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

The Year of Living Biblically

Introduction

As I write this, I have a beard that makes me resemble Moses. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Ted Kaczynski. I've been called all three.

It's not a well-manicured, socially acceptable beard. It's an untamed mass that creeps up toward my eyeballs and drapes below my neckline.

I've never allowed my facial hair to grow before, and it's been an odd and enlightening experience. I've been inducted into a secret fraternity of bearded guys--we nod at each other as we pass on the street, giving a knowing quarter smile. Strangers have come up to me and petted my beard, like it's a Labrador retriever puppy or a pregnant woman's stomach.

I've suffered for my beard. It's been caught in jacket zippers and been tugged on by my surprisingly strong two-year-old son. I've spent a lot of time answering questions at airport security.

I've been asked if I'm named Smith and sell cough drops with my brother. ZZ Top is mentioned at least three times a week. Passersby have shouted "Yo, Gandalf!" Someone called me Steven Seagal, which I found curious, since he doesn't have a beard.

I've battled itch and heat. I've spent a week's salary on balms, powders, ointments, and conditioners. My beard has been a temporary home to cappuccino foam and lentil soup. And it's upset people. Thus far, two little girls have burst into tears, and one boy has hidden behind his mother.

But I mean no harm. The facial hair is simply the most noticeable physical manifestation of a spiritual journey I began a year ago.

My quest has been this: to live the ultimate biblical life. Or more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible. To obey the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love my neighbor. To tithe my income. But also to abide by the oft-neglected rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers. To stone adulterers. And, naturally, to leave the edges of my beard unshaven (Leviticus 19:27). I am trying to obey the entire Bible, without picking and choosing.

To back up: I grew up in an extremely secular home in New York City. I am officially Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say: not very. I attended no Hebrew school, ate no matzoh. The closest my family came to observing Judaism was that paradoxical classic of assimilation: a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree.

It's not that my parents badmouthed religion. It's just that religion wasn't for us. We lived in the twentieth century, for crying out loud. In our house, spirituality was almost a taboo subject, much like my father's salary or my sister's clove-cigarette habit.

My only brushes with the Bible were brief and superficial. We had a next-door neighbor, Reverend Schulze, a kindly Lutheran minister who looked remarkably like Thomas Jefferson. (By the way, Reverend Schulze's son became an actor and, oddly enough, went on to play the part of the creepy priest on The Sopranos.) Reverend Schulze told great stories about college sit-ins during the sixties, but whenever he started talking about God, it just sounded like a foreign language to me.

I attended a handful of bar mitzvahs where I zoned out during services and spent the time trying to guess who had bald spots under their yarmulkes. I went to my paternal grandfather's funeral, which was, to my surprise, presided over by a rabbi. How could the rabbi eulogize a man he'd never met? It was disconcerting.

And as far as childhood religion, that was about it.

I was agnostic before I even knew what the word meant. Partly, it was the problem of the existence of evil. If there is a God, why would He allow war, disease, and my fourth-grade teacher Ms. Barker, who forced us to have a sugar-free bake sale? But mostly, the idea of God seemed superfluous. Why do we need an invisible, inaudible deity? Maybe He exists, but we'll never know in this life.

College didn't help my spiritual development. I went to a secular university where you were more likely to study the semiotics of Wicca rituals than the Judeo-Christian tradition. And when we did read the Bible, it was as literature, as a fusty, ancient book with the same truth quotient as The Faerie Queene.

We did, of course, study the history of religion. How the Bible has been the force behind many of humankind's greatest achievements: the civil rights movement, charitable giving, the abolition of slavery. And how, of course, it's been used to justify our worst: war, genocide, and the subjugation of others.

For a long time, I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world. The potential for abuse too high. I figured it would slowly fade away like other archaic things. Science was on the march. Someday soon we'd all be living in a neo-Enlightenment paradise where every decision was made with steely Spock-like logic.

As you might have noticed, I was spectacularly mistaken. The influence of the Bible--and religion as a whole--remains a mighty force, perhaps even stronger than it was when I was a kid. So in the last few years, religion has become my fixation. Is half of the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And most important, I now have a young son--if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don't want to pass it on to him.

So I knew I wanted to explore religion. I just needed to figure out how.

The germ of the idea came from my own family: my uncle Gil. Or ex-uncle, to be exact. Gil married my aunt and divorced her a few years later, but he remains the most controversial member of our family. If the rest of my relatives are ultrasecular, Gil makes up for it by being, quite possibly, the most religious man in the world. He's a spiritual omnivore. He started his life as a Jew, became a Hindu, appointed himself a guru, sat for eight months on a Manhattan park bench without speaking, founded a hippie cult in upstate New York, turned into a born-again Christian, and, in his latest incarnation, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. I may have missed a phase--I think he was into Shinto for a bit. But you get the idea.

At some point along his spiritual path, Gil decided to take the Bible literally. Completely literally. The Bible says to bind money to your hand (Deuteronomy 14:25), so Gil withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank and tied the bills to his palm with a thread. The Bible says to wear fringes on the corners of your garment (Numbers 15:38), so Gil bought yarn from a knitting shop, made a bunch of tassels, and attached them to his shirt collar and the ends of his sleeves. The Bible says to give money to widows and orphans, so he walked the streets asking people if they were widows or orphans so he could hand them cash.

About a year and a half ago, I was telling my friend Paul about Gil's bizarre life over lunch at a sandwich shop, and I had my epiphany. That's it. I needed to follow the Bible literally myself. I needed to do it for several reasons.

First, since the Bible requires me to tell the truth (Proverbs 26:28), I must confess that part of the reason is to write this book. A couple of years ago, I came out with a book about reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all of it, from A to Z--or more specifical, from a-ak (East Asian music) to UZywiec (a town in southern Poland known for its beer). What could I do next? The only intellectual adventure that seemed a worthy follow-up was to explore the most influential book in the world, the alltime best seller, the Bible.

Second, this project would be my visa to a spiritual world. I wouldn't just be studying religion. I'd be living it. If I had what they call a Godshaped hole in my heart, this quest would allow me to fill it. If I had a hidden mystical side, this year would bring it out of the closet. If I wanted to understand my forefathers, this year would let me live like they did, but with less leprosy.

And third, this project would be a way to explore the huge and fascinating topic of biblical literalism. Millions of Americans say they take the Bible literally. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, the number hovers near 33 percent; a 2004 Newsweek poll put it at 55 percent. A literal interpretation of the Bible--both Jewish and Christian--shapes American policies on the Middle East, homosexuality, stem cell research, education, abortion--right on down to rules about buying beer on Sunday.

But my suspicion was that almost everyone's literalism consisted of picking and choosing. People plucked out the parts that fit their agenda, whether that agenda was to the right or left. Not me. I thought, with some naivete, I would peel away the layers of interpretation and find the true Bible underneath. I would do this by being the ultimate fundamentalist. I'd be fearless. I would do exactly what the Bible said, and in so doing, I'd discover what's great and timeless in the Bible and what is outdated.

I told my wife, Julie, my idea, and warned her it might affect our life in a not-so-minor way. She didn't gnash her teeth or tear out her hair. She just emitted a little sigh. "I was kind of hoping your next book would be a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt or something."

Everyone--family, friends, coworkers--had the same concern: that I'd go native. That I'd end up as a beekeeper at a monastery, or I'd move into my ex-uncle Gil's spare room in his Jerusalem apartment.

In a sense, they were right to worry. It's impossible to immerse yourself in religion for twelve months and emerge unaffected. At least it was for me. Put it this way: If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, "That guy is kinda delusional."

As with most biblical journeys, my year has taken me on detours I could never have predicted. I didn't expect to herd sheep in Israel. Or fondle a pigeon egg. Or find solace in prayer. Or hear Amish jokes from the Amish. I didn't expect to confront just how absurdly flawed I am. I didn't expect to discover such strangeness in the Bible. And I didn't expect to, as the Psalmist says, take refuge in the Bible and rejoice in it.

The Preparation

And he shall read in it all the days of his life . . .

--DEUTERONOMY 17:19

On the admittedly random day of July 7, 2005, I begin my preparations. I pull out a Bible that is tucked away in the corner of my bookshelf. I don't even remember where I got it, but it looks like the Platonic ideal of a Bible. Like a Bible they'd use in a fifties Western to stop a bullet from piercing the hero's chest. On the front, it says "Holy Bible" in faded gold embossing. The tissue-thin pages remind me of my beloved encyclopedia. The black leather cover smells exactly like my parents' 1976 Plymouth Valiant. It feels good, comforting.

I crack open the Bible. The title page says, "This Bible is presented to . . ." and then, in handwritten bubble letters, the name of my ex-girlfriend. Huh. Somehow I had inadvertently pilfered my ex-girlfriend's childhood Bible. I hope inadvertently. It's been a decade since we broke up, and I can't remember. Regardless, that's not a good sign. At the very least, I need to return it when I'm done.

I've read bits and pieces of the Bible before, but never the whole thing, never straight through from Genesis to Revelation. So that's what I do for four weeks, five hours a day. Luckily, I'm used to marathon reading from my Britannica project, so it felt pleasantly nostalgic.

As I read, I type into my PowerBook every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice I find in the Bible. When I finish, I have a very long list. It runs seventy-two pages. More than seven hundred rules. The scope is astounding. All aspects of my life will be affected--the way I talk, walk, eat, bathe, dress, and hug my wife.

Many of the rules will be good for me and will, I hope, make me a better person by the end of the year. I'm thinking of: No lying. No coveting. No stealing. Love your neighbor. Honor your parents. Dozens of them. I'll be the Gandhi of the Upper West Side.

But plenty of other rules don't seem like they'll make me more righteous at all. Just more strange, more obsessive, more likely to alienate friends and family: Bathe after sex. Don't eat fruit from a tree planted less than five years ago. Pay the wages of a worker every day.

And a good number of the rules aren't just baffling, but federally outlawed. As in: Destroy idols. Kill magicians. Sacrifice oxen.

This is going to be a monster project. I need a plan of attack. I need to make some decisions.

1. Which version of the Bible should I use?

The Bible I pulled from my bookshelf is called the Revised Standard Version, which it turns out is a well-respected translation, an offspring of the famed King James Version from 1611, but stripped of most of the "thee"s and "thou"s.

It's a good start. But it's just one of many, many versions--an estimated three thousand of them in English alone. One of my goals is to find out what the Bible really says, so I decide I can't rely on any single translation. I want to compare and contrast at least some of those three thousand.

I go to a Bible bookstore in midtown Manhattan. It's a huge WalMart-sized store with fluorescent lighting and a long counter of cash registers at the front. My salesman is named Chris, a soft-spoken guy with the body of an Olympic power lifter. He shows me tables covered with Bibles of all shapes, sizes, and linguistic slants--from the plain-spoken English of the Good News Bible to the majestic cadence of the Jerusalem Bible.

He points out one Bible I might want. It's designed to look exactly like a Seventeen magazine: An attractive (if long-sleeved) model graces the front, next to cover lines like "What's Your Spiritual IQ?" Open it up and you'll find sidebars such as "Rebecca the Control Freak."

"This one's good if you're on the subway and are too embarrassed to be seen reading the Bible," says Chris. "Because no one will ever know it's a Bible." It's an odd and poignant selling point. You know you're in a secular city when it's considered more acceptable for a grown man to read a teen girl's magazine than the Bible.

I leave the store with two shopping bags packed with Scripture. But my buying spree isn't over. When I get home, I click on Amazon.com and get several Jewish translations of the Bible, and a half-dozen Bible commentaries. To be safe, I order The Bible for Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Bible--anything aimed at those with a sub-80 IQ.

That's not to mention the Bibles sent to me by friends. One gave me the waterproof Outdoor Bible so that I could study the Scripture even during floods and other Old Testament weather patterns. Another sent me a hip-hop version, where the Twenty-third Psalm reads "The Lord is all that." (The more traditional translation is "The Lord is my shepherd.")

In short, I've got the proverbial stack of Bibles, almost waist high.

2. What does it mean to follow the Bible literally?

To follow the Bible literally--at face value, at its word, according to its plain meaning--isn't just a daunting proposition. It's a dangerous one.

Consider: In the third century, the scholar Origen is said to have interpreted literally Matthew 19:12--"There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven"--and castrated himself. Origen later became a preeminent theologian of his age-- and an advocate of figurative interpretation.

Another example: In the mid-1800s, when anesthesia was first introduced for women in labor, there was an uproar. Many felt it violated God's pronouncement in Genesis 3:16: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children." If Julie and I ever have another child, would I dare get between her and the epidural needle? Not a chance.

It's a good bet that, at some time or other in history, every single passage in the Bible has been taken as literal. I've decided I can't do that. That'd be misleading, unnecessarily flip, and would result in missing body parts. No, instead my plan is this: I will try to find the original intent of the biblical rule or teaching and follow that to the letter. If the passage is unquestionably figurative--and I'm going to say the eunuch one is--then I won't obey it literally. But if there's any doubt whatsoever--and most often there is--I will err on the side of being literal. When it says don't tell lies, I'll try not to tell any lies. When it says to stone blasphemers, I'll pick up rocks.

3. Should I obey the Old Testament, the New Testament, or both?

Many, perhaps most, of the teachings in the two testaments are similar, but some are significantly different. So I've decided to split up my quest.

I will devote most of my year--eight months or so--to the Old Testament, since that's where you'll find the bulk of the Bible's rules. The Old Testament consists of thirty-nine books that mix narrative, genealogy, poetry, and lots and lots of laws. The first five books alone--the books of Moses--have hundreds of decrees, including the crucial Ten Commandments, as well as some of the more seemingly atavistic ones about executing homosexuals. That's not to mention divinely inspired advice in later Old Testament books. The Proverbs--a collection of King Solomon's wisdom--offer guidance on child rearing and marriage. The Psalms tell you how to worship. I'll be abiding by everything. Or trying to. Being officially Jewish, I feel much more comfortable living and writing about the Old Testament. (Or, as many Jews prefer to call it, the Hebrew Bible, since old implies "outdated," and new implies "improved"). But in the final four months of my year, I want to explore--in at least some way--the teachings of the Christian Bible, the New Testament.

To ignore the New Testament would be to ignore half of the story. The evangelical movement and its literal interpretation of the Bible hold enormous sway, both for the good (they were powerful advocates for aiding Darfur) and, to my secular mind, the not-so-good (far-right fundamentalists are driving the creationism movement).

Naturally, there's the most famous of all Christian literalists--the conservatives in the Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson mold. I plan to meet them later this year. But I also want to look at evangelical groups such as the "Red-letter Christians," which focus on what they see as literal adherence to Jesus's teachings about compassion, nonviolence, and the redistribution of wealth.

It's debatable whether the New Testament even has a legal code--it depends on your definition of "law"--but it has many teachings that have been followed with varying degrees of literalness, from Jesus's "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemy" to the Apostle Paul's decree that men should have short hair. Frankly, I haven't hammered out all the details of my New Testament plan but hope to figure it out once I get my spiritual footing.

4. Should I have guides?

The Bible says, "It is not good for the man to be alone." Plus, I'm flying blind here. So over the course of a couple of weeks, I assemble a board of spiritual advisers: rabbis, ministers, and priests, some of them conservative, some of them one four-letter word away from excommunication. Some are friends of friends, some are names I stumbled upon in Bible commentary books. I'll be talking to them as much as possible.

Plus, I make a pledge to get out of the house. I'll visit a bunch of groups that take the Bible literally in their own way: the ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ancient sect of Samaritans, and the Amish, among others.

My guides will give me advice and context. But they won't be the final word. The Bible will. I don't want to follow any single tradition exclusively. As naive or misguided as it may be, I want to discover the Bible for myself, even if it entails trekking down some circuitous paths. "DIY religion," as my friend calls it. Perhaps I'll find the beauty of a particular tradition fits me best. Or perhaps I'll start my own sect of Judeo-Christianity. I don't know.

As I expected, not everyone thinks my project is a great idea. My aunt Kate--who has remained an Orthodox Jew even after her divorce from the controversial Gil--told me I was, as our people say, meshuga.

I first floated the idea by Kate in early August. We were at my grandfather's house sitting around his big dining room table. Kate had just finished changing after a dip in the pool. (She won't wear a bathing suit for modesty reasons, so she plunged in with her long, black billowy dress, which impressed me. The thing looked heavy enough to sink a lifeguard.) When I explained the premise of my book, her eyebrows shot up to her hairline. "Really?" she said.

Then she laughed. I think part of her was happy that someone in our godless family was showing some interest in religion.

After which she got concerned: "It's misguided. You need the oral law. You can't just obey the written law. It doesn't make sense without the oral law."

The traditional Jewish position is this: The Bible--known as the written law--was composed in shorthand. It's so condensed, it's almost in code. Which is where the oral law comes in. The rabbis have unraveled the Bible for us in books such as the Talmud, which are based on the oral teachings of the elders. When the Bible says to "rest" on the Sabbath, you need the rabbis to tell you what "rest" means. Can you exercise? Can you cook? Can you log on to drugstore.com?

Without the rabbis, I'm like the protagonist of the early eighties TV show The Greatest American Hero--he found a bright red suit that gave him all these superpowers, but he lost the instruction manual, so he was always flying into walls.

Some conservative Christians were also baffled by my undertaking. They said I couldn't truly understand the Bible without accepting the divinity of Christ. They said that many of these laws--like the ones about animal sacrifice--were nullified by Jesus's death.

And I did start to have doubts. These were good points. I felt torn, anxious about my approach, my monumental ignorance, my lack of preparation, about all the inevitable blunders I'd make. And the more I read, the more I absorbed the fact that the Bible isn't just another book. It's the book of books, as one of my Bible commentaries calls it. I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, and fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia. No one has been executed for translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It's intimidating, to say the least.

Fortunately, I got a couple of pep talks from two of my favorite advisers. The first was Reverend Elton Richards, my friend David's father, who just retired as minister of his Lutheran congregation in Des Moines, Iowa. He calls himself a "pastor out to pasture." I told him about the doubters.

"You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and a thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and thirst. So they shouldn't judge you."

I love the way he talks. By the end, perhaps I'll be able to speak in majestic food metaphors like Reverend Richards.

I also had breakfast with Rabbi Andy Bachman, a brilliant man who heads up one of Brooklyn's largest synagogues, Congregation Beth Elohim. He told me a midrash--a story or legend that is not in the Bible proper, but which deals with biblical events. This midrash is about the parting of the Red Sea.

"We all think of the scene in The Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston, where Moses lifted up his rod, and the waters rolled back. But this midrash says that's not how it happened. Moses lifted up his rod, and the sea did not part. The Egyptians were closing in, and the sea wasn't moving. So a Hebrew named Nachshon just walked into the water. He waded up to his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, then his shoulders. And right when water was about to get up to his nostrils, the sea parted. The point is, sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in."

So I did. And here is what happened.

Month One: September

Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.

--ECCLESIASTES 12:13

It's the first day, and I already feel like the water is three feet over my head.

I have chosen September 1 to start my project, and from the moment I wake up, the Bible consumes my life. I can't do anything without fearing I'm breaking a biblical law. Before I so much as inhale or exhale, I have to run through a long mental checklist of the rules.

