One book that made it onto my summer reading list was The Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs. The subtitle of the book almost says it all: "One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." Simply put, Jacobs identifies about 700 "rules" that are embedded in scripture (mostly the Old Testament) and then spends the next year trying to live his life with those rules in mind.
Not surprisingly, these scriptural proclamations are quite a strange collection. The Bible says to bind money to your hand, to wear fringes on the corner of your garments, to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers, to leave the edges of one's beard unshaven, to never sit on a chair where a menstruating woman has sat, to not eat fruit from a tree that's four years old or younger--and of course, the more trivial demands, such as to stone adulterers, and the license to beat your slaves as hard as you want--as long as they survive for at least a day or two after the beating. One of Jacobs' favorites in this regard: If you're in a fistfight, and the wife of your opponent grabs your private parts, you must cut off her hand [Deuteronomy 25:11-12]. In the end, it is such a bizarre and arbitrary hodge-podge of rules that no person can follow all of them without acting inconsistently.
Jacobs cites survey data that suggests millions of Americans take the Bible literally--depending on which survey you use, that figure is somewhere between 33 percent and 55 percent. For those of you who are in this category: please read Jacobs' book, and then get back to me. If you still believe that the Bible can be taken literally, you have flunked any reasonable test of intelligence and critical thinking.
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