Plotz does in this book exactly what the title says: he read the whole Bible (something that most Christians and Jews report never having done) and records his thoughts about each chapter. With caveats: The Bible he reads is the Jewish Bible, which ends at 2 Chronicles. He says he’ll leave the New Testament to a non-Jew, but I would love to see a sequel or a revised edition that includes his impressions of the NT.

Plotz finds and is comforted by the moments of beauty in the Bible, but he is horrified at God’s punishment of the people who are most faithful to him, the encouraged murder of innocents, and the surprise endings to the most famous Bible stories–where most of the stories end and the indiscriminate killing begins. He seems to gloss over some of it–there are some horrid verses in Deuteronomy 22 about punishing rape victims that he does not address–but he touches on some of the big stories, like the rapes of Dinah and Tamar, and the mauling of the children by the bears.

This is a great book for Christians and Jews who do not understand how people can be offended by the very substance of their religions, or how one could possibly leave the faith if they “truly knew” God. The way most people read the Bible is not the way they would read any other book; they open the Bible to a particular chapter or to a random page and read until they feel better. When one reads it as they would read anything else, from cover to cover, one learns a lot, and is often disappointed and even “brokenhearted,” as Plotz is, at the brutality and fickleness of God and his people.

Tags: agnosticism, Christianity, Daniel Plotz, Judaism