It begins when I open my closet to get dressed. The Bible forbids men to wear women's clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5), so that comfortable Dickinson College sweatshirt is off-limits. It was originally my wife's.

The Bible says to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers (Leviticus 19:19), so I have to mothball my poly-cotton Esquire magazine T-shirt.

And loafers? Am I allowed to wear leather? I go to the living room, click on my PowerBook and open my Biblical Rules file. I scroll down to the ones about animals. Pigskin and snakeskin are questionable, but it looks like regular old cow leather is permissible.

But wait--am I even allowed to use the computer? The Bible, as you might have guessed, doesn't address the issue specifically, so I give it a tentative yes. Maybe sometime down the road, I could try stone tablets.

And then I stumble. Within a half hour of waking, I check the Amazon.com sales ranking of my last book. How many sins does that comprise? Pride? Envy? Greed? I can't even count.

I don't do much better on my errand to Mail Boxes Etc. I want to xerox a half dozen copies of the Ten Commandments so I can Scotch tape them up all over the apartment, figuring it'd be a good memory aid.

The Bible says, those with good sense are "slow to anger" (Proverbs 19:11). So when I get there at the same time as this wiry fortyish woman, and she practically sprints to the counter to beat me in line, I try not to be annoyed.

And when she tells the Mail Boxes Etc. employee to copy something on the one and only functioning Xerox machine, I try to shrug it off. And when she pulls out a stack of pages that looks like the collected works of J. K. Rowling and plunks it on the counter, I say to myself: "Slow to anger, slow to anger."

After which she asks some complicated question involving paper stock . . .

I remind myself: Remember what happened when the Israelites were waiting for Moses while he was up on the mountaintop for forty days? They got impatient, lost faith, and were struck with a plague.

Oh, and she pays by check. And asks for a receipt. And asks to get the receipt initialed. The Proverbs--a collection of wisdom in the Old Testament--say that smiling makes you happy. Which is actually backed up by psychological studies. So I stand there with a flight attendant-like grin frozen on my face. But inside, I am full of wrath.

I don't have time for this. I have a seventy-two-page-list of other biblical tasks to do.

I finally make it to the counter and give the cashier a dollar. She scoops my thirty-eight cents of change from the register and holds it out for me to take.

"Could you, uh, put the change on the counter?" I ask.

She glares at me. I'm not supposed to touch women--more on that later--so I am simply trying to avoid unnecessary finger-to-finger contact.

"I have a cold," I say. "I don't want to give it to you."

A complete lie. In trying to avoid one sin, I committed another.

I walk home. I pass by a billboard that features two well-toned naked people clutching hungrily at each other's bodies. It's an ad for a gym. The Bible's teachings on sexuality are complicated, and I haven't figured them out yet. But to be safe, I figure I should avoid lust for now. I keep my eyes on the ground for the rest of the walk home.

When I get back to my apartment, I decide to cross Numbers 15:38 off my list: Attach tassels to the corners of my garment. Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called "Tassels without Hassles." They look like the kind of tassels on the corners of my grandmother's needlepoint pillows. I spend ten minutes safety pinning them to my shirtsleeves and hem.

By the evening, I'm bushed. I barely have the energy to listen to Julie talk about the U.S. Open--and even that conversation is fraught. I have to be sure to avoid mentioning Venus Williams, since she's named for the Roman goddess of love, and it would violate Exodus 23:13 (make no mention of other gods).

As I go to bed, I wonder whether or not I took a step toward enlightenment today. Probably not. I was so busy obsessing over the rules--a lot of which still seem thoroughly insane--that I didn't have time to think. Maybe I'm like a student driver who spends every moment checking the blinkers and speedometer, too nervous to contemplate the scenery. But it's just the first day.

"Be fruitful and multiply . . ." --GENESIS 1:28

Day 2. My beard grows fast. I'm already starting to look a little seedy, somewhere between a Brooklyn hipster and a guy who loiters at the OTB all day. Which is fine by me. I'm enjoying the hiatus from shaving. I may be spending all sorts of time on biblical duties, but at least I'm not wasting three minutes each morning in front of the mirror.

For breakfast, I grab an orange from the refrigerator. Food is going to be tricky this year. The Bible bans many things: pork, shrimp, rabbit, eagle, and osprey, among others. But citrus is fine. Plus, oranges have been around since biblical times--one of my books even says that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was an orange. It certainly wasn't an apple, since there were no apples in the Middle East of Adam's day.

I sit down at the kitchen table. Julie is flipping through the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times trying to decide on a movie for Saturday night.

"Should we see The Aristocrats?" Julie asks.

Huh. The Aristocrats is the documentary about the dirtiest joke ever. It contains at least a half dozen sex acts specifically banned by the Book of Leviticus. Julie could not come up with a worse suggestion for an evening activity. Is she testing me? She's got to be.

"I don't think I can. It doesn't sound very biblical."

"You serious?"

I nod.

"Fine. We'll see something else."

"I don't know if I should be seeing movies at all. I have to think

about that."

Julie lowers her gaze and looks at me over the top of her glasses. "No movies? For a year?"

I'm going to have to choose my battles these next twelve months. I

decide I'll bend on this one for now--I'll phase out movies slowly, giving Julie a little grace period.

Things, after all, are kind of tense in our house right now. Julie had a hard time getting pregnant with our first child, as I mentioned in my last book. We did eventually succeed (we have a son named Jasper), but apparently, practice did not make perfect, because the second time around is just as much of an ordeal.

In the last year, I've been--as the Bible says--uncovering Julie's nakedness. A lot. Too much. Not that I dislike it, but enough is enough, you know? It gets tiring. Plus, Julie's getting increasingly frustrated with me because she thinks I'm micromanaging--always quizzing her about ovulation times and basal temperatures and her five-day forecast.

"You're stressing me out, and it's really counterproductive," she told me the other day.

"I'm just trying to stay involved."

"You know what? The more stressed out I am, the less chance there is that I'll get pregnant."

I tell her I want our son, Jasper, to have a little sibling.

"Then please stop talking about it."

So we're in this weird elephant-in-the-room phase where we're both thinking about having a second child, but studiously avoiding the topic.

This is especially hard for someone who spends as much time as I do reading and pondering the Bible. Fertility is one of the most dominant themes in the Bible--probably the dominant theme of Genesis. If you believe some of the more modern biblical scholars, Genesis reflects a nature/fertility stage of monotheism, an influence of the pagan sects. In fact, the very first command that God gives to Adam is "Be fruitful and multiply." It's the Alpha Rule of the Bible.

Now, if I were taking the Bible absolutely literally, I could be "fruitful" by loading up on peaches at Whole Foods Market and "multiply" by helping my niece with her algebra homework. I could scratch this commandment off my list in twenty minutes flat.

This hammers home a simple but profound lesson: When it comes to the Bible, there is always--but always--some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules. In this case, I'm pretty sure that the Bible was talking about fertility, not math, so that's what I'll continue to pursue.

Conception was a huge preoccupation of the ancients. If you think about it, many of the Bible's most famous stories center on the quest to get pregnant. Abraham and Sarah probably had the hardest time conceiving of anyone in the Bible, if not history. At one point, the seemingly barren Sarah became so distraught, she lent her Egyptian handmaiden to Abraham as a concubine. That union produced Ishmael, the forefather of Islam. A few verses later, God and two angels visited Abraham and Sarah's tent and announced that Sarah would soon be pregnant. Sarah's reaction? She laughed, presumably with skepticism. In her defense, she was ninety years old. But God fulfilled his promise, and the nonagenarian matriarch gave birth to Isaac--Hebrew for "he will laugh."

And then there's Rachel. Rachel and her older sister Leah were both married to the clever shepherd (and my namesake) Jacob. Leah was a procreation machine--giving birth to no fewer than six sons and a daughter. But Rachel remained childless and heartbroken. At one point she said to Jacob, "Give me children or I shall die!" Another time, Rachel bought some mandrakes from her sister--mandrakes are a Mediterranean herb once thought to be an infertility cure. But it was to no avail. Finally God "opened Rachel's womb," and she gave birth to Joseph, he of the multicolored coat.

There is an upside to the Bible's infertility motif: The harder it was for a woman to get pregnant, the greater was the resulting child. Joseph. Isaac. Samuel (whose mother pledged her son to God as thanks for the conception). These are some of the giants of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Yesterday I broke Julie's gag rule to inform her that if we do have another kid, he or she could be one for the ages. Which made her smile.

"I think that's true," she said. "Good things come to those who wait." Which sounds like a biblical proverb but is actually from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

You shall have no other gods before me.

--EXO D U S 20:3

Back to day 2. Julie has a meeting, so I'm left alone with my breakfast orange, my list of rules, and my stack of Bibles. I've got a half hour before our son, Jasper, wakes up. Now seems a good time to embark on the more spiritual part of my quest: prayer.

As I said, I've always been agnostic. In college I studied all the traditional arguments for the existence of God: the design argument (just as a watch must have a watchmaker, so the universe must have a God), the first-cause argument (everything has a cause; God is the cause of the universe). Many were dazzling and brilliant, but in the end, none of them swayed me.

Nor did a new line of reasoning I heard from my cousin Levi a couple of weeks ago. Levi--the son-in-law of my Orthodox aunt Kate--told me he believes in God for this reason: The Bible is so strange, so utterly bizarre, no human brain could have come up with it.

I like Levi's argument. It's original and unsanctimonious. And I agree that the Bible can be strange--the command to break a cow's neck at the site of an unsolved murder comes to mind (Deuteronomy 21:4). Still, I wasn't convinced. Humans have come up with some astoundingly bizarre stuff ourselves: biathlons, turducken, and my son's Chicken Dance Elmo, to name a few.

In short, I don't think I can be debated into believing in God. Which presents a problem, because the Bible commands you not only to believe in God but to love Him. It commands this over and over again. So how do I follow that? Can I turn on a belief as if it flows out of a spiritual spigot? Here's my plan: In college I also learned about the theory of cognitive dissonance. This says, in part, if you behave in a certain way, your beliefs will eventually change to conform to your behavior. So that's what I'm trying to do. If I act like I'm faithful and God loving for several months, then maybe I'll become faithful and God loving. If I pray every day, then maybe I'll start to believe in the Being to whom I'm praying.

So now, I'm going to pray. Even though I'm not exactly sure how to pray. I've never prayed before in my life, not counting the few perfunctory uplifted gazes when my mom was sick.

For starters, what do I do with my body? The Bible describes a multitude of positions: People kneel, sit, bow their heads, lift their eyes skyward, put their heads between their knees, raise up their hands, beat their breasts. There's no single method.

Sitting is tempting, but it seems too easy. I'm of the no-pain, no-gain mind-set. So I settle on holding my arms outstretched like a holy antenna, hoping to catch God's signal.

As for what to say, I'm not sure. I don't feel confident enough to improvise yet, so I've memorized a few of my favorite prayers from the Bible. I walk into our living room, stand in front of our brown sectional couch, hold out my arms, bow my head, and, in a low but clear voice, recite this passage from the Book of Job: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

It's a beautiful passage, but I feel odd uttering it. I've rarely said the word Lord, unless it's followed by of the Rings. I don't often say God without preceding it with Oh my.

The whole experience is making me uncomfortable. My palms are sweaty. I'm trying to speak with earnest intent, but it feels like I'm transgressing on two separate levels. First, I feel like I'm violating some sort of taboo issued by the agnostic high priests. Worse, what if I'm breaking the Third Commandment? If I don't believe the holy words I'm saying, isn't that taking the Lord's name in vain?

I glance at the clock. I've been praying only for a minute. I've promised myself I'd try to pray for at least ten minutes three times a day.

So I get back to work. I squint my eyes and try to visualize Him. It's a fiasco. My mind goes to a series of cliches: the Universe, aka the view from inside the Hayden Planetarium; a fog-shrouded Middle Eastern mountain; something akin to the multicolored special effects from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the spaceship went into hyperspace. Pretty much everything but the guy in the flowing white robe and the basso profundo voice.

All I can say is, I hope I get better.

And it is possible I will. When I was in high school, I had a handful of what might qualify as quasimystical experiences. Surprisingly, none involved a bong. They would happen unexpectedly, and they would last only for a moment, about as long as a sneeze, but they were memorable.

The only way to describe them makes me sound like I'm leading an est seminar, but so be it: I felt at one with the universe. I felt the boundary between my brain and the rest of the world suddenly dissolve. It wasn't that I intellectually comprehended that everything and everyone is connected, I felt it the way one might feel cold or carsick. The epiphanies would descend on me without warning: One came while I was lying on a blanket in Central Park's Great Lawn, another while I was riding the bullet train on a family trip in Japan. They were at once utterly humbling (my life so piddling and insignificant) and totally energizing (but it's also part of something so huge). The glow from these mental orgasms would last several days, making me, at least temporarily, more serene and Buddha-like.

For no reason I can think of, my epiphanies suddenly stopped around senior year of high school. Perhaps this year will give me the map to find them again. Or else make me conclude my brain was playing two-bit mind tricks on me.

Nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff. --LEVITICUS 19:19

Day 5. I've made a list of the Top Five Most Perplexing Rules in the Bible. I plan to tackle all five this year, but I figured I'd start with one that requires neither violence nor pilgrimages. Namely: the ban on wearing clothes made of mixed fibers. It's such an odd proscription, I figured there was zero chance that anyone else in America was trying to follow it. Of course, I was flat wrong.

My friend Eddy Portnoy--who teaches history at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary--told me he recently spotted a flyer in Washington Heights advertising a shatnez tester. Shatnez, he informed me, is the Hebrew word for "mixed fibers." A tester will come to your home and inspect your shirts, pants, sweaters, and suits to make sure you have no hidden mixed fibers.

So today I dial the number, and a man named Mr. Berkowitz agrees to make a house call. Mr. Berkowitz arrives right on time. He has a gray beard that descends below his collar, large glasses, and a black tie tucked into the top of his pants, which sit a good six inches above his navel. His yarmulke is slightly askew.

Mr. Berkowitz clicks open his black American Tourister rolling suitcase. Inside, his tools: a microscope, an old canister with the faded label "vegetable flakes," and various instruments that look like my mother's sewing kit after a genetic mutation. He spreads them out on my living room table. Mr. Berkowitz reminds me of an Orthodox CSI. God's wardrobe detective.

He gives me a shatnez primer. Shatnez is not just any mixed fiber. Poly-cotton blends and Lycra-spandex blends--those are fine. The problem is mixing wool and linen. That's the forbidden combination, according to Deuteronomy 22:11 (the Bible's only other verse that talks about mixed fibers).

"How do you tell when something is shatnez?" I ask.

Well, you can't trust the clothing labels, explains Mr. Berkowitz. They're often inaccurate. "You have to look at the fibers yourself. All the fibers look different under the microscope," he says.

He draws me a diagram: Linen looks like a piece of bamboo. Wool is like a bunch of stacked cups. Cotton resembles twisted streamers. And polyester is smooth, like a straw.

I bring out a pile of sweaters, and he goes to work. He snips some threads off a black V-necked sweater and puts them under the microscope.

"See if you can tell," he says. I squint into the microscope.

"It's polyester," I say.

"No. Look. The stacked cups? It's wool."

He seems disappointed. Clearly I'm not a shatnez inspector protege. Mr. Berkowitz is kind, gentle, but persistently frazzled. And I wasn't helping matters.

Mr. Berkowitz makes some notes on a sheet that looks like a hospital chart. The sweater is kosher, he tells me. So is the next one I bring out.

"Look," he says, motioning to the microscope.

"Wool?" I say.

"No. Cotton."

Damn!

I bring out my wedding suit. This could be trouble, he says: Wool suits often have linen hiding somewhere in them, especially Italian suits, which this is.

Mr. Berkowitz gets out a tool that resembles a fondue fork and begins digging into various parts of my suit--the collar, the pockets, the sleeves--with something approaching ferocity. This suit is the only suit I own, and it cost me about one-third of my salary. I'm a little alarmed. I'm glad Julie's not here to see this.

"Is it shatnez?" I ask.

He doesn't answer for a minute. He's too busy with the microscope. His beard is squashed around the eyepiece.

"I have a strong suspicion this is linen," he says. The alleged culprit is some white canvas that was hiding under the suit's collar.

Mr. Berkowitz spins the fabric with his fingers.

"I'm sending it to the laboratory to make sure, but I am almost convinced it is linen." He tells me I'll have to put my only suit into storage, or get it de-linened by a tailor.

Mr. Berkowitz seems suddenly unfrazzled. He is relieved.

"It's joyous," he says. "If I save someone from breaking a commandment, it gives me a little high." He pumps his fist. "I never took drugs, but I imagine this is what it feels like."

His joy is infectious. I feel momentarily happy too, but then return to my baseline bewilderment.

"It's really that important not to wear linen and wool?" I ask.

"Absolutely."

"Are some commandments in the Bible more important than others?"

"All equal," he says. Then pauses. "Well, I can't say that. Not murdering is at a very high level. So are adultery and not worshipping idols."

He seems torn. On the one hand, all the rules are from the same place. The Orthodox Jews follow a list of 613 rules originally compiled by the great medieval rabbi Maimonides from the first five books of the Bible. On the other hand, Mr. Berkowitz also has to admit that homicide is worse than wearing an unkosher blazer.

Before Mr. Berkowitz leaves, I ask him the obvious staring-us-inthe-face question: Why? Why would God care if we wore mixed fibers?

The answer is: We don't know.

There are theories. Some say it was to train the ancient Hebrews to keep things separate so they'd be less inclined to intermarry. Some say it's an allusion to Cain and Abel's sacrifice--Cain offered flax to God, and Abel offered sheep. Some say that the heathens once wore the combination, and the Hebrews were trying to distinguish themselves from the pagans in any way they could.

Bottom line, though: We have no idea.

"This is a law that God gave us. We have to trust Him. He's all-powerful. We're like children. Sometimes parents have laws children don't understand. Like when you tell a child not to touch fire, he doesn't understand why, but it is good for him."

In Judaism, the biblical laws that come without explanation--and there are many--are called chukim. This is such a law. The point is, you can never know what is important in the long term. God might have a different measuring scale than us. In fact, some say it's more crucial to follow the inexplicable ones, because it shows you're committed, that you have great faith.

The notion of obeying laws that have no rational explanation is a jarring one. For most of my life, I've been working under the paradigm that my behavior should, ideally, have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true. I have to adjust my brain to this.

You shall not covet. --EXO D U S 20:17

Day 6. After a day devoted to the obscure, I'm craving some good oldfashioned Ten Commandments to bring me back into the mainstream.

Since I break this commandment every day, I decide "You shall not covet" is most in need of immediate attention. This commandment is the final one of the ten, and the only one to regulate a state of mind, not behavior. It's also arguably the hardest, especially in modern-day New York. This is a city that runs on coveting.

It's 2:00 p.m., and here's the list of things I've coveted since I woke up:

* Jonathan Safran Foer's speaking fee (someone told me he gets fifteen thousand dollars per lecture).

* the Treo 700 PDA.

* the mental calm of the guy at the Bible bookstore who said he had no fear because he walked with God.

* our friend Elizabeth's sprawling suburban front yard.

