Slate.com Table of Contents culturebox Let's Get Those Phones Ringing! day to day Advanced Search Office Insanity art dear prudence The Found Poetry of Postcards Stream of Unconsciousness blogging the bible dialogues Good Book Making Sense of the Credit Debacle books dispatches What Do Humans Owe Animals? "If We Could, We'd Be Building Like Crazy" change-o-meter drink Good Conversation A Spoonful of Vino change-o-meter explainer Zen Man Do Psychologists Still Use Rorschach Tests? change-o-meter explainer Murmurs in Moscow Party's Over change-o-meter explainer Let Spending Dogs Lie Philatelists' Republic of China chatterbox explainer The Time-Space Theory Were There Sex Shops in the Time of George Washington? chatterbox fighting words The Electoral-Cycles Theory Don't Say a Word chatterbox food Good Riddance, Yucca Mountain Too Many Kiddie Cooks Spoil the Broth chatterbox foreigners The He-Kept-Us-Safe Theory Love Thy Neighbor chatterbox gabfest The Flypaper Theory The Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot Gabfest chatterbox green room The Burden-of-Success Theory Barking Up the Wrong Tree corrections green room Corrections When Green Is Another Word for Cheap culturebox grieving The New Scrooge The Long Goodbye culturebox human nature What if Woody Allen Had Directed Watchmen? Crocktuplets culturebox jurisprudence Watchmen Failed State of the Union culturebox jurisprudence Shoot the Recession Here We Go Again Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 1/133 jurisprudence recycled The Better, Cheaper Mortgage Fix "One Dollar for Every West Virginian" jurisprudence slate v Lest Ye Be Judged You Read That in the Bible? lifehacking slate v Kill Your Computer "Your Dad Arrested Me Last Night!" medical examiner slate v Sniffle While You Work Dear Prudence: Bed Buy Blowback moneybox supreme court dispatches Dumb Money Cash Bar moneybox technology War on the Rich? Read Me a Story, Mr. Roboto moneybox television The World According to TARP Fallon Upward moneybox the best policy The Bubble Next Time Loan Ranger movies the book club Swatchmen How the Supreme Court Was Won my goodness the chat room Bridge to Somewhere Biblically Speaking other magazines the dismal science The Enemy of My Enemy Testing Testing poem the green lantern "Addicts" Tree-Humper politics the green lantern The Latest Chicago Pol Dirty Dogs and Carbon Cats politics the spectator This Time I Really Mean It Not the Usual Suspects politics today's business press Rush to Pardon GM's Nuclear Option: Bankruptcy politics today's papers Renewable Power to the People When Giant Companies Fall politics today's papers Leave Grover Alone Too Many Czars in the Kitchen? press box today's papers Jeffrey Gettleman's World of War Obama Puts on a Happy Face recycled today's papers Rereading Watchmen Investors Throw In the Towel recycled today's papers Jose Rijo Unplugged Will Crisis Destroy the EU? Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/133 sparked by the Slate project. You can buy Good Book here. The today's papers following is adapted from the book. Sebelius Tapped as HHS Secretary today's papers It's a Numbers Game, and Nobody's Winning Should you read the Bible? You probably haven't. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. tv club Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among Friday Night Lights, Season 3 nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I've ever met, have not done webhead much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the Ye Olde Social Network faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in xx factor xxtra its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible Chauvinist Pigs in Space pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively. Advanced Search Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET Slate V: You read that in the Bible? Maybe it doesn't make sense for most of us to read the whole art Bible. After all, there are so many difficult, repellent, confusing, and boring passages. Why not skip them and cherry-pick the best The Found Poetry of Postcards bits? After spending a year with the good book, I've become a What messages do they really send? full-on Bible thumper. Everyone should read it—all of it! In fact, By Sarah Boxer the less you believe, the more you should read. Let me explain Wednesday, March 4, 2009, at 7:01 AM ET why, in part by telling how reading the whole Bible has changed me. Click here to read a slide-show essay about postcards. When I was reading Judges one day, I came to a complicated digression about a civil war between two groups of Israelites, the . Gileadites and the Ephraimites. According to the story, the Gileadites hold the Jordan River, and whenever anyone comes to . cross, the guards ask them to say the password, shibboleth. The Ephraimites, for some unexplained reason, can't pronounce the . sh in shibboleth and say "sibboleth" instead. When an Ephraimite fails the speech exam, the Gileadites "would seize him and slay him." I've read the word shibboleth a hundred . times, written it a few, and probably even said it myself, but I had never understood it until then. It was a tiny but thrilling moment when my world came alive, when a word that had just been a word suddenly meant something to me. blogging the bible And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day Good Book when I was Bible-reading. You can't get through a chapter of the What I learned from reading the entire Bible. Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a By David Plotz phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us Tuesday, March 3, 2009, at 6:58 AM ET 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David's wife places in the In 2006 and 2007, David Plotz blogged the Bible for Slate, bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about starting with "In the beginning …" and reading right through to morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still the end. This week, Plotz publishes Good Book: The Bizarre, shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, a book Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/133 of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King's but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry "I Have a Dream" speech. agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God. Just as an exercise, I thought for a few minutes about the cultural After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the markers in Daniel, a late, short, and not hugely important book. mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or What footprints has it left on our world? First, Daniel is thrown none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly in the "lions' den" and King Belshazzar sees "the writing on the performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only wall." These are two metaphors we can't live without. The "fiery conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was furnace" that Daniel's friends are tossed into is the inspiration for awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty— the Fiery Furnaces, a band I listen to. The king rolls a stone in such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no front of the lions' den, sealing in a holy man who won't stay God I want to obey and no God I can love. sealed—foreshadowing the stone rolled in front of the tomb of Jesus. Daniel inspired the novel The Book of Daniel and the TV When I complain to religious friends about how much He show The Book of Daniel. It's even a touchstone for one of my dismays me, I usually get one of two responses. Christians say: favorite good-bad movies, A Knight's Tale. That movie's villain Well, yes, but this is all setup for the New Testament. Reading belittles hero Heath Ledger by declaring, "You have been only the Old Testament is like leaving halfway through the weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found movie. I'm missing all the redemption. If I want to find the grace wanting"—which is what the writing on the wall told and forgiveness and wonder, I have to read and believe in the Belshazzar. story of Jesus Christ, which explains and redeems all. But that doesn't work for me. I'm a Jew. I don't, and can't, believe that While reading the Bible, I often felt as if I had finally lifted a Christ died for my sins. And even if he did, I still don't think that veil from my eyes. I learned that I hadn't known the true nature would wash away God's crimes in the Old Testament.