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

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible | A. J. Jacobs | Awesome Book!

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The Year of Living...

	The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible A. J. Jacobs Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 383 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

From the bestselling author of The Know-It-All comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible.

Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.

The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.

Jacobs's quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for The Know-It-All. His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin.

Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first-century brain.

Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, The Year of Living Biblically is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down.

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Just What I Needed

Two sad events converged in my life to lead to my decision to buy this book in the New Orleans airport. First of all, I attended my mother's funeral the day before and needed a book with some laughs. And, I did laugh out loud frequently while in the airport waiting for my flight and on the airplane on my way home.

Secondly, I have had some members of my religion verbally attack me and my family as straight on our way to hell while we try our best to be loving, conscientious members of the group. In this book, I feel swept up and included in the author's quest. He has done some things I would have enjoyed doing and he has furthered my knowledge on my spiritual quest. Though he is not a Christian, he does what our family tries to do to the best of our inadequate ability - to recognize us all as God's children and part of the kingdom. The book makes me feel as though I've been invited to the party and encourages me to continue on my quest to bring as many people in as I can during my lifetime. We can all benefit from the wisdom of various religions and all types of people. I like reading books that support me on my spiritual path. This book actually inspired me to dance as I moved forward during the days I read it. The author writes clearly and with a genuine sense of fun. To me, cheerfulness and optimism are important to convince others of our faith. In these characteristics, the author outdoes some of us who profess to have great faith. And, he walked the talk for an entire year. He has encouraged me to try harder to match my actions to my beliefs.

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Awesome Book!

I devoured this book in two and a half days. Its a fascinating read filled with details and Biblical information that I somehow missed growing up in a religious home. The author offsets all the details with plenty of humor and it never gets boring. This book is great for people from all walks of life, religious or not.

Humorous and....oddly inspirational!

Just finished this book and it was fantastic! It was an impulse buy in the airport about a week or so ago and I haven't been able to put it down. I found the observations humorous and the religious "cliff notes" fascinating. I'm pretty much an agnostic, but find the study of religion interesting. Also, I felt very inspired by the authors commitment. I just ordered "The Know-it-All"......can't wait!

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A Daring Adventure!

When a friend bragged to me about the publication, in which his daughter was involved, of this particular book, I bought it, read it and agreed with his assessment. I hadn't read many pages before courtesy was transformed into delight and laughter. If anyone has ever taken on fundamentalism with the power of halarity and a tongue-in-cheek literalism, this book has done it!

I am quite familiar with the sacred writings of both Jews and Christians, after all I have spent all of my life dealing with them in some way as clergy. Yet, with the skill of a seasoned but amateur interpreter, he discovered, dug up and unearthed passages I had never seen in the light he suggested. For example, he examined Leviticus 15:19 that reads "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." So a man is forbidden to touch a woman during her menstrual period. Jacobs takes this to mean, literally, not touching, laying down on bedding or sitting where she has lain. Moreover, he went on the streets of New York City with a Handy Seat, an aluminum cane that folds into a three-legged miniature chair, so that he could fulfill this stricture. At Time Warner Center, when the guard asked him what he was doing, he said, "Just sitting." He carried his Bible with him, much like it was used in a fifties Western shoot-out at O.K. Corral to stop a bullet from piercing the hero's chest. He said he loved his Bible like he loved his encyclopedia even though the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words, just a few spots called Borders. He said that the injunction of the Bible to be "fruitful and multiply" could mean loading up on peaches at the market or helping his niece with her algebra homework. He says, "If a female friend were to come up to him for a cheek kiss, he would dart his head out of the way like Oscar de la Hoya, not risking that she was still in her period. When he went out he would take his Handy Seat and sit on it rather than a bench where a menstruating woman could have sat and he did this in, of all places, Grand Central Park!

It was even stranger to see him with a lengthy beard that made him "resemble Moses. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Ted Kaczynski." Strangers would come up to him, he said, and "pet his beard, like it was a Labrador puppy or a pregnant woman's stomach." He wore a white robe with no mixed fibers. His basis for this was Leviticus 19:19, "Nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff." So he had a friend come to help him determine which of his garments had such and which were safe to wear. So he wore a robe. This is the way he walked the streets of New York City!

If you desire the pleasure of reading a book that is quite compatible with the labors of the Jesus Seminar of the late Robert Funk then this just may be a book for you. I am willing to bet you will be as surprised as I was delighted!

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