* the George Clooney level of fame that allows you to say whatever you feel like, moronic or not.

* the brilliant screenplay for the 1999 movie Office Space. (I sometimes have a weird fantasy that I could go back to 1997 with a videotape, transcribe the dialogue, and beat writer Mike Judge to the punch.)

Plus, ever since I became a father, I've been introduced to a whole new level of coveting. I'm not just coveting for myself, I'm coveting for my son. I'm trying to keep up with the Jones's kid.

Like with Jasper's vocabulary. I love the guy, but he's distressingly behind the curve in the speaking department. He communicates mostly by using eight different types of grunts, each one with its own meaning. I feel like the ethnographer who had to decipher the nuances of the twenty-three Eskimo words for snow. A medium-pitched grunt means "yes." A lowerpitched grunt means "no." A brief chimplike grunt means "come here now!" Jasper's a great walker and ball thrower, but words--those things I'm supposed to arrange for a living--they're not so interesting to him.

Meanwhile, his friend Shayna--three months his junior--knows words like helicopter and cabinet. She's practically got her own blog. I covet Shayna's vocabulary for Jasper.

To sum up, I expend a lot of mental energy breaking this commandment. And I'm not even including "coveting" in the sexual sense--though I certainly did that with the woman in purple flip-flops on the street. Or the woman with the low-riding Calvins. Or . . . I'll return to that topic later, since it deserves its own chapter.

The full anticoveting commandment reads like this: "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's."

The ox and the ass aren't a problem in postagrarian Manhattan. But the phrase "anything that is your neighbor's"--that pretty much covers it all. No wiggle room.

But how do you stop yourself from coveting?

The word covet is a translation of the Hebrew root hamad, roughly equivalent to "desire" or "want." There are two schools of thought on what the commandment is preventing.

Some interpreters say that coveting in itself isn't forbidden. It's not always bad to yearn. It's coveting your neighbor's stuff that's forbidden. As one rabbi puts it, it's OK to covet a Jaguar--but you shouldn't covet your neighbor's Jaguar. In other words, if your desire might lead you to harm your neighbor, then it's wrong.

But others say that coveting any Jaguar is wrong, whether it's your neighbor's or the one at the dealership. A moderate interest in cars is OK. However, coveting means that you are overly desirous of the Jaguar, you are distracted by material goods, you have veered from the path of being thankful for what God provides. You have, no doubt, fallen victim to advertising, the Tenth Commandment's arch-nemesis.

To play it safe, I'm trying to avoid both types of coveting.

Julie rejects one of my strategies--I asked her to censor the newspapers and magazines by ripping out all the ads for iPods and Jamaican vacations and such. Instead I've been forced to cut down my magazine consumption to a trickle.

But coveting material goods in ads isn't the big hurdle for me. My real weakness is jealousy of others. The relentless comparison to my peers. Am I more successful than Julie's ex-boyfriend who invented a lighting gadget that fits over the page of a book so you can read it at night? It's been featured on the cover of the Levenger catalog, as my mother-in-law reminds me often.

If it's not the ex-boyfriend, it's someone else. And this type of coveting will never be assuaged. If by some crazy quirk or twist of fate or accounting error, I were to get J. S. Foer's speaking fee, then I'd move right on to coveting Madeleine Albright's speaking fee. The Bible is right. Jealousy is a useless, time-wasting emotion that's eating me alive. I should focus on my family and, nowadays, God.

Of course, stopping an emotion is not easy. The prevailing paradigm is that we can't control our passions. As Woody Allen said when his affair with Soon-Yi Previn was discovered, "The heart wants what it wants." But I can't just give up--I need a new point of view. So I consult my spiritual advisory board.

One recommended method is to tell yourself that the coveted car/ job/house/speaking fee/donkey is just not a possibility. A medieval rabbi--Abraham ibn Ezra--uses this example (he's talking about the sexual sense of covet, but you can apply it more broadly): When you see a pretty woman married to another man, you have to put her in the same class as your mother. She's off-limits. The very notion of her as a sex partner is repulsive, unthinkable, except to perverts and/or those who have read too much Freud. Or else, think of the woman as a peasant would a princess. She's pretty, but she's so far out of your realm, your admiration is abstract, not lascivious.

I try to do this with J. S. Foer's speaking fee. It's outside of my realm, I say. The strategy runs counter to you-can-do-anything-you-set-yourmind-to ambition, but maybe it's better for my mental health.

And then there's this tactic: If you're intently focused on following the rules of the Bible, you don't have time to covet. Not as much, anyway. You're just too busy. A couple of weeks ago, my daily coveting list would have taken up one-third of this book. Now I've trimmed it down to half a page. Progress, I think.

You shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. --LEVITICUS 23:40

Day 7. It's been a week. My spiritual state: still agnostic. My beard state: itchy and uneven--I've got these bald patches that look like crop circles made by tiny UFOs. My wardrobe state: I've traded my usual T-shirts and jeans for khakis and Oxfords because it feels somehow more respectful. My emotional state: strung out.

The learning curve remains crushingly steep. I continue to secondguess everything I do and say. I've noticed my speech has slowed down, as if I'm speaking English as a second language. This is because I mentally check every word before allowing myself to utter it. Is it a lie? Is it a boast? Is it a curse? Is it gossip? What about exaggeration? Does the Bible allow me to say "My friend Mark's been working at Esquire since 1904?" (He's been there a mere seventeen years). I censor about 20 percent of my sentences before they leave my mouth. The Bible's language laws are rigorous.

I'm poring over religious study books, desperately trying to get a handle on this topic and every other. My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

I still read the Bible itself, taking it with me wherever I go. That Bible salesman was right--I should have gotten that version of the Scriptures that's camouflaged as a teen magazine. When I read my Bible on the subway, I can feel the hostility emanating from the secular commuters. They look at me with their lips taut and faces tense, like they expect me to tackle them at any moment and forcibly baptize them.

In addition to the Bible, I also carry around a stapled printout of my rules, which I scan frequently. My original plan had been to pay equal attention to all the rules every day. This turned out to be impossible. That's like trying to juggle seven-hundred-plus balls. The brain can't handle it. I was too scattered.

So my revised plan is this: I will still attempt to follow all the rules simultaneously. But on a given day, I'll home in on a particular rule and devote much of my energy to that rule, while keeping the others in my peripheral vision.

How to choose the right time to focus on a particular rule? It's not a science. I've opted instead to go where the spirit takes me. I imagine a lot of factors will come into play: life's curveballs, my whims, logistics, my day job (I write for Esquire magazine, which I know will force me to confront the lust rules soon enough). And variety. I want to alternate obscure with mainstream, physical with mental, hard with easy. I need variety. I don't have the stamina to spend a month focused solely on the forty-five rules of idolatry.

With the humble is wisdom. --PROVERBS 11:2

Day 11. I'm going to take a bunch of biblically themed road trips this year, and today is my first: Amish country. It seems a good place to start. Not only are the Amish tied with the Hasidic Jews for the title of most easily spotted Bible followers, but they are also interesting in this sense: They strictly adhere to rules in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. For instance:

* Their famous facial hair is the result of the Old Testament's ban on trimming the beard. (The Amish do, however, shave their moustaches, because the moustache was thought to have military associations.)

* They refuse to pose for or take photos, since it would violate the Old Testament's Second Commandment: "You shall not make . . . any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath." This is why, if you click on an Amish website, you'll often see photos of the backs of their heads. (And yes, the Amish have websites; go ahead and chuckle if you must. To be fair, the Amish don't run the sites themselves. It's a third party promoting their woodworks and quilts.)

* Amish women wear bonnets in keeping with the New Testament's 1 Corinthians 11:5, which states that women's heads must be covered while praying.

* The Amish perform a foot-washing ritual in accordance with the New Testament's John 13:14-15, which says, "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example . . ."

The Amish version of biblical living is combined with what's called the Ordnung--the traditions that have built up since the Amish origins in sixteenth-century Switzerland. The Ordnung is what dictates the Amish dress code and their ban on electricity.

Julie and I rent a car and drive down to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Julie may not be a huge fan of my project, but she figures she can at least take advantage of a road trip or two. Our destination is called Smucker's Farm Guest House. It's one of the few bed-and-breakfasts actually owned and operated by an Amish family. Most inns just offer some sort of vague proximity to Amish people. This is the real thing.

The trip takes four hours. Incidentally, I'm proud to say that I had absolutely no urge to make a double entendre when we passed Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which I see as a moral victory.

We pull into the driveway, and the first thing I lay eyes on is a woman in full Amish regalia--ankle-length blue dress and a white bonnet-- wielding a gas-powered leaf blower. This isn't an image I expected to see. She doesn't have a video iPod, but still. It punctures my Amish stereotypes right up front.

The woman--Anna--brings us to meet her father, Amos, the head of the household. Amos Smucker is tall, thin, and slope shouldered. He's dressed exactly as you'd imagine: black suspenders, straw hat, pants pulled high above his waist. His snow-white hair is shaped in the traditional Amish style: a modified bowl cut that curves over the ears and then angles down, becoming just a bit longer in the back.

I introduce myself. He nods, gives me a quiet "Hello," and walks us to our room.

Amos talks slowly and carefully, like he only has a few dozen sentences allotted for the weekend, and he doesn't want to waste them at the start. I read later in the Amish book Rules of a Godly Life that you should "let your words be thoughtful, few, and true." By adopting minimalism, Amos has mastered those speech laws I'm struggling with.

I tell Amos that I'd love to talk to him about the Amish. He obliges. I wonder how sick he is of answering the same annoying questions from curious outsiders. At least I pledged to myself not to bring up Witness or that Randy Quaid movie about the one-armed Amish bowler.

We sit in Amos's kitchen--sparse, of course, with a wooden table and a three-ring binder that says "A Journal of By-gone Years: The Smuckers."

"When did your family come over?" I ask.

"My ancestor Christian Smucker came over from Switzerland in the eighteenth century."

And yes, Amos is a distant cousin of the strawberry-jam Smuckers, though that branch is no longer Amish.

"How many brothers and sisters do you have?"

"There were seventeen of us," says Amos.

"Seventeen?"

He nods.

"And where were you in the order?"

"I was the baby," Amos says. "Once my mother got me, she said, 'I'm done. I got what I wanted.'"

Did he just make a joke? I think so. Amos allows himself just the slightest, faintest wisp of a smile.

I explain the premise of my book to Amos. He stares over my left shoulder in silence. No reaction. From my brief visit with the Amish, I got the feeling that they are not enamored of talking about theology, at least not with the English, at least not with me. Best stick to more practical topics.

"Are you working now?"

"I used to be a dairy farmer, but I don't do so much anymore. I'm not retired. I'm just tired."

I think Amos just made another joke. You haven't seen deadpan delivery till you've seen the Amish.

"What's your schedule?" I ask.

"I go to sleep at eight-thirty or so, and wake up at four-thirty. I can't sleep after five. I was a dairy farmer, and that's the way my computer is programmed."

An interesting metaphor for a man who doesn't use electricity, I think to myself.

Amos drums his fingers on the table. He has amazing hands. Knotty, but somehow elegant, with thumbs that curve around like candy canes and practically brush up against his wrist.

We sit silently.

Finally, Julie asks if maybe he could show us the property. He nods. Our first stop is the garage. Amos owns three black buggies, all of them lined up against the wall, their red fluorescent triangles facing outward. His daughter Anna is polishing the middle one.

The garage opens into the stables, where Amos keeps his horses. He has two of them--they're beautiful and chocolate brown, and they trot over to greet Amos.

"They used to be racehorses," says Amos, patting one on the neck. "Ninety percent of the horses the Amish have were once racehorses."

This is the only time during the weekend that Amos approached being prideful. Humility is absolutely central to the Amish way of life, and it's one of the most beautiful things about the community. But if you're going to be proud of anything, I figure these horses are a pretty good choice.

Amos grew up in this house, he tells us.

"What was your childhood like?"

"It was cold. There was no insulation, so it got to be two below in our room."

"Wow," I say.

"Two below the covers."

This time he can't suppress the corners of his mouth from turning slightly upward. That was definitely a gag.

Back in the kitchen, I ask about his kids. He has seven, all of them still Amish, many of them living nearby or even across the street. Before coming, I had read that the Amish population in America--now at almost two hundred thousand--had doubled in the last twenty years. They are in no danger of fading away.

"Are there a lot of conversions to the Amish faith?"

"Very few." Amos pauses, then says: "Do you want to hear an Amish joke?"

"Sure."

This is great. The Amish have been an easy go-to punch line for far too long. In fact, I almost didn't come to Amish country because I didn't want to fall into the trap. So it'll be a delight to hear an Amish joke from an actual Amish person.

"What happened when the Mennonite man married the Amish woman?"

Julie and I don't know.

"She drove him buggy."

We laugh. It's not Chris Rock, but you have to remember: Amos is working with some pretty stringent preconditions.

"Ba-dum-bum," says Julie.

I wonder if the rim-shot reference made any sense to him, or if he just thought Julie makes odd sounds.

I try to bring up spirituality once more. I tell him that the Book of Amos is one of my favorite parts in the Bible. Again, silence. For a long thirty seconds.

"Do you know 'Amazing Grace'?" he finally says.

We nod.

"Help us out then."

Amos fishes a harmonica out of his pocket, takes a deep breath, and starts playing the most astounding version of the hymn I've ever heard. He was working that harmonica, his hand flapping, playing notes on both the inhale and the exhale.

Julie and I fumble the words a bit in the middle, but we end strong: "I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see."

"Do you play at church?" I ask when he stops.

"No, we don't play instruments," he says. "It might encourage pride. You might get some thoughts. Try to show off for other people."

Amos holds up his harmonica. "This is just for home use."

A pause. "Well, I best get moving," says Amos. "Supper is at five-thirty."

And with that, Amos disappears into his dining room.

Julie and I drive to a local tourist-trap restaurant that serves buttersoaked vegetables and shoofly pie. On the way, we see another startling sight, right up there with the leaf blower: It is an Amish teen, his hands behind his back, Rollerblading leisurely down a country road.

I found out later that some of the Amish allow Rollerblades. Rubber tires are forbidden, so bikes are out, but Rollerblade wheels are made of plastic. Likewise, though electricity is banned, tools using batteries, solar power, or gas are sometimes OK. Hence the leaf blower.

The lesson from my weekend with the Amish is this: You cannot stop religion from evolving. Even here, where customs and dress were supposedly frozen in the sixteenth century, they will still find a way. It makes my quest to rewind my life to biblical times that much more daunting. Can I really scrape off all those millennia of accumulated tradition?

Before we arrive at the restaurant, Julie and I spot a cluster of about thirty buggies. We pull over to see what's happening. We have stumbled onto an Amish baseball game. Amos tells us that many Amish--him included--discourage competitive sports.

But here are eighteen Amish teenage boys, their sleeves rolled up, their shirts and suspenders dark with sweat. Julie and I watch for a long time. These kids are good, but something is off about the game. I realize after a few minutes what it is: This is the quietest baseball game I've ever seen. No trash talk. No cheering from the parents in the stands. Near silence, except for the occasional crack of the bat. It is eerie and peaceful and beautiful.

Do not now be stiff-necked as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to the Lord . . .

--2 CHRONICLES 30:8

Day 13. Back in New York, the Bible is keeping me overscheduled. The mornings are particularly crammed. I have to attach my tassels. Say my prayers. Tie a Xeroxed copy of the Ten Commandments to my forehead and hand in accordance with Exodus 13:9 (more on that later). The rest of the day is consumed with Bible study, midday prayer, perhaps a good deed, biblical shopping (today I plan to buy a wooden staff), a few hours devoted to secular Esquire matters, a scripturally approved dinner, then prayers at night.

Oh, and my spiritual advisory board. I try to meet or talk with at least one sage per day. Today is a doubleheader. It starts with breakfast with my friend Roger Bennett.

Roger is a Liverpudlian who ends all conversations with "Rock on." He has about eight jobs--writer, documentarian, foundation head, and so on--most of which have at least a vague connection to religion.

Roger doesn't mind that my morning rituals made me ten minutes late, but he does want to tell me something: "You're going into this thinking that it's like studying the sumo wrestlers in Japan," Roger says. "You're saying to yourself, 'I won't really become one. I'll maintain my distance.'"

I start to protest. Roger continues.

"You're dealing with explosive stuff. People a lot smarter than you have devoted their lives to this. So you have to admit there is a possibility that you will be profoundly changed by the end."

He could be right. And it scares me. I hate losing control. I like to be in command of everything. My emotions, for instance. If I'm watching a love story, and I start to get too weepy, I'll say to myself: "OK, there's a boom mike right over Audrey Hepburn's head; see if you can spot its shadow," and that'll snap me out of the movie, and I'll regain my composure. I also spend a lot of time trying to control my health, mostly by fixating on germs. I have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (a disease that has, I'm afraid, become a bit trendy, thanks to Larry David, et al.). My medicine cabinet is packed with a dozen bottles of Purell at all times. I haven't touched a subway pole with my bare hands in a decade--I usually just plant my feet wide apart in the subway car and pretend I'm a surfer.

The problem is, a lot of religion is about surrendering control and being open to radical change. I wish I could stow my secular worldview in a locker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and retrieve it at the end of the year.

After breakfast with Roger, I take a subway downtown to have lunch with the Brooklyn rabbi Andy Bachman at a diner. It's back-toback mentoring today. Andy's easy to relate to. He also grew up in a secular home, though that home was in Wisconsin (Jews there are known as the "frozen chosen," by the way). He was drawn to religion when he first saw the beautiful typography of the Talmud. He's youngish, fortytwo, and insists I call him Andy, which seems disrespectful, but I try.

"How's it going?" asks Andy.

I tell Andy about Mr. Berkowitz and the mixed-fiber inspection.

"I was riveted," I say. Maybe too riveted, actually. I know myself. I'm drawn to the weird. In my last book, on the encyclopedia, I made seven references to philosopher Rene Descartes's fetish for cross-eyed women, which I think and hope is a record.

"I'm worried I could spend the whole year on the strange parts of the Bible and neglect the parts about goodness and justice," I say.

Andy thinks about it for a half minute. He takes a sip of coffee.

"My advice is: Don't forget the prophets."

The prophets, he explains, are twenty extraordinary men and women found in the Hebrew Scriptures. They come onto the scene several hundred years after the age of Moses. By then, the Israelites were living in the Promised Land, but they'd botched it all up. They'd gotten corrupt and lazy. They were oppressing the poor just like their former masters in Egypt. The prophets were the Martin Luther Kings of their day, railing against the crooked system. Not so coincidentally, MLK liked to quote them--including Amos's amazing words: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!"

"Try to make everything you do measure up to the moral standards of the prophets," Andy told me. "Remember what Micah said. He said that the animal sacrifices weren't important. The important thing is to 'Do justice. And to love mercy. And to walk humbly with your God.'"

. . . and he gave him a tenth of all.

--GENESIS 14:20 (JPS)

Day 14. Andy's correct, of course. I have to be more moral. I have to do something that would please the prophets. The next morning, I flip through my list of rules and find an excellent candidate on page twentyeight: Give away 10 percent of your income.

"I'm going to tithe," I announce to Julie over breakfast.

