelby Spong.

Selected Bibliography

Armstrong, Karen. The Battle For God. New York: Ballantine, 2000. ------. The Great Transformation. New York: Knopf, 2006. ------. A History of God. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Ballmer, Randall. Thy Kingdom Come. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Barton, John, and John Mudiman, eds. The Oxford Bible Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Beal, Timothy K. Roadside Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Bell, James Stuart, and Stan Campbell. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Bible. New York: Penguin Group, 2005.

Blackhouse, Robert. The Kregel Pictorial Guide to the Temple. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1996.

Blanton, Brad. Radical Honesty. Stanley, Va.: Sparrowhawk Publications, 2005.

Bloom, Harold. Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

Bloom, Harold, and David Rosenberg. The Book of J. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1990.

Bock, Darrell. The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006.

Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Borowski, Oded. Daily Life in Biblical Times. Leiden, The Netherlands: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003.

Boyd, Gregory. The Myth of a Christian Nation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2005.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Brettler, Marc Zvi. How to Read the Bible. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2005.

Butler, Trent, Chad Brand, and Archie England, eds. Holman's Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2003.

Carmichael, Calum. Ideas and the Man: Remembering David Daube. Frankfurt, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004.

Carter, Jimmy. Our Endangered Values. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. ------. Sources of Strength. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. Chilton, Bruce. Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography. New York: Image, 2002. Coffin, William Sloane. Letters to a Young Doubter. Louisville, Ky.: Westmin-

ster John Knox Press, 2005.

Colbert, Don. What Would Jesus Eat? Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Collins, Francis. The Language of God. New York: Free Press, 2006. Crabb, Larry. Finding God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993. Crapanzano, Vincent. Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit

to the Bench. New York: New Press, 2000.

Cross, Carlene. Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith.

New York: Algonquin Books, 2006.

Davis, Kenneth C. Don't Know Much About the Bible. New York: William Morrow, 1998.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Dossick, Rabbi Wayne. Living Judaism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

Dowley, Tim. Everyday Life in Bible Times. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1998.

Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Eisenberg, Ronald L. The JPS Guide to Jewish Traditions. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society of America, 2004.

------. The 613 Mitzvot. Rockville, Md.: Schreiber Publishing, 2005. Englert, Jonathan. The Collar. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed. New York: Free Press, 2002.

Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

Fox, Robin Lane. The Unauthorized Version. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Friedman, Richard Elliott. Commentary on the Torah. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

------. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Summit Books, 1987.

Galambush, Julie. The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Geoghegan, Jeffrey, and Michael Homan. The Bible for Dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2003.

Girzone, Joseph. My Struggle with Faith. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming. New York: Norton, 2006.

Greenberg, Rabbi Steven. Wrestling with God & Men. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Hahn, Scott. Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy. New York: Doubleday, 2005.

Harris, Roberta. The World of the Bible. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith. New York: Norton, 2004.

------. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Hedges, Chris. American Fascists. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Hendricks, Howard G., and William D. Hendricks. Living by the Book. Chicago: Moody Press, 1991.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Kelemen, Lawrence. Permission to Receive. Southfield, Mich.: Targum Press, 1996. Kelly, Stuart. The Book of Lost Books. New York: Random House, 2006. Kennedy, D. James. Why the Ten Commandments Matter. New York: Time

Faith, 2005.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. New York: Knopf, 1994. Kolatch, Alfred. The Jewish Book of Why. Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David Publishers, 1981.

------. The Second Jewish Book of Why. Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David Publishers, 1985.

Kornbluth, Doron. Jewish Matters. Southfield, Mich.: Targum Press, 1999.

Kozodoy, Ruth Lurie. The Book of Jewish Holidays. Springfield, N.J.: Behrman House, 1981.

Kugel, James L. The Bible as It Was. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1995.

Levine, Baruch A. Leviticus: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989.

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

------. The Screwtape Letters. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

Lightfoot, Neil R. How We Got the Bible. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2003.

Locks, Gil. Coming Back to Earth. New York: L'Chaim Publications, 2004.