I’m not a huge audio book fan, but I often find myself driving between 6 and 8 on Saturday evenings. That might not mean much to you, but to me it means tyranny: every public radio station between New Haven and Brooklyn — at least the ones I’m aware of — play only “A Prairie Home Companion” during those hours. No offense to Garrison Keillor — who’s an icon, I know — but I turn away as soon as I hear the chimes heralding American Public Media. I need to listen to something on the way down, so occasionally I’ll download an audio book.
Recently I was entertained by David Plotz’s new book, “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.” Plotz is an editor for Slate and began reading and blogging the Old Testament, from alpha to omega, a few years ago.
Plotz also reads for the audio recording, and I’ve heard his voice so often on Slate’s Political Gabfest that he feels like an old friend. While the book was a pleasure, I’m fairly certain it was more fun reading as an ongoing blog than listening to as an entire book. Still, I learned more about what’s in the Bible than I knew there was to learn.
Most interesting, though, was a point Plotz keeps coming back to again and again. You run through a lot of different tribes in the Old Testament, tribes against whom the Israelites war and with whom they intermarry, but we don’t know much about them. It’s not clear what happened to them all, but Plotz’s point is that he thinks the Jews survived as a people and a religious group because they wrote a book. They wrote their traditions down, and Plotz writes about how moving it can be to practice ancient rituals and know the same rituals were performed in ancient times. That really struck me: survival through book writing.