She seems concerned. In general, she's much more magnanimous than I am. She's a sucker for those charities that send you free sheets of return-address labels with little cartoons of a Rollerblading Ziggy, along with a heartbreaking brochure about lymphoma. I tell her it's emotional blackmail. She ignores me and mails them checks.

But even for Julie 10 percent is high, especially with Jasper and, we hope, another kid to come. She asks me whether I can count my literary agent's fee as a tithe. She's only half-joking.

Unfortunately, I doubt even the most brilliant rabbi could figure out a way to classify International Creative Management as "the poor" (especially after the agents raised their commission to 15 percent a few years ago).

"Can you at least do 10 percent after taxes?" she says. That night, I call my spiritual advisory board to ask. I reach Elton

Richards, the pastor out to pasture.

"You shouldn't get too legalistic with it," says Elton. "Give what

you can afford. And then give some more. It should feel like a

sacrifice."

I study my Bible for insight. It seems that in the time of ancient Israel--before the Romans took over--no one paid taxes per se. The tithes

were the taxes. And the tithing system was as complicated as any 1040

form. You gave portions to the priests, the temple keepers, the temple itself, the poor, the widows, and the orphans. So, I suppose, at least for

now, after-tax tithing is probably OK.

I calculate 10 percent of my projected salary. It's not a huge number--but that's precisely the problem. If I were making $10 million a

year and had to give away one million, that'd be easier.

That night I spend three hours browsing a website called Charity

Navigator. It's sort of a Zagat guide to aid organizations. (Even this

leads to coveting--they list the salaries of these charity CEOs, and some

break $500,000.)

I settle on several organizations--Feed the Children and Save Darfur

among them--and donate about 2 percent of my income. That's as much

as I can do in one shot.

When the confirmation emails ping in, I feel good. There's a haunting line from the film Chariots of Fire. It's spoken by Eric Liddell, the

most religious runner, the one who carries a Bible with him during his

sprint. He says: "When I run, I feel His pleasure." And as I gave away

money, I think I might have felt God's pleasure. I know: I'm agnostic.

But still--I feel His pleasure. It's a warm ember that starts at the back of

my neck and spreads through my skull. I feel like I am doing something

I should have been doing all my life.

On the other hand, like a hard sprint, the pleasure is mixed with

pain. I have just carved off 2 percent of my salary, and I've got 8 percent left to go. So here's the mental strategy I've adopted: If it weren't for the Bible, I wouldn't be living a biblical year. I wouldn't have a book deal. No Bible, no income. So it's only fair to give 10 percent to God's people. It's the most righteous finder's fee around.

He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.

--PROVERBS 13:24

Day 23. As I mentioned, one of my motivations for this experiment is my recent entrance into fatherhood. I'm constantly worried about my son's ethical education. I don't want him to swim in this muddy soup of moral relativism. I don't trust it. I have such a worldview, and though I have yet to commit a major felony, it seems dangerous. Especially nowadays. Within a couple of years, Jasper will be able to download Tijuana donkey shows on YouTube while ordering OxyContin from an offshore pharmacy.

So I want to instill some rock-solid, absolute morals in my son. Would it be so bad if he lived by the Ten Commandments? Not at all. But how do I get him there?

This morning, it's clearer than ever that I need help. I'm exhausted, a direct result of the fact that I'm the worst disciplinarian in America.

At about 2:00 a.m. Jasper woke up, so I let him climb into bed with me and Julie--already a sucker move. Instead of lulling him to sleep, this gave him lots of new activities. For instance, grabbing my sleep mask, pulling it away from my eyes till the elastic band is fully extended--a length of about two feet--then releasing it. The mask would shoot back onto my face with alarming force, producing an eye-watering snap. (Note: Contrary to what you might think, my sleep mask does not violate the Bible's prohibition against wearing women's clothes. It came in a box featuring a photo of a very masculine and well-rested man sleeping next to his attractive wife.)

I told Jasper to stop, but my tone was about as menacing as Fred Rogers. So he did it again and again.

This is probably unbiblical. At the very least, my leniency is a violation of the Proverbs. The Proverbs are the Bible's collection of wisdom attributed to King Solomon, and they come down clearly on the side of disciplining kids. As in corporal punishment.

Proverbs 22:15: "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child; but the rod of discipline drives it far from him."

Proverbs 23:14: "Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell." (KJV)

Proverbs 23:13: "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you beat him with a rod, he will not die."

Some Americans hew to these proverbs literally. Until 2005 you could buy "The Rod," a twenty-two-inch nylon whipping stick that sold for five dollars. It was the creation of an Oklahoma-based Southern Baptist named Clyde Bullock, who advertised it with the motto "Spoons are for cooking, belts are for holding up pants, hands are for loving, and rods are for chastening." He shut down the business partly because of an outcry from more liberal Christians and partly because he couldn't buy its cushioned grips anymore.

Other not-quite-as-literal literalists say paddles are an acceptable alternative. James Dobson--founder of Focus on the Family, the ultraconservative Christian group--recommends paddling, especially if you want to keep your hand as "an object of love."

I don't own a rod or a paddle. In fact, corporal punishment of any sort is deeply counter to my parenting philosophy. I've always considered walloping your kid the H-bomb of childcare--it's in the arsenal but shouldn't be deployed.

Even for Project Bible, I can't deploy it. At least not yet. I've reached my first limit. So what to do? I decided this is one of those times when I should fulfill the letter of the law, if not the spirit. It's better than fulfilling nothing at all.

A few days ago I Googled "flexible rod" and "soft rod," and, after sifting through several biblically questionable ads, I ended up ordering a very unmenacing Nerf bat. I try it today on Jasper. After dinner, he grabs a handful of nickels off the dresser and chucks them across the room.

So I take the Nerf bat and smack Jasper's butt with it. I've never spanked him before, despite several temptations to do otherwise. When I swing my bat--even though it's spongy and harmless--I break some sort of barrier. I have now punished my son physically. It's an unsettling feeling. It drives home just how lopsided the relationship is: Parents have God-like physical dominance over their kids, at least when those kids have yet to hit puberty.

Jasper seems undisturbed by all this. He responds by laughing hysterically, grabbing his Wiffle bat, and attempting to smack me back. So I'm basically sanctioning violence here.

The rod is a fiasco. But here's the thing: I agree with the gist of Proverbs. I need to discipline my son more. I need to give Jasper some tough love, dispense more time-outs, or risk having him turn into a three-foottall monster. Julie has become the family disciplinarian, which is causing tension in our marriage, as she's not fond of being the bad cop. I've got to get stricter.

Look at the example set by God. The God of the Bible treats his children--the human race--with both justice and mercy. Right now, I'm out of whack; I'm 10 percent justice and 90 percent mercy. If I had been in charge of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve would have gotten three strikes, then a fourth, then a stern warning, then had their bedtime moved up twenty minutes. God, as you know, kicked them out. As a sign of His compassion, he clothed them in animal skins before the eviction, but He still kicked them out.

Make me understand the way of thy precepts, and I will meditate on thy wondrous works.

--PSALMS 119:27

Day 30. It's the end of month one. Physically I feel okay. The beard's itchiness has receded, and, at least for the moment, it looks more comparativeliterature-professor than guy-who-stopped-taking-his-meds.

As for my spiritual life, the word that comes to mind is disconnected. I've been playing the role of the Bible Man for a month, but that's what it still feels like: a role. A character. Like the time at summer camp when I was twelve, and, for reasons I no longer remember, I adopted a deep Southern accent--a real Foghorn Leghorn twang--and spoke it exclusively for a month.

This biblical alter ego of mine is such a separate being, I've taken to calling him a different name: Jacob. It seemed the most natural choice; close but not identical. I've been observing this Jacob guy, studying him.

And here's what I've found: He, too, has a split personality. On the one hand, Jacob is much more moral than I am. He attempts to fulfill Leviticus 19:18--"Love your neighbor as yourself." Which means he's doing things like holding the elevator door for slow-moving passengers. Or giving a buck to the homeless guy outside the Museum of Natural History who says he's seeking donations for the "United Negro Pizza Fund."

He pays attention to the hundreds of small, almost unnoticeable moral decisions we make every day. He turns off the lights when leaving the room. He refrains from gawking at odd-looking passersby--the four-hundred-pound man, the guy with the banana-colored pants, the woman who's eight inches taller than her boyfriend--something that I, as a lifelong people watcher, would love to do. Jacob stares straight ahead like a Buckingham Palace guard.

He's not getting short-listed for the Nobel yet, but he's a better man than my secular self.

On the other hand, my alter ego Jacob is engaging in some deeply strange behavior. He says, "Maybe we could have lunch on the fourth day of the workweek," since "Thursday" is forbidden. It comes from the Norse god Thor.

He rubs a dab of olive oil in his hair each morning, as instructed by Ecclesiastes 9:8 ("let not oil be lacking on your head"), which leaves these unfortunate green stains on all my baseball hats.

And he's developed this byzantine method of paying our babysitter Des. The Bible says the "wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning," (Leviticus 19:13) so Jacob gives her cash every night. But my secular self needs to pay her by weekly check so that she can properly file for taxes. Which means that I have to ask that she bring all the cash back at the end of the week and exchange it for a check. I'm not sure this is helping anyone. Des has already started trying to slip out at night without saying good-bye to me/Jacob.

My alter ego's behavior points to one of the biggest mysteries of the Bible. How can these ethically advanced rules and these bizarre decrees be found in the same book? And not just the same book. Sometimes the same page. The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It's not like the Bible has a section called "And Now for Some Crazy Laws." They're all jumbled up like a chopped salad.

Maybe all will become clear by the end of the year. Maybe.

Month Two: October

Three times a year you shall celebrate a pilgrim feast to me. --EXO D U S 23:14 (NAB)

Day 31, morning. I spend a half hour checking airfares to Israel. I need to go this year. I can't devote twelve months to living biblically without making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the holy book itself.

I've been once before. When I was fourteen, my parents wanted to take us to Israel and Egypt, so we signed up for a tour group whose members consisted of my family, a couple of dozen retired orthodontists, and an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old woman who had been led to believe this would be a singles tour, which it was, if you count the high percentage of widows and widowers.

I don't remember much about the tour. I remember the long bus rides, with the Israeli tour guide asking, "Does anyone want to stop at the smile room?" That was Israeli tour guide slang for the bathroom, since "everyone smiles when they walk out of the smile room." I remember preferring the Egyptian portion of the trip; I'd always been fascinated by the pyramids and had some knowledge of the Nile culture, or had at least memorized the lyrics to Steve Martin's "King Tut" song.

But Israel itself made little impression at all on my secular mind. At the time, I was going through an ill-thought-out Marxist phase. Religion was the opium of the people. And not just that: I was sure the opium pushers--the rabbis, the bishops, the ministers--were in on the con and were only trying to pay for their Mercedes Benzes. Israel was the center of the corrupt system.

By default, this trip has to be more meaningful. Plus, it will give me a chance to meet my ex-uncle Gil. Yes, as in meet him for the first time. Here's the weird thing: He was married to my aunt for years, but I've never seen him face to face. The family considered him such an unstable character, such a fraud, that no one wanted him around at reunions or birthday parties. They didn't see him as a harmless eccentric. He was dangerous. There were rumors of his Svengali-like, abusive techniques when he was a cult leader.

The main strategy was to pretend that he didn't exist. In her semimonthly family newsletter, my grandmother couldn't even bring herself to type Gil's name. She referred to him only as "He." As in "He and Kate will be visiting in March," which I always found an ironic echo of the Orthodox refusal to write the name God (usually written G-d.) The only time I remember my grandmother mentioning Gil was when she talked about a disturbing conversation she'd had with Kate. "She told me she'd be happy to stare into his eyes all day," said my grandmother. "That's not how a marriage should be. You should be side by side, facing the world, not looking into each other's eyes all day." So Gil has always been this mysterious, forbidden, slightly scary figure to me.

Gil met Kate in 1982, and she became Orthodox soon after. I don't remember much about her from her pre-Gil life. I remember her waistlength hair (now tucked under a headdress), her creepy UFO-expert boyfriend, and her gift of a whoopee cushion she brought back from France, which I guess was way more sophisticated than any whoopee cushion that we yokel Americans could make.

I remember her giggling a lot. And she still does; Orthodox Judaism hasn't erased her sense of humor. She has a great, loud, whooping laugh. But her passion nowadays is for two things: her four children and the Torah.

It's a tricky and guilt-inducing proposition, meeting Gil. The truth is, I'm rebelling against my family. No one wants me to meet him. Early on, my mom asked point blank: "You're not going to talk to Gil, are you?" I didn't answer.

She thinks that if I meet Gil, it'll give him some sort of legitimacy he doesn't deserve. I don't know about that. I don't think I'm in the position to bestow legitimacy on anyone. Regardless, I can't resist the chance to visit him. The man helped with the genesis of this quest. For better or worse, he could be a pivotal figure in my struggle to understand religion. At the end, I'll beg my family's forgiveness.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon . . .

--PSALMS 81:3

Day 31, afternoon. The Bible commands me--or Jacob, or whoever I am--to blow a trumpet at the start of every month. (To be safe, I'm also blowing a trumpet at the start of every Hebrew month.)

I find a ram's horn at the Jewish community center gift shop. It's a small shofar--thirty dollars will only get you so much--about three times the size of a kazoo and shaped like an elbow macaroni.

There's no doubt it's from a ram, though. It smells like a barn that hasn't been cleaned for days. I stand in my living room and blow. No sound. Just loudly exhaled air. These ram's horns are surprisingly hard to play. I'm still working under the assumption that the Bible didn't ban computers, so I spend half an hour on the internet picking up tips:

* Separate the lips as if you were making a raspberry.

* Keep your jaw in the position you would if you were spitting a watermelon seed.

* Wet your lips--

* --but not too much.

* If you do wet them too much, spittle is best removed from the shofar by a coffee brush or an aquarium brush.

* Put the shofar in the corner of your mouth, not in the center.

I sip a glass of water, part my lips, jut out my jaw, and blow the shofar again. It sounds like a dying fax machine. But, I remind myself, I still have eleven more months.

I did a little research, and, as I suspected, I'm not alone. There are a handful of twenty-first-century people who also blow a trumpet to kick off each month. But they are admittedly on the religious fringe. Mainstream Judaism and Christianity have both discontinued the practice, along with the observance of hundreds of other obscure biblical rules. The reason?

Christians believe that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. His crucifixion made animal sacrifice unnecessary. And not just animal sacrifice, but many of the ceremonial laws of the ancient Hebrews. This is why Christians can eat bacon and shave their beards with impunity. And why they don't need to blow a trumpet to the new month.

Most--but not all--Christians draw a distinction between "moral laws" and "ritual laws." They still adhere to the Old Testament's moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments (and, sometimes, the ban on homosexuality), but they scrap many of the ritual laws. Of course, there's a good amount of debate in Christianity over which should be considered moral laws and which ritual. Is the Sabbath a moral law? Or ritual? What about the ban on tattoos? I read a long tirade by one Christian against so-called Christian tattoo parlors.

There are dozens of rules that Jews no longer follow as well. The reason is different, though. According to Judaism, animal sacrifice can take place only at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. And when the temple was gone, so was the relevance of more than two hundred sacrifice-related rules. (Including blowing a trumpet to the new moon, which was originally done along with a sacrifice.) Plus, Americans are off the hook with regard to another forty-five laws that they believe apply only in the land of Israel--many of them dealing with agriculture.

When I started this project, I vowed to try to follow all the Bible's rules--ritual, moral, agricultural, and sacrificial--and see where it takes me. But, to use a food metaphor in honor of my adviser Pastor Richards, I think I've bitten off more than I can chew.

When a woman has a discharge of blood, which is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.

--LEVITICUS 15:19

Day 34. In case you were wondering, Julie got her period yesterday-- which is bad news in two senses. First, it means that our attempt to be fruitful and multiply has failed yet again. Second, it ratchets up the biblical living to a whole new level of awkwardness.

The Hebrew Bible discourages the faithful from touching a woman for the week after the start of her period. So far in my year, adhering to this rule has been only mildly uncomfortable, nothing worse. In fact, it's got an upside: It dovetails quite nicely with my lifelong obsessive-compulsive disorder and germaphobia, so it's turned out to be a brilliantly convenient excuse to avoid touching 51 percent of the human population.

A female friend will come in for a cheek kiss, and I'll dart my head out of the way like Oscar de la Hoya. A colleague will try to shake my hand, and I'll step backward to safety.

"I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to."

"Oh. Um. OK."

Usually that's the end of it. Usually but not always. Consider this

conversation I had with Julie's Australian friend Rachel, whom we met in Central Park last week.

"You're not allowed to? What do you mean?"

"Well, you might be . . . impure."

"What do you mean 'impure'?"

"You know. In your cycle."

I paused. She looked perplexed. I decided this was a good time to avoid eye contact and study the pavement.

"Oh, you mean I might be menstruating? Don't worry, I menstruated last week."

At which point she hugged me. No escaping it.

Oddly, Rachel is not alone. A small but surprisingly vocal minority of Julie's friends have volunteered detailed information about their biological cycles. The photo editor at Esquire took the considerate step of emailing me her schedule. Did I perhaps want an Excel chart as well, she wondered?

I even managed to flatter this one woman I met at my sister-in-law's party. When I explained to her why I couldn't shake her hand, she told me, "Well, that's the nicest compliment I've heard in a long time." I looked at her again: gray hair, crow's feet, sixtysomething--yes, probably long past needing to worry about unplanned pregnancies.

Julie, however, is not flattered at all. She finds the whole ritual offensive. I'm not loving it either. It's one thing to avoid handshakes during flu season. But to give up all physical contact with your wife for seven days a month? It's actually quite exhausting, painful, and lonely. You have to be constantly on guard--no sex, of course, but also no hand holding, no shoulder tapping, no hair tousling, no good-night kissing. When I give her the apartment keys, I drop them into her hand from a safe height of six inches.

"This is absurd," she tells me, as she unlocks the door. "It's like cooties from seventh grade. It's theological cooties."

I tell Julie that I can't pick and choose what I follow in the Bible. That'd negate the whole point of my experiment. If I'm trying to get into the mind-set of the ancient Israelites, I can't ignore even the most inconvenient or obscure rule. I also point out that I didn't send her to a red tent.

She's not amused. "I feel like a leper."

"Actually, leprosy in the Bible is a mistranslation. It's more likely a generic name for skin disease. Some even claim it's syphilis."

This is the wrong response. It's a vestigial reflex from my days as an encyclopedia-reading know-it-all: Whenever I run out of things to say, I crowbar random facts into the argument.

Julie walks out of the room. When she's annoyed, she walks with heavy, stomping footsteps. I felt magnitude-five tremors throughout the apartment.

Since I understand Julie's objection and kind of agree with it, I figure it'd be good to get some historic and cultural context. I consult my spiritual advisory board and read up on the literature. As with all of the baffling Bible rules, there is a wealth of positive spin.

First, if done properly, the no-touching ban isn't bad for your marriage. Quite the opposite. Orthodox Jews still follow a version of the original menstruation laws, and many told me they enjoy the enforced sex hiatus. "It's like we get to have honeymoon sex every month," said an Orthodox woman I met one day in Central Park. "It's like makeup sex. You only appreciate what you have when you don't have it."

