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The Year of Living Biblically
- A documentation of A.J. Jacobs (a secular, journalist, liberal new york jew) who vows to spend a year living strictly according to every percept in the bible.
- There are a lot of strangely outrageous things you will have to do or rules that you have to abide if you were to live a life following the bible, literally.
- To name a few of rules: do not wear clothes of mixed fibres, do not shave your beard, stone adulterer (yeah the author really did all these)
- The bible is quite sexually discriminating. Women are treated as a property of men. (A wife who defends her husband by grabbing the private parts of his aggressor must have her hand cut off. A husband is forbidden from touching his wife when she is menstruating because she is deemed is “impure” during that period )
- Much of the rules is really baffling for the 21st century brain (eg stoning homosexuals, sacrificing oxen, smashing idols etc)
- Though religious rules could be crazy at times, it often has an underlying cause behind it. And it is really up to us to find out about and interpret it accordingly.
Afterthoughts: as an atheist, I find this quite an amusing read. The author didnt end up writing something as a mockery of Evangelicals or even religion as a whole, as i was afraid he was going to, which would have been oh-so-typical. And I liked that he kept his sense of humour in tact while presenting the most absurd parts of bible.
But it is pretty clear after reading the book, that if anyone were to follow as many Biblical laws as possible, it will disrupt and uproot all areas of his/her life. I didn’t find the book extraordinarily well-written nor enlighteningly insightful. As any difficult undertakings in life, it always makes you realise something about yourself or even life, and a year of living biblically is well, just another one of those things – which in a not totally indisputable way , you can see as a stunt a writer pulls to get a book deal.