The Year of Living Biblically
What would it require for a person to live all the commandments of the Bible for an entire year? That is the question that animates this hilarious, quixotic, thought-provoking memoir from Jacobs (The Know-It-All). He didn't just keep the Bible's better-known moral laws (being honest, tithing to charity and trying to curb his lust), but also the obscure and unfathomable ones: not mixing wool with linen in his clothing; calling the days of the week by their ordinal numbers to avoid voicing the names of pagan gods; trying his hand at a 10-string harp; growing a ZZ Top beard; eating crickets; and paying the babysitter in cash at the end of each work day. (He considered some rules, such as killing magicians, too legally questionable to uphold.) In his attempts at living the Bible to the letter, Jacobs hits the road in highly entertaining fashion to meet other literalists, including Samaritans in Israel, snake handlers in Appalachia, Amish in Lancaster County, Pa., and biblical creationists in Kentucky. Throughout his journey, Jacobs comes across as a generous and thoughtful (and, yes, slightly neurotic) participant observer, lacing his story with absurdly funny cultural commentary as well as nuanced insights into the impossible task of biblical literalism.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
7people
2009–2026years
43% recommend57% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Totally agree. If you like this style of memoir + deep subject dive, I also highly recommend anything by A.J. Jacobs - his "Year of Living Biblically", and "The Know-It-All" are great reads in the same vein.
- You might find this book a hoot. I did:
- AJ Jacobs writes really cool 'project' pieces: he dedicates himself to an idea and writes articles and books about it. I loved "A year of living biblically" and am hoping to read "Know it all" sometime soon.
- These things remind me of the book “My Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs. In our lives if we stopped to consult a list of all the platitudes we’ve ever come across one by one each time we did or experienced anything it would be similarly as absurd full of contradiction paralyzing.
- Seems to me like a "Year of Living Biblically" kind of endeavor -- doing something for the sake of being able to say you did it.
If you actually succeed in doing it, it shows an admirable degree of personal discipline. But what if, instead, you were pick the 10 or 15% of the works that really speak to you and build a list of 3 or 4 top notch secondary research books around each primary source book? I think you would come away with a much deeper understanding and would find it much more satisfying. Brilliant people have thought about and extended these ideas for centuries and if you just read the original documents you miss out on all that. I can tell you that I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering without ever having read anything by James Clerk Maxwell. Similarly I doubt you will get much -- apart from observing the spirit of discovery -- from reading Harvey's (yes you spelled his name wrong) Exercises on the Generation of Animals.
- There's a writer from Esquire who's basically made a living doing experiments like this. He's written things like The Year Of Living Biblically [1] (self-explanatory), The Know-It-All (he read all of Encyclopedia Britannica) [2], and other experiments.
There are a lot of others who have done similar things. Matt Cutts from Google does 30 day experiments. Karen X Cheng learned to dance in a year. There's something about contained experiments that are quite compelling.
I'm doing my own version of this, as a writer. I'm working on writing 1,000,000 words [3]. I'm doing this in 1,000 sets of 1,000. I'm currently at 240.
760 to go.
–
[1] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/