Second, avoiding your wife at this time of month is not misogynistic. It actually has to do with a reverence for life. When a woman has her period, it's like a little death. A potential life has vanished. This is a way of paying respect, like sitting shivah.

In fact, words like impurity and unclean are mistranslations. Some Orthodox Jews find such terms offensive. The Hebrew word is tumah, a state of spiritual impurity that doesn't have the same negative connotations.

(By the way, the history of impurity laws is fascinating but complex. Let me try to cram an hourlong talk I had with a rabbi into eight lines: The purity laws date from the Jerusalem temples. Back then, you had to be pure to make a sacrifice. When the Second Temple was destroyed, many of the purity laws fell out of use. Many, but not all. Jewish men still steer clear of their wives during menstruation. But they cite a different motivation: Touching might lead to sex, and sex during that time of the month--temple or no temple--is forbidden by another law, Leviticus 20:18. Also, to be extrasafe, the no-touching ban has been extended from a week to about twelve days. OK, finished.)

None of this positive spin appeases Julie, especially since I've decided to abide by another law that makes the no-touching-impurewomen rule seem like a breeze. It's found in Leviticus 15:20: "everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean." In other words, you shouldn't lie on a bed where a menstruating woman has lain, and you can't sit on a chair where she has sat.

It's a rule that no one follows to the letter anymore. But, again, I want the ultimate ancient-Israelite experience. And it can't hurt to be pure, right?

As for not lying on unclean beds, I'm off the hook. Julie and I don't share a bed. Apparently, when I sleep, I thrash around like a beached marlin, so Julie has opted for two twin beds pushed together, a disturbing echo of my parents and early sixties sitcoms.

The no-sitting-on-impure-seats presents more of a challenge. I came home this afternoon and was about to plop down on my official seat, the gray pleather armchair in our living room.

"I wouldn't do that," says Julie.

"Why?"

"It's unclean. I sat on it." She doesn't even look up from her TiVo'd episode of Lost.

OK. Fine. Point taken. She still doesn't appreciate these impurity laws. I move to another chair, a black plastic one.

"Sat in that one, too," says Julie. "And the ones in the kitchen. And the couch in the office."

In preparation for my homecoming, she sat in every chair in the apartment, which I found annoying but also impressive. It seemed in the biblical tradition of enterprising women--like Judith, who seduced the evil general Holofernes, only to behead him when he was drunk.

I finally settle on Jasper's six-inch-high wooden bench, which she had overlooked, where I tap out emails on my PowerBook with my knees up to my chin.

The next day I do a web search and find a thirty-dollar solution to the chair problem: the Handy Seat. This is an aluminum cane that unfolds into a three-legged miniature chair. It's marketed to the elderly, as well as "individuals who suffer from asthma, arthritis, hip or leg surgery, fibromyalgia, back injury," and various other ailments.

My Handy Seat arrives a few days later, and man, do I adore it. I've started bringing it everywhere. First, it's a cane, which is sort of like a staff, which feels very biblical to me. Plus, if you think about it, every subway seat, every bus seat, every restaurant seat--almost certainly impure. The Handy Seat is the foolproof solution. It's not overly comfortable (the plastic part for sitting is only about the size of a Frisbee, and I've got minor back pain from the hunching posture it causes). And there's the inevitable problem of raised eyebrows from passersby and scolding from lobby security guys. ("What are you doing?" asked the guard at the Time Warner Center. "Just sitting, waiting for my friend." "Well, you can't sit here. Get up.") But the Handy Seat is my little island of cleanliness. There's something safe and comforting about it.

O God, thou art my God, I seek thee . . .

--PSALMS 63:1

Day 36. A spiritual update: I'm still agnostic. I am feeling a little more comfortable saying the word God--thanks to sheer repetition, it no longer makes me sweat. But the anxiety has been replaced by frustration. And frankly, boredom.

The God of the Bible is an amazingly interactive deity. He's not aloof--He talks to people all the time. God spends forty days with Moses on a mountaintop telling him the commandments. God instructs Ezekiel to make bread, and even gives him a recipe of wheat, lentils, and spelt. God wrestles--physically wrestles--with Jacob on a patch of desert called Penuel. Jacob comes out of the fight with a broken hip and a new name: Israel, which means "one who was struggled with God." (Incidentally, some say it wasn't God Himself who struggled, but one of God's angels; the point is, there was contact with the divine.)

I don't expect the level of interaction that the patriarchs had. I don't think God is going to put me in a quarter nelson. But I'm having trouble even sensing the presence of God.

I'm praying three times a day. In the Bible, to my surprise, there's no agreed-upon per-day prayer quota, but morning, afternoon, and night seems a safe, traditional schedule. I'm still praying with the prefabricated prayers provided by the Bible. Today I use a moving passage from Psalms 63:1.

O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee;

my flesh faints for thee,

as in a dry and weary land where no water is.

It's a beautiful prayer. It's got two powerful metaphors at work: first, thirsting for God, and second, loving God like a man loves his wife. And yet, despite the prayer's power, my mind wanders as I read it. "I have to remember to charge my cell phone. . . . We need more quarters for the laundry room."

A righteous man hateth lying . . .

--PROVERBS 13:5 (KJV)

Day 37. Man, do I lie a lot. I knew I lied, but when I started to keep track, the quantity was alarming. As with coveting, I try to catalog my daily violations.

A sample from today:

* I lied to Julie about how much internet access at Starbucks costs. I told her eight dollars instead of ten, so she'd be 20 percent less annoyed.

* I gave a fake email address to a religious magazine called Sojourners because I didn't want to be swamped by junk email.

* I told a friend who writes children's books that my son loved her book about cookies, even though we've never even cracked open said book about cookies.

* And I lied to kindly Mr. Berkowitz, the man who tested my clothes for mixed fibers. This I do at least once a week. Mr. Berkowitz calls--usually at eight in the morning when Julie is still asleep-- and asks if he can come over to my apartment to pray with me. If I said yes every time, he'd practically be a roommate. So I lie. "Can't today, Mr. Berkowitz. An important business meeting." "Sorry Mr. Berkowitz, I'm sick today. A throat ache, a headache, the whole thing."

I don't tell huge lies. My lies aren't of the "I don't remember that meeting, Senator" variety, or even the "I spent time in jail with my friend Leonard" variety. They're little lies. White lies. Half-truths. Sugarcoating.

I'm such an experienced liar, I once edited an article for Esquire on the art of the "noncommittal compliment." When your friend makes a movie that is just dreadful, what do you say? I gave a bunch of options, like "You've done it again!" or "I loved the credits!"

I've always thought that this sort of truth hedging was necessary in human relations. Without little lies, chaos would erupt. Marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered. I've seen Liar Liar with Jim Carrey. I know how it works.

But if you take the Bible strictly, it says to avoid lying on all occasions. It says this several times. (A relevant detour: Some scholars argue that the commandment "You shall not bear false witness" should be interpreted more narrowly--it originally applied only to lying under oath. Unfortunately for liars, there are heaps of other passages banning deceit of any kind, including Proverbs 6:17, which calls "the lying tongue" an "abomination.")

In his book Why the Ten Commandments Matter, conservative Florida minister D. James Kennedy says my little white lies are, in fact, sins. Think of it this way: You have a date with a friend, but you just want to stay home and watch TV. You don't want to hurt her feelings, so you say you're sick. The friend comes over with a pot of chicken soup and finds you healthy. She can never trust you again. Just tell her the truth in the first place, says Dr. Kennedy.

So at the very least, I should cut back on lying. I decide to do this in stages. My first mission is to stop telling lies to my son, then move on from there. I lie to Jasper all the time, especially at meals. One classic is this: "Just one more bite," I'll say. He'll take a bite. Then I'll say "OK, just one more bite." And so on.

Mind you, he's equally as deceitful. He's allowed to watch TV only when eating, so he'll try to stretch the dinner out for hours. He'll put a string bean halfway into his mouth and just dangle it there like a Marlboro Light.

I'll say "Eat, Jasper."

And then he'll gum it for a bit before stopping and getting back to the business of watching Dora explore.

My question is: Does the parent-child relationship have to be one of dishonesty? Perhaps there's something to transparent parenting.

I start it this morning. Jasper wants a bagel for breakfast. So I ask Julie where she put the bagels.

"We're out," she says. "Just give him an English muffin and tell him that it's a bagel."

Julie says she did it yesterday, and he didn't know the difference.

So I give him a whole wheat Thomas' English muffin.

"Bagel?" he asks, pointing to the English muffin.

"Actually, it's not a bagel. It's an English muffin."

He looks confused.

"It's still very good. But it's not a bagel."

As it registers that he isn't getting a bagel, his expression turns from confusion to anger to rage. He looks like someone has just circumcised him again.

"Bagel! Bagel!"

"We don't have bagels. We'll get bagels tomorrow."

Within about a minute, this has escalated into a full-blown tantrum. I'm still amazed that kids can live out cliches quite as precisely as they do. When throwing tantrums, Jasper will get down on his stomach and pound the floor with his fists and feet like he's a character in a Peanuts cartoon.

"What's going on here?" asks Julie. As you might have guessed, I had to tell the truth.

There are probably long-term advantages to being completely honest with your kid (he'll know he can't have his way all the time, for one thing. He'll trust you for another). But there are severe short-term disadvantages.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. --GENESIS 1:1

Day 40. When I told my friend Ivan--a good Catholic--that I was considering visiting a creationist museum, he let out a loud groan. "Those people give Christianity a bad name."

I understand what he's saying. It's the way many Jews feel when we see a billboard proclaiming Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson as the Messiah. Or the way many gay men feel when they see Rip Taylor tossing a handful of confetti. It's kind of embarrassing. Like Ivan, I've always taken evolution to be a cold, hard truth. As indisputable as the fact that the sun is hot or that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (the latter of which I learned in the encyclopedia and can't get out of my head).

But creationism is biblical literalism at its purest, so I need to check it out. I researched various creationist hot spots--both Jewish and Christian--and found a handful of possibilities. But nothing came close to a huge structure perched on a gentle Kentucky hill. There lies the Creation Museum, the Louvre for those who believe God made Adam less than six thousand years ago from dust. Its founders are an evangelical group called Answers in Genesis. (A note on timing: I'll be talking more with evangelicals--both conservative and liberal--in month nine when my New Testament portion begins; but since creationism is so tied to the Old Testament's Genesis, I'm doing it early.)

The Creation Museum is still under construction--it's slated to open after my year ends--which is fine by me. There's something appropriate about seeing the creation of a creationist museum. So I fly down to Cincinnati, a few miles from the site.

At the airport, I realize once again how deeply biblical symbolism has seeped into every nook in my brain. As I exit, I see a strange FAA sign that warns ominously: "Don't Look Back." It doesn't say how you'd be punished if you do--I'm guessing body-cavity search, not getting turned to a pillar of salt--but I still find it a bizarre echo of God's warning to Lot as he fled the destruction of Sodom: "Do not look back."

A half hour later, I pull up to the museum--a low building fronted by thick yellow columns. In the parking lot, I spot a bumper sticker of a Jesus fish gobbling up a Darwin fish.

I'm greeted by publicist Mark Looy, a gray-haired man with a gentle schoolteacher voice, who guides me to a door that lets us into the lobby. The lobby is, in a word, awesome.

The museum is still a work in progress. Hard hats everywhere, the smell of sawdust, the whine of drills. But even in its unfinished state, you can tell this is going to send the media into a Michael Jackson-trial-like frenzy.

The first thing I see is a life-size diorama of an Eden-like scene. There's a waterfall, a stream, and cypress trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cave girl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She's playing awfully close to a fierce-looking razor-toothed T. rex. Don't worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The T. Rex's scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas' teeth.

When the museum opens, the Answers in Genesis folks expect thousands of visitors. And it'll probably get them--polls say that as many as 45 percent of Americans believe in creationism. Not intelligent design. We're talking strict the-earth-is-less-than-ten-thousand-years-old creationism. (The creationists I met scoffed at intelligent design, the theory that the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of this as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo.)

Mark introduces me to Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis. Ken is a wiry and energetic fifty-six-year-old with a gray Vandyke beard. Ken quizzes me about my last book, the one about reading the encyclopedia, and I end up telling him about my ill-fated appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was stumped by the question "What is an erythrocyte?"

"It's a red blood cell," says Ken.

He's right. I'm thrown off guard. A creationist who trumps me in science knowledge--that's unexpected and unsettling.

Ken was born to religious parents in Queensland, Australia, and still has a thick Aussie accent despite his twenty years in America. We start walking through the rooms. "The guy who designed the museum also designed the Jaws attraction at the Universal theme park," Ken says. And it shows. The place is professional. We stroll past more than a dozen robotic dinosaurs. A statue of Eve, with her flowing hair placed conveniently over her pert breasts. A partly built ark. A room with a circular slope like New York's Guggenheim Museum, a subtle reminder of man's fall from paradise. A theater with sprinklers to simulate the flood. A huge crocodile (a prop from the secular movie Crocodile Dundee). The future home of a talking Saint Paul robot. A medieval castle-themed bookstore. Medieval? Because the dragons of medieval times were actually still-living dinosaurs.

As we pass by the statue of a Roman centurion and the currently headless giraffe, I ask Ken the questions he's been asked a thousand times.

If Adam and Eve gave birth to two boys, Cain and Abel, how did Cain and Abel have kids?

"That's an easy one. Adam and Eve didn't just have Cain and Abel. It says in Genesis 5:4 that Adam had 'other sons and daughters.'"

When it says "day," does that mean a literal twenty-four-hour day?

"Yes. You've got to go back to the original word in Hebrew, which is yom. It's the same word that's used for a twenty-four-hour day. If you don't take that to mean 'day,' it's a slippery slope."

What about scientific dating that says the world is millions of years old?

"Ninety percent of age-dating methods are faulty."

Which version of the Bible do you use?

"Usually the King James. But you have to be careful with translations."

Ken explains that, for instance, many versions say the rabbit "chews its cud" (Leviticus 11:6). "The skeptics say the rabbit doesn't chew its cud. But you look at the original language, it says 'the rabbit re-eats its food.' And look at what a rabbit does. It excretes rabbit pellets and then eats the pellets. The Bible is correct."

We walk into a room with a brick wall covered with menacing-looking graffiti. This room is devoted to modern ills, among them drugs and racism. "There is only one race, the human race," says Ken.

The creationists I meet are surprisingly liberal on race matters. Racial intermarriage is considered just fine. In fact, they think that Darwin's theory can lead to racism because minorities are sometimes seen as lower forms of Homo sapiens on the evolutionary scale. They are also progressive on Darfur. On other topics--including abortion and gay marriage--they are down-the-line conservatives.

We pass a dinosaur with a saddle on it. This display was mocked by my own magazine--Esquire--which called it a dressage dinosaur because of the English saddle. Ken downplays it. "It's just a novelty. Just something for the kids." He ushers me through. "This way, A. J." (That's one thing I notice: They say "A. J." here a lot. It seems common among certain types of very religious people to say your name all the time. It makes me think of God's first words to Moses, which were "Moses, Moses!" but it's probably unrelated.)

Speaking of dinosaurs, if they really were on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

"He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers."

I later bought a paperback at the museum bookstore called Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends three hundred pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the boat possible. There are chapters on the ark's ventilation system, methods of onboard exercise for the animals, and the myth of explosive manure gases.

The book is beautifully argued--and I don't believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I had told Mark the publicist that I was coming in with an open mind, but while down here, I realize my mind won't open that far. I can understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. But the existence of a juvenile brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that's barely older than Gene Hackman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.

Of course, the creationists cite plenty of scientific evidence of their own. Or more precisely, they interpret the same evidence as being proof of creationism. Mark told me about a T. rex bone in Montana that broke open and had blood vessels. No way that could be millions of years old, he said.

The article Esquire ran was called "Greetings from Idiot America," and it was very funny. But I have to disagree with the headline. The Answers in Genesis folks aren't idiots. And despite a British news show that scored its segment with Deliverance-style banjo music, they aren't hillbillies. Everyone I met had a full set of well-orthodontured teeth and blinked at regular intervals. I can't prove it, but I'd wager there's no difference in the average IQ of creationists and evolutionists.

The thing is, their faith in the literal Bible is so strong, they will squeeze and distort all data to fit the Genesis account. In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist. The mental gymnastics can be astonishing.

Consider AiG's resident astrophysicist, Jason Lisle. Mark introduced me to him proudly. "A real, live PhD who believes in creationism. Here he is, in 3-D."

Jason has meticulously parted hair, looks a bit like Paul Reubens, and is sweet in an unforced way. He tells me it wasn't easy being a creationist PhD student. He had to stay closeted about his beliefs and write for the AiG magazine under a pseudonym.

Now here's the interesting part: Like mainstream scientists, he thinks the universe is billions of light years big. But if it's that big, and only six thousand years old, the light rays from distant stars wouldn't have time to travel to the earth. Shouldn't the night sky be black?

"That's a tough one," he says. "But it's not a killer." There are several possibilities.

1. The speed of light may not have always been 186,000 miles per second. Perhaps it was faster when the universe began.

2. The time-zone analogy. You can leave Kentucky at 5:00 p.m. and arrive in Missouri at 4:00 p.m. In the same way, there may be something to continuous time zones in space.

3. Something called gravitational time dilation. I didn't quite understand it, but it had to do with our galaxy having a special place in the universe.

After Jason the astrophysicist, I'm brought across the hall to meet another creationist named Carl Kerby. Carl is a big guy--turns out his dad was a pro wrestler. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and gives off a casual, feet-on-the-desk vibe. His specialty: He is the Creation Museum's resident expert on pop culture. Carl monitors movies and TV shows for subtle, or not-so-subtle, pro-evolution content so that he can alert fellow creationists to the danger.

On his list: Finding Nemo (namely, the line "Give it up old man, you can't fight evolution, I was built for speed"). And Gilligan's Island (they used the word prehistoric twice in one episode; "there's no such thing as prehistoric," Carl says). Other violators include Bugs Bunny, Lilo & Stitch, Bob the Builder, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

"It used to be my favorite movie," he says of Limpet. "And then I played it for my family, and thirteen minutes in, there was a nerdy science guy who pulls down a chart and starts talking about how fish were our ancestors. I had to stop the movie and talk to my family and explain."

Of course, when it comes to secular entertainment, creationism's enemy number one is Inherit the Wind, about the famous Scopes "monkey trial." It debuted as a play in 1955 and was later turned into a Spencer Tracy movie. And Carl--along with all his colleagues--insists that it's wildly unfair to Christians.

When I got home, I rented the movie and compared it to the actual court transcripts. And I have to say . . . the movie is wildly unfair to Christians. Or at least to this strain of Christianity.

William Jennings Bryan--a deeply religious three-time Democratic presidential nominee who was the prosecuting attorney for the anti-evolution folks--was turned into a total buffoon named Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Fredric March. Brady is a potbellied glutton prone to burping and smacking his lips. In one scene, he's gorging on fried chicken out of a basket--in the courtroom.

The film re-creates the famous showdown over the Bible between Bryan and the brilliant Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow. It's a good scene. But if you read the court transcript, it was actually a more interesting and subtle confrontation. For instance, here's the dialogue from the movie:

Darrow: Do you believe every word of the Bible is true? Bryan: Yes. Every word is literally true.

And here's the corresponding real exchange:

Darrow: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

Bryan: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

Like creationists today, he admits that there is some figurative language in the Bible, even if most of it should be taken as literally true.

And he had wit: "I believe [the Bible] was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at that time, instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born." [Laughter and applause.]

Not bad, you know?

As I said, I still believe in evolution. There's nothing that will change that, even if they found Noah's Year-at-a-Glance calendar on a pristinely preserved ark. And, yes, I know there's artistic license and all that. But it does seem odd to me that this movie--which is supposed to be a champion for the truth--distorted the truth so much. Why do that? Especially when you have reality on your side.

I spend my last half hour at the museum bookshop. I flip through dinosaur books for kids, a Far Side-like cartoon book about the fallen world, biology books, and theology books. I spend several minutes skimming an astronomy book called Dismantling the Big Bang, which aims to expose the philosophical weaknesses of said theory.

It makes me think of AiG's resident astrophysicist, Jason. Before I left, he wanted to make clear to me that he's not geocentric--he doesn't believe the earth is the center of the universe. "Does anyone anymore?" I asked. He said, yes, there is a group called "biblical astronomers"--they believe the earth is stationary because the Bible says the earth "shall never be moved" (Psalms 93:1). Jason considers them an embarrassment.

That was something I hadn't expected: moderate creationists who view other creationists as too extreme. But it will turn out to be one of this year's big lessons: Moderation is a relative term.

In the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land . . . --LEVITICUS 25:4

Day 42. On my flight back to New York, I sink into a minidepression about the museum. All that creativity and enthusiasm--it seems like such misplaced energy.

I feel the need to compensate, to do justice to the Bible itself. So I vow to spend the next few days finding biblical literalism at its most noble. And today I may have found it while reading a book about faithbased ethics called The Quiet Hand of God. Namely, the movement by faithful Christians and Jews to apply the Bible's financial laws to the world's poverty crises. Here the Bible has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives.

Here's how it works: The Bible says that years--like days of the week--belong in a cycle of seven. The seventh year is called the Sabbath year, and big things happen.

First, that entire year, you must stop working. No farming is allowed. This is so the land can rest, and the needy can come and eat all they want from the vines and olive trees. Second, you must forgive your neighbor's debts. All IOUs are erased.

After seven consecutive Sabbath cycles--forty-nine years--something even more radical happens: the Jubilee year. During the Jubilee year, you must return all property to its original owner (Leviticus 25:10).

Scholars aren't sure how strictly the Jubilee law was practiced in ancient Israel. It's possible it was practiced only by a devout sprinkling of farmers. And naturally, as my banker friend Ivan points out, if we followed these today, it would throw the financial markets into utter chaos.

Even on a personal level, I've found it a challenge to practice. Consider the not-working part. I've worked for sixteen years straight, so I'm long overdue for a yearlong hiatus. The problem is, I've got a deadline for this book and a kid who is obsessed with offensively pricey Thomas the Tank Engine toys.

As for forgiving debts, I try two things:

1) Since bonds are debts, I try to forgive a bond I have owned for nine years. It was issued by the New York State Dormitory Authority.

"We've never had a request like this before," says the fourth guy I was sent to. He finally suggests that I donate some money to my favorite State University of New York school.

2) To my recollection, the only other outstanding debt that stretches more than seven years is the one owed by my sophomore-year college roommate. He owed me at least twenty dollars. The weasel would buy yogurt with the communal house money, then hide it from the rest of us in paper bags labeled "Photo Equipment-- Do Not Touch." I've always held a grudge. I let it go.

But there is something practical I can do. And that's through an organization called Jubilee USA Network.

Back in the 1990s, two British evangelists named Martin Dent and Bill Peters had an epiphany: They made the connection between the Bible's Jubilee concept and the third-world debt crises. Dent and Peters had both worked in Africa for the British equivalent of the peace corps. Dent, in fact, had been appointed an honorary chief of a Nigerian tribe. He had seen poverty firsthand. He argued that the developed nations should forgive third-world debt. Often these IOUs were left over from corrupt regimes. The Bible says that everyone deserves a fresh start.

The Jubilee movement they started has resulted in massive cancellations of debt by England, France, the U.S., and others. They got a huge publicity boost when Bono and his sunglasses joined the cause. Here's what he said about Jubilee in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2006:

"It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much--yet. He hasn't spoken in public before . . .

"When he does, his first words are from Isaiah: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,' he says, 'because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.' And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favor, the year of Jubilee (Luke 4:18).

"What he was really talking about was an era of grace--and we're still in it."

I joined a group called Jubilee USA as a volunteer and have been sending out postcards to congressmen and senators about debt relief.

I know. Call Oslo and alert the Peace Prize committee. But it's better than watching Entourage and eating Fruit Roll Ups. Plus, I scored some points with my socially conscious wife, who joined me for several hours of address writing and stamp affixing. Whenever Julie collaborates with me on my biblical quest, I get a Mr. Berkowitz-like high.

If you can read the writing and make known to me its interpretation, you shall be clothed with purple . . .

--DANIEL 5:16

Day 44. In an effort to cut down on temptation, I've been rationing my news intake, especially when the news concerns Hollywood actresses running off with Pilates instructors. But I spotted one news story that seemed worthwhile. It was about Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia apparently made a speech in Puerto Rico to a student group. He said that those who believe the Constitution should evolve with society are "idiots." Wrong, he says. We should stick to the original intent of the Founding Fathers. As Scalia put it, "Scalia does have a philosophy; it's called originalism." (By the way, referring to yourself in the third person may not be biblically forbidden, but should be. Unless you have a biblical alter ego named Jacob, of course.)

This is helpful. I've been trying to focus my mission. Here is my answer: I'll do the Scalia technique on the Bible. I'll try to find the original intent. I want to live the original religion.

A lot of people tell me that such a quest is a fantasy. The Bible was written thousands of years ago by people with profoundly different worldviews. And I agree, it's hard. Much harder than finding the original intent of the Constitution, which was at least written in some form of English, even if the Ss and Fs look alike. The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Its journey into other languages has been famously bumpy; the Bible could be the most mistranslated text in history.

The Red Sea is a mistranslation of the "Sea of Reeds." The idea that Moses (and his descendents) had horns comes from a mistranslation of the Hebrew word qaran. It actually means that Moses's face was shining, or emitted beams of light.

I've been doing my best. Since I've been told that reading the Bible in translation is like watching TV in black and white, I'm trying to compensate any way I can. I flip between different versions. I have this fancy Bible software with an ancient-language dictionary. I have my advisory board. I've bought books on teaching yourself Hebrew and ancient Greek--which is overly optimistic, given my time frame.

But even if I assume a proper translation, then there's the not-sotrivial matter of changes in the text over time. Most modern scholars (at least those of a secular bent) don't believe the medieval scribes were flawless Xerox machines. They made tweaks both intentional and accidental. Similarly, the Hebrew Bible has been stable for centuries, but you can see small variations if you compare it to, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But I don't want to give up just because it's hard. Especially since the Scalia method of "original intent" continues to be a major force in biblical interpretation, both in Christianity and--rather differently--in Judaism.

A thirty-second history: For centuries, most believed the Bible was a true account of what happened. It was nonfiction, plain and simple. Most people were, as religious scholar Marcus Borg calls them, "natural literalists"--they had no strong evidence to believe otherwise.

But more and more, science began to butt up against the literal biblical story. How to reconcile Galileo's universe with Joshua stopping the sun in the sky? Or Darwin's theory of evolution with Noah's ark? You saw several reactions. Two of the major ones that have dominated for a century are:

1. Modernism. This says that science and religion are separate. As Stephen Jay Gould put it, they are "nonoverlapping magisteria." The Bible is packed with figurative language and poetry. The creation story, powerful as it may be, is a myth. But religion and the Bible still have a place, because science can't answer questions about faith, purpose, and the meaning of life.

2. Fundamentalism. This view continues to assert that the Bible is 100 percent inerrant, both in morals and historical accuracy. Joshua really did make the sun stand still. Noah really did pile the animals onto a big boat made of gopher wood. They admit there is some nonliteral language in the Bible--when Isaiah says the "trees clapped," it's obviously a metaphor. Same with Jesus's parables. But unless a phrase is clearly figurative, the Bible should be taken at face value.

Like sixties White House advisers, fundamentalists have their own domino theory. If one part of the Bible is proved wrong, why should we believe any of it? It's a good point. And as an agnostic, I had this view from the other side. Why should I follow a book that seems to condone slavery and hand chopping? The question helped inspire my quest.

The Christian literal movement is, of course, famous for its conservative politics. To oppose homosexuality, for instance, its adherents cite Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."

But not all Christian literalists are conservative; there's a growing progressive movement. One branch calls itself Red-letter Christians-- after the color of the text of Jesus's sayings in old Bibles. The Red-letter Christians--such as reverends Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis--focus not on homosexuality or abortion, but instead on the literal adherence to Jesus's teachings about poverty and peace. When I start exploring the New Testament, I'll be consulting both sides.

Jewish biblical interpretation has taken a slightly different path. I got a crash course in this from a frighteningly smart rabbi named Robbie Harris. Robbie--who talks so quickly that my fingers ache from typing notes--is a professor of the Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan.

When I first met him, Robbie was on his cell phone with a publicist from the Knitting Factory, the hipster downtown music club.

"OK," he said. "Great. I'll call you later."

He was playing there next week, he told me. His band is called Shake, Rabbis and Roll (SR2, for short).

"What kind of music is it?" I asked.

"Rock and roll. Do you like rock and roll?"

"Who doesn't?"

Robbie played me a couple of songs from his first album, which "went aluminum." I liked them, especially the one about the snobby New York girl. ("She looks at Central Park as the Great Divide/And now she thinks she's slumming on the Upper West Side.")

He's an observant Jew, but one to whom I can relate, since--unlike the totally religious Mr. Berkowitz--he straddles the secular and Jewish worlds.

Here's what Robbie taught me: In Judaism there's the literal meaning of the biblical passage, and then there's the interpretation of the rabbis in books like the Talmud.

Sometimes these two line up. When the Bible says don't mix wool and linen, that's what it means: Don't mix wool and linen. Here the rabbis just elaborate on what kind of wool (sheep's) and how far apart it must be from the linen.

But other times, the literal meaning is light years from the rabbis' interpretation. For instance, the famous line in Leviticus "an eye for an eye" doesn't really mean pluck out the other guy's eye. It's much more civilized than that. The tradition says it means this: "cash for an eye." The attacker has to pay the victim the monetary value of the eye.

Or consider this passage: "You are not to boil a young goat in the milk of its mother" (Exodus 23:19, NASB).

If you take this literally, as I'm trying to do, this is relatively easy. I think--with a little willpower and a safe distance from farms--I can make it for a year without boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. My friend John suggested that, worse comes to worst, I could boil the baby goat in its aunt's milk. Thanks, John.

But the rabbis have a far more elaborate interpretation: Exodus 23:19 actually means to separate milk and meat. Which is where you get the kosher rules banning cheeseburgers. Along with the myriad rules about how long you must wait between a meat course and a dairy course (from one hour to six hours, depending on local tradition) and whether you should separate dairy utensils and meat utensils in a dishwasher (yes).

Strict Orthodox Jews believe that God gave these amplifications-- the "oral laws"--to Moses on the mountaintop. That's why he was up there for forty days. Moses passed on the oral laws to the Israelites, who told them to their sons, and so on until they were eventually written down. Traditionally, the laws from the all-important five books of Moses--the Torah--come to a total of 613. (My list of rules is slightly longer because I included advice from other parts of the Old Testament, such as Proverbs and Psalms.) Other Jews believe that the oral laws have developed over thousands of years but are sacred nonetheless.

There is one sect of Judaism that rejects oral law altogether. Its followers are called Karaites, and they are theological minimalists, adhering only to the Bible. This can result in some ultrastrict behavior. On the Sabbath, many turn off the heat so as not to engage in commerce with the electric company, which could be considered work. "I just wear a lot of layers," one Karaite I interviewed told me. "It's not so bad." The Karaites had their golden age in medieval times--an estimated 10 percent of Jews were once Karaite. They have since dwindled in number to about fifty thousand, mostly in Israel and, oddly enough, Daly City, California.

On this journey, I plan to be mindful of the oral law. But I'm not going to follow it exclusively. I feel I have to try to puzzle out for myself what the Bible means, even if it means I take some wrong turns.

All this makes me realize: In a sense, my project is steeped in Judaism, since I'm spending a lot of time on the Hebrew Scriptures. But in some ways, it's actually more influenced by the Protestant idea that you can interpret the Bible yourself, without mediation. Sola scriptura, as it's called.

Martin Luther advocated sola scriptura in reaction to the Catholic Church. At the risk of muddying matters, Catholicism is somewhere between Judaism and Protestantism in terms of biblical interpretation. Like Judaism, there's a middle step between you and the Bible--namely the church doctrine. But the Catholic church's mandates are generally slightly less elaborate and complex than those of the rabbis.

In some ways, going literal is turning out to be easier than rabbinic Judaism. Do I need to wear a yarmulke? No, the Bible doesn't mandate it. That came from the rabbis. But in some ways, it's infinitely harder. I'm trying to follow the word. When the Bible says, "an eye for an eye," I don't want to soften it to the rabbinically approved "some money for an eye." When it says smash idols, I want to smash idols. Plus, I'm already feeling guilty--which is how I know I'm actually Jewish. I feel like I'm disappointing my forefathers. I imagine my distant ancestor the Vilna Gaon--a famous rabbi in Eastern Europe--shaking his head somewhere, sighing, emitting an Oy-yi-yi-yi-yi.

Give strong drink to him who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress. --PROVERBS 31:6

Day 44, afternoon. My Esquire colleague David broke up with his girlfriend. He has sciatica--which I had always thought was restricted to people who drive Ford Crown Victorias and get half-off movie tickets. Also, he wrote a very funny movie script about elaborate Christmas displays--and then had someone sell the exact same idea two days before he sent it out.

Next time I'm at Esquire, I stop by his office with a bottle of Kendall-Jackson red wine.

"Here," I say, handing it to him over his desk.

"What's this?"

"It's because you're depressed. The Bible says to bring wine to the heavy of heart."

"The Bible says that?"

"Yes. It also says that you shouldn't sing to people with a heavy heart. That'd be like rubbing vinegar in the wound."

"So you're not going to sing to me?"

"No."

David seems grateful for the wine, and no doubt the lack of singing as well. I love it when the Bible gives Emily Post-like tips that are both wise and easy to follow.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. --EXO D U S 20:8

Day 45. It's the seventh Sabbath of my biblical year. Well, actually, it's the day after the seventh Sabbath. I couldn't type this entry on the Sabbath itself because the Bible tells me not to work. (A friend of mine said that even observing the Sabbath might be breaking the Sabbath, since my job is to follow the Bible. That gave me a two-hour headache.)

Before my biblical year, I was among the biggest Sabbath violators in America. I'm a workaholic. It's a trait I got from my father, who scribbles away on his law books without ceasing--on the beach, on the train, while "watching" old Katharine Hepburn movies on DVD (which means an occasional glance at the screen to make sure the picture is still moving). If the Apocalypse comes, there's no doubt he'd work right on through, looking up to take note of the rising rivers of blood before returning to his case study. I'd probably do the same.

We'd have a lot of company. In the post-BlackBerry age, is there really a boundary between the weekday and the weekend, between work hours and overtime? We work on Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat. We work on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. We put in more hours than the God of Genesis himself.

It wasn't always so in America. As New York Times writer Judith Shulevitz points out, the Puritans left England in large part for the freedom to follow the fourth commandment. The Puritans took the Sabbath seriously: no sports, no dancing, no smoking, no visiting. You must attend church, but the Puritans "punished anyone who got there with unseemly haste or on too showy a horse." The Sabbath in America survived even after the Puritans faded away. As recently as eighty years ago, writes Shulevitz, "football was considered too vulgar to be played on Sunday."

You can see traces of the Puritan influence today--just try buying liquor on Sunday morning in Manhattan. And the hardcore Sabbath is making a comeback in some evangelical circles. The Florida-based megapastor D. James Kennedy tells his parishioners not to eat at a restaurant on Sunday, because that's encouraging waiters to work, thus breaking God's law.

The strictest Sabbath keepers today are probably the Orthodox Jews. In postbiblical times, the rabbis wrote down a complex list of forbidden behavior. It's got thirty-nine types of work, including cooking, combing, and washing. You can't plant, so gardening is off-limits. You can't tear anything, so toilet paper must be pre-ripped earlier in the week. You can't make words, so Scrabble is often considered off-limits (though at least one rabbi allows Deluxe Scrabble, since the squares have ridges, which provides enough separation between letters so that they don't actually form words).

I got a firsthand taste of the Orthodox Shabbat when my aunt Kate was visiting my parents' house. Kate's very cute, very observant thirteenyear-old daughter, Rivka, was over. She'd eaten part of an ice cream sundae and wanted to store it in the freezer for later. But it was Friday, and sundown was coming fast. (The Jewish Sabbath lasts from before sundown Friday to after sundown Saturday.)

She couldn't open the freezer after sundown because that would turn on a freezer light, which was illegal.

"Can you unscrew the freezer lightbulb?" she asked my mom.

My mom tried to unscrew it, but couldn't reach the bulb without removing every last Eggo and Ben & Jerry's from the freezer drawer.

"I'll tell you what," said my mom. "I'll open the freezer for you."

"You can't. You're Jewish," said Rivka.

"Then I'll ask Joelle to do it." (Joelle is my Catholic great-aunt.)

"You can't ask her. She just has to volunteer to do it."

At which point, my mom gave up. I'm guessing that the poor kosher sundae is still in there today.

At first glance, the Sabbath and all of its rules seemed outlandish. And yet I've opted to reserve judgment till I experience the Sabbath myself.

Or at least the explicitly biblical version of the Sabbath. Unlike the rabbis, the Bible itself gives few detailed instructions on how exactly to refrain from work. And the ones it does give apply only to farmers and reality-show contestants: no kindling of fire, no gathering sticks, no plowing or harvesting.

So I have to figure this one out myself. Since my work is writing, I decide I need to abstain from writing, of course. But also researching, phoning colleagues, and scouting the newspaper for ideas. The thing is, going cold turkey terrifies me. I want to wade into this ocean cautiously, like a Sarasota retiree.

The first week, I told myself: no checking of email. I lasted all of an hour, after which I told myself, well, I won't open the emails themselves. I'll just scan the subject headers. That doesn't count as working. So I clicked on the mail. Hmm. An email from my mom. The Bible does say to respect your parents. And maybe it's urgent. Plus, I have another fiftyone Sabbaths to get it right. I clicked on it. It's a joke about five blondes and a blind man in a bar.

Week number two, I tried it again. I shall open no email from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. I made it past Friday night, but then broke down on Saturday morning and stole a peek again. Well, I told myself, I've still got fifty Sabbaths left. Unfortunately, I didn't improve with Sabbaths three to six.

This week I vowed to make it all the way. I felt optimistic. At 6:00 p.m. on Friday night, the sun officially dipped below the New York horizon. I snapped shut my computer, shoved all my books in the corner, silenced the electronic cowbell on my cell phone that I've been meaning to change anyway--and did a little Berkowitz-like fist pump. Something clicked in my brain. It was a school's-out-for-summer feeling. A wave of relief and freedom. No matter how much I want to, I cannot work. I have no choice.

It was a beautiful moment. And short lived. An hour later, my brain clicked back, and I started to suffer pangs of withdrawal every time I walked past my idle PowerBook. What emails are piling up in my inbox? What if the editor of The New Yorker sent me a surprise job offer? On Saturday at noon, I broke down. I checked. Who's going to know?

I was too embarrassed to tell Julie. Julie loves that I'm trying to break the seven-day work cycle--the Sabbath is her favorite part of my experiment. So I keep my failure a secret.

Worse, I then use the Sabbath to weasel out of household tasks.

"Can you put the papers in the recycling bin?"

"I really shouldn't. I'm not allowed to carry a burden outside of my house."

As she took out the papers herself, I could hear her footsteps thump down the hallway corridor.

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him . . . --EXO D U S 22:21

Day 46. Tonight I invited a Jehovah's Witness into my home. I realize that this fact already puts me in an extreme minority.

And, mind you, I didn't just idly answer the door and let a Jehovah's Witness inside. I aggressively pursued the Jehovah's Witnesses. I phoned the headquarters and requested that a Jehovah's Witness be sent to my apartment. After three calls and not a little confusion on their part--it's not a common inquiry--I finally got my wish.

Yes, I'm aware that it doesn't make much sense. It's like volunteering for jury duty or paying to see a Vin Diesel movie.

OK, enough! The poor Jehovah's Witnesses. Their zeal for ringing doorbells have made them one of America's favorite religious punch lines. So I promise: No more cheap Jehovah's Witness jokes.

But I do want to know more about the Jehovah's Witnesses and what they really stand for. Because they are perhaps the fastest-growing biblical literalists in the world. Their current membership stands at more than 6.6 million, with about 300,000 new converts a year. They're also interesting to me because they are usually classified as Christian, but, like the Amish, they lean heavily on the Hebrew Scriptures.

My Jehovah's Witness is named Michael, and he arrives right on the dot, at 7:30 p.m. He wears a brown suit, brown shoes, brown tie, and carries a brown leather case holding a Bible and a pamphlet. He looks somewhat like the actor Gary Busey, if Gary Busey had his hair parted in the middle.

Michael is warm and likeable. He has a deep voice, but it is more soothing than booming, more shrink than football coach.

And he is grateful. So grateful it's almost heartbreaking. He thanks me for having him over. "There are so many misconceptions about Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm just so glad you're talking to me to find out the truth."

He sits on the living room couch, leaning forward, his hands in the "fish-was-this-big" posture. "People say ours is a primitive Christianity--and we take that as a compliment." The Witnesses believe they're getting back to the original meaning of the Bible--the booklet Michael gives me is called "What Does the Bible Really Teach?"

Michael, who works in computers at the massive Jehovah's Witness headquarters in Brooklyn, gives me a crash course in his faith. Here, some of the highlights of the belief (vastly oversimplified, of course):

* God should be called Jehovah, because that's what the Bible calls him. "You can call a person 'man,' or you can call him by his name, 'Bob.' God has a name: 'Jehovah.'"

* Humans should take literally Jesus's pacifist words. "You won't find any Jehovah's Witnesses in Iraq," Michael says. "Jesus said, 'He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.'"

* They don't believe in the Trinity. Jesus is not God, but instead God's first creation. (This belief is why they are sometimes seen as belonging outside of Christianity.)

* Armageddon is coming soon--and believers will be resurrected and live in paradise. But most righteous people won't live in heaven. Almost everyone will live in a paradise here on earth. Heaven will be reserved for 144,000 pious souls who will reign with Jehovah as divine administrators.

* The Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas or Easter, as neither holiday is mentioned in the Bible. Birthdays are also out: The only two birthdays celebrated in the Bible were those of evil people-- one a Pharaoh and one a pro-Roman Jewish king. Michael's fine with the ban, especially now. "As I get older, I don't want to be reminded of my birthday."

* There is no hell. The Witnesses believe hell is a mistranslation of Gehenna, which was an ancient garbage dump. They say that nonbelievers simply die at Armageddon, rather than being thrown into an inferno. "How can you have a kind and loving God who also roasts people?" he asks.

I am surprised by the Jehovah's Witness theology, especially this last point. I had always heard that they were a fire-and-brimstone sect, but here's Michael telling me they reject the notion of hell. The belief is probably heretical by mainstream standards, but it has a gentleness to it.

It has been an hour and a half, and Michael is glancing at his watch every few minutes now.

"You just tell me when you want me to go," says Michael. "I'm from the Midwest, so I'm conscious of overstaying my welcome."

"No, I'm fine," I say. It's true. I could keep going for hours. I doubt Michael will convert me, but I love discussing the Bible. Can't get enough of it.

I ask him what's the most controversial part of his faith.

"The blood transfusion issue," he says. "People think we're kooks. But we absolutely use the medical system." (Was this a subtle dig at the Christian Scientists, I wondered?) "We just don't take blood transfusions."

The reason is the literal translation of several verses, among them Acts 15:29, Genesis 9:4, and Leviticus 7:26--the last of which reads, "Ye shall eat no manner of blood" (KJV).

The Witnesses make an unusual argument here. They say that the word eat should really be translated as "consume," and that transfusion qualifies as consumption.

As Michael points out, this is seriously controversial. Critics say that the ban has caused numerous deaths, and the Witnesses have been the subject of several lawsuits. In recent years, the church elders have scaled back a bit. Now, elements of blood--such as hemoglobin--can be transfused. But still, the ban on transfusing whole blood remains.

To me, it boils down to this question: Should you obey the Bible's rules even if doing so endangers your life? I've looked in the Bible to see what guidance it gives. As I suspected, there's no clear-cut yes or no.

On the one hand, the Bible is filled with martyrs and near-martyrs to their faith. In the Book of Daniel, the evil King Nebuchadnezzar commands three Hebrews to bow down before a golden idol or else get thrown in a fire. The men refuse to bow. Nebuchadnezzar stokes the fire--making it seven times hotter--and tosses the rebels in. But God protects his faithful, and they emerge unscorched.

On the other hand, there are plenty of times when life takes precedence over obeying rules. Jesus lashes out at the Pharisees who criticize his followers for gathering grain on the Sabbath. Likewise, in modern Judaism, life trumps all. Even the most kosher rabbi would allow his followers to get pigs' valves put in their hearts if necessary (despite a misleading Grey's Anatomy plotline to the contrary).

As you might have guessed, I'd make a horrible Jehovah's Witness. Even in my biblical year, if I needed a blood transfusion, I'd be rolling up my sleeve before the doctor finished his sentence. I'm just not faithful/ brave/foolhardy enough to do otherwise. The Bible, in fact, has made me more reverent of life.

Finally, at ten-thirty--three hours after he arrived--Michael says politely that he should let me get to sleep. I'm about to say no, I could keep going, when his Palm Treo rings. It's his wife.

"Yes, we're just finishing up here. I'm about to leave."

Michael stands up to shake my hand.

And then it hits me: I have just done something few human beings have ever achieved. I have out-Bible-talked a Jehovah's Witness.

You shall keep the feast of booths seven days . . .

--DEUTERONOMY 16:13

Day 47. The Bible gives explicit instructions on how to build Noah's ark--300 by 50 by 30 cubits, with a roof and three decks of gopher wood. Later there's an impressive eight pages on how to construct the Tabernacle, the tent where the Ten Commandments were stored, right on down to its blue and purple curtains.

Luckily, I'm exempt from both these projects. They were one time only.

But the Bible does command me to build something else: a hut. Once a year, we're supposed to build a hut and dwell in it for a week so that we may be reminded of the huts used by the ancient Hebrews when they wandered the desert for forty years. It's a major biblical holiday called the Feast of Ingathering--or Sukkoth--and is still practiced by religious Jews. It starts today. (October, incidentally, is a huge month for biblical holidays. I've also observed Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah--but let me return to those later.)

Frankly, the idea of building a large three-dimensional structure gives me a stomachache. I'm no handyman. Put it this way: When I watch Bob the Builder with Jasper, I always learn something new (oh, so that's what a strut is).

I try to console myself that the hut will be a nice change from all the negative commands, the "thou shalt nots." Here, a clear "thou shalt." So I dive in and tackle the first issue: Where to put up my hut? The roof seems logical. I call our building's manager and explain my plan.

"I can't let that happen," he says. "Liability issues."

"What about the courtyard?"

"The courtyard isn't accessible to anyone except one apartment."

"Which apartment?"

"It's not going to work. You can't build a hut in the courtyard."

So I go to my backup plan: building the hut in our living room. This is not ideal for two reasons. The first reason is that it's a hut in our living room.

The second is that my hut--called a sukkah, in Hebrew--wouldn't pass muster with even the most laid-back go-with-the-flow rabbi in America. The rabbis say huts must be built outside, and conform to dozens of other rules as well. This time of year, approved sukkahs sprout up all over West Side roofs.

"Wouldn't it be easier just to use the sukkah on the roof of the Jewish community center?" Julie asks.

"Maybe," I say. "But I'd feel like I was cheating."

I explain to Julie that I'm on a solo mission to find the core of the Bible. I am a lone adventurer. I must blaze my own path.

"OK, but it sounds like you're making work for yourself."

She's got a point. My day starts with a trek down to a store called Metropolitan Lumber to pick up a dozen two-by-fours, a handful of cinder blocks, and some canvas. I begin to feel better about the project. There's something satisfying about buying lumber. It makes me feel like a guy who builds porches and rec rooms and uses words like drywall.

Next I sling my duffel bag over my shoulder and hike off to Riverside Park. I need some more materials. The Bible instructs us to get "the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook." (In biblical times, these might have been used to build the huts, though the longstanding Jewish tradition is to wave them in the air.)

As I walk through New York's version of nature, I stuff my bag full of leafy boughs and willows. I buy a palm plant the size of a volleyball and a Middle Eastern lemonlike fruit called an etrog (traditionally thought to be the fruit in question). It feels good. I'm accomplishing stuff. I'm sweating.

At 11:00 a.m., back in my apartment, I begin hammering crossbeams and holding nails in my mouth and sweating a lot more. Three hours later, thanks to the simpleton's blueprint I downloaded off the internet, I actually have the skeleton of a bona fide hut. Which promptly collapses like it's in a Buster Keaton movie and smashes into the wall. I start again, and this time add extra struts, and this time it stays up.

"Oh my God," Julie says when she arrives home.

I ask her if she's annoyed.

"A little. But more stunned that you actually built something. It's enormous."

Julie inspects my hut. It's got four wooden poles topped by a big sheet of white canvas that just grazes our apartment's ceiling. The interior is spare but decorated with boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook. She squeezes between the hut and the radiator to get another view. She eyes the cinder blocks, making sure that they didn't scratch the floor.

The Bible says to dwell in the hut, so I plan to dwell as much as possible--eat my meals in my hut, read my books there, sleep there. I invite Julie along, but she says she'll let me "fly solo on this one."

So that night, at eleven-thirty, I spread three blankets out on the wood floor. I lie down, put my hands behind my head, stare at the draped canvas, breathe in the citrus and willows (which smell like something they'd rub into you during a massage at Bliss Spa), and try to figure out what I'm feeling.

First, I realize, I'm still on a high from building the hut. I put the thing up myself. Bertrand Russell--the famously agnostic philosopher-- said there are two kinds of work in this world: altering the position of matter on earth, and telling other people to alter the position of matter on earth. I like doing the former. I like breaking the stereotype of the physically inept Jew, at least for a day.

My elation is tainted with guilt, though. This sukkah is way too comfortable. This is supposed to remind me of the ancient huts in the desert, but here I am in a climate-controlled apartment--no sand, no wind, and no lack of food. I don't have to worry about the freezing nights or blistering days or plagues, which killed forty thousand of the six hundred thousand Israelites.

But that guilt, in turn, is relieved by this epiphany: This holiday is all about living biblically. God, if He exists, is ordering everyone--not just those with a book contract--to travel back in time and try to experience the world of the ancient Middle East. God created "immersion journalism," as my friend calls it. Maybe God approves of my project after all.

He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly. --PROVERBS 14:29

Day 50. I've noticed that a lot of biblical living is about constant reminders. That's the purpose of the tassels I've safety pinned to my shirt--the Bible says they are to remind me of the commandments, like a biblical version of the string around the finger.

In the spirit of reminders, I've taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It's my Most Violated List. We'll see if it helps; it's worth a try. The list includes the following classics:

* Lying. Most recent violation: I told my friend I'd return his book about prayer very soon, when in fact I'd lost it.

* Vanity. I check my temples every day for signs of hair loss.

* Gossip. Julie and I talked about how her brother Doug still wears these loud, multicolored sweaters right out of The Cosby Show.

* Coveting. I did a signing at a book fair a few days ago, and at the next table was Anthony Bourdain, the rakish celebrity chef/author. My table got such visitors as: my mother, my father, my wife, my son. Meanwhile the line in front of Bourdain's table resembled opening night of The Phantom Menace, though without as many Darth Maul costumes.

* Touching impure things. Handy Seat aside, it's just too hard to avoid.

* Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM.

You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawal. A dollar seventy-five? That's bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it's time to work on your anger issues.

Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the-forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice (again, I like to be emotionally in control at all times). My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It's a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness.

Did I really need to get so angry at the juggler at the street fair who stopped juggling to take a cell phone call? And then talked for, like, fifteen minutes while Jasper looked on all eager and hopeful? Yes, it's annoying, but worse things have happened.

Or what about the guy in Starbucks who monopolized the bathroom for forty-five minutes? (In my defense, he was also wearing a black beret; this was 2006 Manhattan, not 1948 La Rive Gauche.) I was fuming.

And what about the incident at the soup kitchen?

I've been volunteering at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea. It's an incredible place, the largest soup kitchen in New York, the secondbiggest in the country; they serve more than 1,100 meals a day. The man who runs it is a charismatic tough-love leader who I could see commanding a rebellion against the Roman centurions.

And usually, I get a little ethical head rush from working at the soup kitchen. This, I tell myself, is biblical living at its best. I'm following the inspiring words in Deuteronomy 15:7: "If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren . . . you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother."

And yet . . . even at the soup kitchen, I'm able to find slights. On my most recent visit, I get assigned to kitchen duty--then immediately demoted. They tell me it's because of my beard. I understand. No one wants an unpleasant surprise in his rice pilaf. I am fine with it, until I spot some other volunteer working in the kitchen--despite having his face covered with a big bushy beard of his own.

Why the discrepancy?

"Oh, I'm shaving my beard tomorrow," explains my rival volunteer.

Which makes exactly no sense. Does gravity somehow stop working the day before you shave?

I get reassigned to garbage duty. My job is to take the plastic trays from those who have finished lunch, remove the cutlery, bang the trays forcefully against the side of the garbage can--clearing off all the mashed potatoes and string beans--and then hand them to the stacker. I think I am doing a pretty decent job, which is confirmed by the garbage team captain, a guy in a Jets T-shirt who tells me, "Good job." I am feeling pumped.

Then, after an hour and a half, I'm the victim of a soup kitchen power play. This older guy named Max--he has a droopy face and a permanent scowl--comes up to me, hands me an iced tea in a particularly aggressive manner, and says: "Drink this. Then go away."

I don't want iced tea, and I don't want to go away. I just stare at him.

"Drink this. Then go away," he repeats, glowering.

As far as I can tell, he is no higher on the volunteer food chain than I am; for reasons unknown, he just wants my garbage duty spot.

The Bible says to respect your elders and do not quarrel. So I leave. But I stew about it for a good two days. Drink this. Then go away. What a bastard.

I've been battling my anger since this project started. I want to let go of my resentment. I know it's healthier, a better way to live. But how to do this when faced with a real-life soup kitchen Nazi? The best biblical inspiration I've found is in the book of Jonah. A quick recap for those (like me three months ago) who know only the whale part:

God calls on Jonah to preach to the evil city of Nineveh (now in Iraq). Jonah refuses. He tries to flee God by boarding a ship. This doesn't work: God creates a mighty tempest, and the frightened sailors throw Jonah overboard. God then sends a whale that swallows Jonah (actually, the Bible says "big fish," not whale) and spits him safely out onto land.

Chastened, Jonah agrees to go to Nineveh. Jonah preaches there, and it works. More than 120,000 men, women, and children repent. God forgives them.

You'd think Jonah would be happy with God's forgiveness, but he's actually angry. He wanted the evil ones smote. He wanted fire and brimstone. He gets so furious at God, he no longer wants to live. God says, "Do you do well to be angry?"

Jonah doesn't answer but goes off to the outskirts of Nineveh to sulk. So God decides to teach Jonah a lesson: God grows a plant that shields the prophet from the harsh desert sun. Jonah is exceedingly glad. But the very next day, God causes a worm to kill the plant. Once again, Jonah is exposed to the harsh sun and gets very angry. Again, God asks Jonah: "Do you do well to be angry?"

God then drives home his point: Jonah lost his temper over a plant for which he "did not labor" and which lasted but a day. God says, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals." In other words, get some perspective.

So that's what I try to do. I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. "Do you do well to be angry?" I ask it out loud to myself. No, I don't, I answer. So I got elbowed aside by a strangely competitive soup kitchen volunteer. The world will not end.

I should remember the modern-day Ninevehs where thousands of lives are in danger--the crowd of homeless out the door at Holy Apostles, for instance, or pretty much anywhere in East Africa.

There is such a thing as biblically acceptable anger--righteous indignation. Moses gets angry at the Israelites for worshipping a false idol. Jesus gets angry at the money changers for profaning the Temple. The key is to pump up your righteous anger and mute your petty resentment. I'll be happy if I can get that balance to fifty-fifty.

David danced before the Lord with all his might . . . --2 SAMUEL 6:14

Day 55. It's the night of October 25, and I'm at the loudest, rowdiest, most drunken party of my life. Me and several hundred Hasidic men.

I came for the dancing. There's a part in the Bible where King David celebrates the arrival of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. This was an older David, years after he slew Goliath with a rock and sling. He has defeated his increasingly paranoid mentor Saul to become king of Israel. And he brings home the ark, a sacred box containing the Ten Commandments. He celebrates by dancing. And, man, does he dance. He dances with such abandon, with such joy, that he doesn't notice that his robe is flying up, exposing his nakedness to the young handmaidens in the kingdom.

His uptight wife, Michal, is appalled. She makes the mistake of scolding King David, and, as a result, is cursed with childlessness.

The unhappy ending seems unduly harsh. But I do love the image of the king doing a wild holy jig. The joy of religion; that's what David was feeling, and that's something I underestimated--or pretty much ignored--in my secular life. I want to feel what David felt, so I took a subway to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on a Tuesday evening.

The occasion is a Jewish holiday called Simchas Torah, the last night before the sukkah is taken down. It's not in the Bible proper, but it does celebrate something biblical: the end to the annual reading of the five books of Moses. And it sounded too interesting to miss.

My guide, Gershon, is a friend of a friend. He's a kind, bespectacled, newlywed Hasid whose outgoing voice-mail message says: "Your next action could change the world, so make it a good one."

As we walk, I get to see a side of ultra-Orthodox Jews that I'd never seen before. They always look so somber on the subway, so purposeful. But here they are, well, wasted. They're weaving down the sidewalks, some holding bottles of Crown Royal whiskey, some singing loudly in Hebrew.

On this holiday, it's not just OK to drink, it's pretty much mandatory. Gershon and I go to his parents' house and pound a few shots of vodka in their front-yard sukkah. It's raining, and the raindrops fall through the gaps in the sukkah roof and splash into our glasses.

When Gershon says the prayers in Hebrew before drinking, I sneak a peek at him. His eyes are half-closed, his eyelids fluttering, his eyeballs rolled toward the back of his head. Will I ever come close to that spiritual state? Will I get my longed-for epiphany? I'm worried that I won't.

After our vodka shots, we head over to the party's headquarters-- the huge building known as 770 Eastern Parkway, the nerve center of this branch of Hasidism. (The sect is called Lubavitchers, and its members are the least insular of the Hasidic Jews, committed to bringing unaffiliated Jews into the fold.)

I'm wearing black pants and a black sweater to better blend in with the Hasidim. I forgot to bring the crucial yarmulke, but Gershon lends me one of his.

"We dance for our animal nature," says Gershon, as we step across the puddles. "The Torah is for both sides of the nature. The reading is for the divine side, and the dancing is for the animal side."

As we approach within a few yards of 770--as it's called--Gershon asks me:

"You ever been bungee jumping?"

"No."

"Well, I have. The instructors say to just jump, don't think about it. That's what you have to do here."

I see what he means. Just getting inside is going to be an extreme sport. The doors are glutted with dozens of revelers in their black coats-- all men, no women (the Hasidim aren't much for gender mixing). We have to elbow our way through.

A fat, red-bearded guy comes up to Gershon and hugs him. Red Beard goes off on a drunken I-love-you-man, you-are-the-greatest-guy-Iknow rant that lasts a good two minutes.

Gershon finally extracts himself.

"Who was that?" I ask.

"Never met him before in my life."

We squeeze our way inside. And there, an ocean of undulating black hats. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them in a hall the size of a large gymnasium. It's as loud as any concert I've ever been to. But instead of drums and guitar, it's a village of men singing Ay yi yi yi.

The floor is exactly like a Seattle mosh pit circa 1992. Everyone's bumping, smacking, thumping into one another. One guy barrels into me so hard that he sends me stumbling. "Hey you with the beard!" he says. Everyone looks up. He unleashes a deep laugh.

We are making a slow, huge circle, sort of a Holy Roller derby. If you look up, you can see the occasional Hasid bouncing up in the air like a pogo stick. When there is a patch of free space on the floor--which isn't often--a reveler will do a somersault. Two men are swapping their black hats repeatedly as if they were reenacting a Laurel and Hardy scene.

I tell you, I've never seen such pure joy. It is thick, atmospheric, like someone had released a huge canister of nitrous oxide into the room. Here we are, hundreds of dancing King Davids. Even for a control freak like me, there's no choice but to go along with it. You are overwhelmed. You follow the sweaty, bouncing, shouting, ay-yi-yi-ing hordes, or you are trampled.

I swing from emotion to emotion: terror that I'll be crushed, fascination that humans act this way, paranoia that they'll deal with the interloper in a manner I'd never forget (think Deliverance meets Yentl). But occasionally I swing to delirious happiness. I don't know if I feel God. And it isn't as intense as the epiphanies I had as a kid. But a couple of times that night, I feel something transcendent, something that melts away the future and the past and the deadlines and the MasterCard bills and puts me squarely in the moment. At least for a few seconds, there is no difference between me and Jacob, my biblical alter ego.

After three hours of dancing--at one in the morning--I tell Gershon that I'm going to go, even though the hardcore dancers stay on till six. He walks me out. "Remember," he says to me as we shake hands goodbye on the street corner, "sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It's like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you'd see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the weirdness, to what it means."

As I ride the subway home, with the Ay-yi-yi-ing still echoing in my ears, I try to think of the meaning beyond the weirdness. Here's what I decide: Underneath my repression, maybe I have a closeted mystical side. Maybe I'm a rational Presbyterian on the outside, but an emotional Baptist on the inside. Given the right circumstances, maybe everyone is, even Henry Kissinger.

The next morning, I tell Julie about my wild night of dancing with Hasidic men and how I got a taste of pure joy.

"And where were the women during this thing?"

"Well, they were watching. They have these observation windows."

"Observation windows?" Julie looks pissed.

It's strange. Naturally, I noticed the gender segregation--but there were so many odd and overwhelming things about the night that I didn't laser in on that one. It's the obliviousness that comes with being in the majority.

"Yeah," I say. "Well, I was trying not to be judgmental."

"Well, seems like they're being judgmental of women."

I can sense Julie becoming more and more skeptical of religion, or at least hardcore religion.

Before my project, Julie was the mildly proreligion one in the family. She believed in a God of some sort, or at least a universe that wasn't morally apathetic. "Things happen for a reason," she was always telling me when I'd moan about some career setback. She loves the rituals of Hanukkah and Passover. She's already started coming up with themes for Jasper's bar mitzvah (soccer! The Academy Awards!).

But now, I feel her drawing away--even as I start to warm to some aspects of religious life. It's the difference between living the Bible and living with someone who is living the Bible.

. . . He had done so, walking naked and barefoot. --ISAIAH 20:2

Day 61. I'm typing this right after midnight. The Psalms urge us to rise at midnight and praise God, so I've been doing that for a week. I promised Julie I'd do it only for a week, since I've had to set an alarm for 11:58 p.m., two hours into her sleep cycle.

It's the end of my experiment's second month, and here's what I'm feeling: exhilarated, confused, overwhelmed, underqualified, fascinated, and scared. Also, embarrassed.

My biblical alter ego Jacob is starting to look freakish. I've got tassels hanging from my garments. I take this purity-insuring Handy Seat everywhere. My beard has gone beyond shaggy. It now hangs a good two inches below my chin, and it's starting to make curlicues and shoot off in unexpected directions. (Julie wanted to go to Halloween with me as Tom Hanks from Cast Away and her as the volleyball, but I can't do Halloween because it's a pagan holiday.)

Yes, of course, part of me likes the attention. I write memoirs for a living, for Pete's sake. And, yes, I know I brought this on myself--no one's forcing me to follow the Bible at knifepoint. But the constant stares and quizzical looks--it'd be enough to make anyone, even me, self-conscious. A bit paranoid, even.

Luckily, I've found inspiration in the Bible. As the Brooklyn rabbi Andy Bachman suggested, I've been rereading the Prophets. He's right. They are amazing.

I love their message of social justice--especially Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. Again and again, they berate the hard-hearted rich who lie on beds of ivory and sip wine contentedly and "trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth." Their days are numbered.

But I also love the way they delivered that message. You see, the prophets didn't just utter their prophecies. They staged what are known as "prophetic acts"--wild, attention-grabbing, God-inspired pieces of performance art. The prophets were the inventors of street theater, as scholar Marcus Borg points out in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. They were ancient David Blaines, but with orders from God, not a network executive.

Consider Hosea, who married a prostitute and named his children "Not pitied" and "Not my people." The names were a warning: Israel must repent for its idolatrous ways, or God will continue to have no pity and cut them off.

Even more radical was Isaiah, who walked naked and barefoot for three years among the people of Jerusalem. (This was symbolic of what would happen if Judah allied itself with Egypt and Ethiopia; they would be conquered, and everyone would end up naked captives.) Another prophet, Jeremiah, did wear clothes but walked the streets with a wooden yoke around his neck to signify the yoke of Babylonian rule.

But eclipsing them all was Ezekiel. He was the master. I knew from reading the encyclopedia that Ezekiel had eaten a scroll to symbolize his appropriation of its message. And yet that was tame compared to his other performances. One time, for instance, God told Ezekiel to carve a model of Jerusalem into a brick, then lie down beside the model on his left side. He continued lying there. For 390 days. Then Ezekiel turned to his right side to lie another forty days. These days were to symbolize the years that Israel and Judah would be in exile after the Babylonian conquering.

During his 430-day feat, Ezekiel was to eat a meager diet of bread-- cooked over human dung. Ezekiel pleaded with God, and God agreed to let him use cow dung as fuel instead.

As I enter my third month, Ezekiel and his fellow prophets have become my heroes. They were fearless. They literalized metaphors. They turned their lives into protest pieces. They proved that, in the name of truth, sometimes you can't be afraid to take a left turn from polite society and look absurd.

Maybe my alter ego Jacob is in the prophetic tradition of Ezekiel. I hope so. On the other hand, he could be way off. I imagine that for every Ezekiel, there were a couple hundred false prophets walking around Jerusalem with, say, loincloths on their heads and eating clumps of dirt.

I blow my shofar. It still sounds like a fax machine, but a healthy one.

Month Three: November

They shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them. --LEVITICUS 20:27

Day 62. It's been more than a month since my mixed-fiber adventure. Time for me to tackle the second item on my list of Most Perplexing Laws: capital punishment.

The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn't just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.

The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, at the very least, I should try to stone. But how?

I can't tell you the number of people who have suggested that I get adulterers and blasphemers stoned in the cannabis sense. Which is an interesting idea. But I haven't smoked pot since I was at Brown University, when I wrote a paper for my anthropology class on the hidden symbolism of bong hits. (Brown was the type of college where this paper actually earned a B+.)

Instead I figured my loophole would be this: The Bible doesn't specify the size of the stones. So . . . pebbles.

A few days ago, I gathered a handful of small white pebbles from Central Park, which I stuffed in my back pants pocket. Now all I needed were some victims. I decided to start with Sabbath breakers. That's easy enough to find in this workaholic city. I noticed that a potbellied guy at the Avis down our block had worked on both Saturday and Sunday. So no matter what, he's a Sabbath breaker.

Here's the thing, though: Even with pebbles, it is surprisingly hard to stone people.

My plan had been to walk nonchalantly past the Sabbath violator and chuck the pebbles at the small of his back. But after a couple of failed passes, I realized it was a bad idea. A chucked pebble, no matter how small, does not go unnoticed.

My revised plan: I would pretend to be clumsy and drop the pebble on his shoe. So I did.

And in this way I stoned. But it was probably the most polite stoning in history--I said, "I'm sorry," and then leaned down to pick up the pebble. And he leaned down at the same time, and we almost butted heads, and then he apologized, then I apologized again.

Highly unsatisfying.

Today I get another chance. I am resting in a small public park on the Upper West Side, the kind where you see retirees eating tuna sandwiches on benches.

"Hey, you're dressed queer."

I look over. The speaker is an elderly man, mid-seventies, I'd guess. He is tall and thin and is wearing one of those caps that cabbies wore in movies from the forties.

"You're dressed queer," he snarls. "Why you dressed so queer?"

I have on my usual tassels, and, for good measure, have worn some sandals and am carrying a knotty maple walking stick I'd bought on the internet for twenty-five dollars.

"I'm trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers . . ."

"You're stoning adulterers?"

"Yeah, I'm stoning adulterers."

"I'm an adulterer."

"You're currently an adulterer?"

"Yeah. Tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks from now. You gonna stone me?"

"If I could, yes, that'd be great."

"I'll punch you in the face. I'll send you to the cemetery."

He is serious. This isn't a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him. I fish out my pebbles from my back pocket.

"I wouldn't stone you with big stones," I say. "Just these little guys."

I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then flinging it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.

I am stunned for a second. I hadn't expected this grizzled old man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye.

I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it at his chest. It bounces off.

"I'll punch you right in the kisser," he says.

"Well, you really shouldn't commit adultery," I say.

We stare at each other. My pulse has doubled.

Yes, he is a septuagenarian. Yes, he had just threatened me using corny Honeymooners dialogue. But you could tell: This man has a strong dark side.

Our glaring contest lasts ten seconds, then he walks away, brushing by me as he leaves.

When I was a kid, I saw an episode of All in the Family in which Meathead--Rob Reiner's wussy peacenik character--socked some guy in the jaw. Meathead was very upset about this. But he wasn't upset that he committed violence; he was upset because it felt so good to commit violence.

I can relate. Even though mine was a stoning lite, barely fulfilling the letter of the law, I can't deny: It felt good to chuck a rock at this nasty old man. It felt primal. It felt like I was getting vengeance on him. This guy wasn't just an adulterer, he was a bully. I wanted him to feel the pain he'd inflicted on others, even if that pain was a tap on the chest.

Like Meathead, I also knew that this was a morally stunted way to feel. Stoning is about as indefensible as you can get. It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality? Later that week, I ask my spiritual adviser Yossi about stoning. Yossi was born in Minnesota and calls himself a "Jewtheran"-- Jewish guilt and Lutheran repression mesh nicely, he told me. He's an ordained Orthodox rabbi but never practiced, instead opting for the shmata trade--he sold scarves to, among others, the Amish. He's tall and broad shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard. In his spare time, Yossi writes wry essays about Jewish life, including a lament about how his favorite snack, Twinkies, recently became nonkosher. I met him through Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox outreach group.

He isn't fazed by my question at all.

We don't stone people today because you need a biblical theocracy to enforce the stoning, he explains. No such society exists today. But even in ancient times, stoning wasn't barbaric.

"First of all, you didn't just heave stones," says Yossi. "The idea was to minimize the suffering. What we call 'stoning' was actually pushing the person off the cliff so they would die immediately upon impact. The Talmud actually has specifications on how high the cliff must be. Also, the person getting executed was given strong drink to dull the pain."

Plus, the stonings were a rare thing. Some rabbis say executions occurred only once every seven years, others say even less often. There had to be two witnesses to the crime. And the adulterer had to be tried by a council of seventy elders. And, weirdly, the verdict of those seventy elders could not be unanimous--that might be a sign of corruption or brainwashing. And so on.

I half-expected Yossi to say they gave the adulterer a massage and a gift bag. He made a compelling case. And yet, I'm not totally sold. Were biblical times really so merciful? I suspect there might be some whitewashing going on. As my year progresses, I'll need to delve deeper.

And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.

--DEUTERONOMY 8:10

Day 64. A spiritual update: I'm still agnostic, but I do have some progress to report on the prayer front. I no longer dread prayer. And sometimes I'm even liking it. I've gone so far as to take the training wheels off and am testing out some of my own prayers instead of just repeating passages from the Bible.

Elton Richards--the pastor out to pasture--broke down prayer for me into four types. It's a handy mnemonic: ACTS. A for adoration (praising God). C for confession (telling God your sins). T for thanksgiving (being grateful to God for what you have). S for supplication (asking God to help you).

Right now, the one that's working for me best is T, thanksgiving. Adoration feels awkward to me. Confession feels forced. As for supplication, I'm doing it, but I feel greedy asking God to help my career. Should I really be cluttering His in-box by asking for better placement of The Know-It-All at airport bookstores?

But thanksgiving, that I'm getting into. In Deuteronomy, the Bible says that we should thank the Lord when we've eaten our fill--grace after meals, it's called. Christians moved grace to the beginning of the meal, preappetizer. To be safe, I'm praying both before and after.

Today, before tasting my lunch of hummus and pita bread, I stand up from my seat at the kitchen table, close my eyes, and say in a hushed tone:

"I'd like to thank God for the land that he provided so that this food might be grown."

Technically, that's enough. That fulfills the Bible's commandment. But while in thanksgiving mode, I decide to spread the gratitude around:

"I'd like to thank the farmer who grew the chickpeas for this hummus. And the workers who picked the chickpeas. And the truckers who drove them to the store. And the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone's deli and told me 'Lots of love.' Thank you."

Now that I type it, it sounds like an overly earnest Oscar speech for best supporting Middle Eastern spread. But saying it feels good.

Here's the thing: I'm still having trouble conceptualizing an infinite being, so I'm working on the questionable theory that a large quantity is at least closer to infinity. Hence the overabundance of thank-yous. Sometimes I'll get on a roll, thanking people for a couple of minutes straight-- the people who designed the packaging, and the guys who loaded the cartons onto the conveyor belt. Julie has usually started in on her food by this point.

The prayers are helpful. They remind me that the food didn't spontaneously generate in my fridge. They make me feel more connected, more grateful, more grounded, more aware of my place in this complicated hummus cycle. They remind me to taste the hummus instead of shoveling it into my maw like it's a nutrition pill. And they remind me that I'm lucky to have food at all. Basically, they help me get outside of my self-obsessed cranium.

I'm not sure this is what the Bible intended, but it feels like a step forward.

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." --PSALMS 14:1

Day 67. The ancient Israelites were surrounded by unbelievers. This is clear from the amount of space the Bible devotes to condemning idolatry, paganism, and false gods. An impressive 46 of the 613 Jewish laws deal with the topic (give or take a few, depending on how you classify them). It is, I think, one of the main similarities between ancient Israel and twenty-first-century New York--we live amidst a sea of unbelievers.

I feel tempted all the time--not so much by a cult to Baal, but by the lure of secular humanism. To face my demons, I decide to go deep into the heart of unbelief: the weekly New York City Atheists meeting at a midtown Greek restaurant.

I know a fair amount of atheists, seeing as I live in a relatively godless town. But there's no way that you could drag any of my atheist acquaintances to a meeting of New York City Atheists. Some of my friends are atheists precisely because they want to avoid joining a group that meets on a weekend and talks about plans for a cable-access TV show.

An atheist club felt oxymoronic, like an apathy parade. But against all odds, it exists. The gathering of the godless takes place in a back room with a long table. A big blue atheism banner hangs from the ceiling--right next to the Christmas decorations of cardboard silver angels, an irony several of the atheists point out.

I meet my neighbors. One is a compact woman with graying hair and a Darwin cap. How was she converted to atheism? "I grew up with a Methodist aunt who was basically a Victorian," she tells me. "I couldn't say the word leg. I had to say limb. I once said the word constipation and got smacked. The hypocrisy was too much for me."

Then there is the big guy who looks like he's either a stevedore or hockey coach. "I'm a second-generation atheist," he says. "My dad spat when he walked by churches or synagogues."

There is a short-haired woman who seems quite eager to steer the conversation to her self-published book, which is about an atheist arena cleaner in ancient Rome. "The main character's job was to clean up the carnage after the gladiators."

They ask me, eyeing my unkempt beard, why I'm visiting the atheists club, and I tell them about my project. They seem relieved, at least, that I'm not an Orthodox Jew or militant Muslim. But further discussion will have to wait.

"Shhhh-shhh."

The shusher is Ken, the leader of New York City Atheists. Ken looks a bit like Jackie Mason, but a strapping, broad-shouldered Jackie Mason. He's at the front of the room, wearing a blue-and-white atheist baseball cap. My neighbor, the one with the Darwin hat, tells me that Ken worked at IBM for thirty-seven years, and instead of golf, atheism is his retirement hobby.