BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. David Plotz, deputy editor of Slate, is Jewish, and considers himself a relatively religious person, and yet, he has never read the Bible. A self-described Bible ignoramus, Plotz set out to create a blog that would track his first
read of the Bible, chapter by chapter. David, welcome to On the Media.

DAVID PLOTZ: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Who are you to read the Bible and offer up insights?

DAVID PLOTZ: Well, I think that we're all supposed to do it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

DAVID PLOTZ: Have you read the Bible?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: No.

DAVID PLOTZ: There you go.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Parts of it, only parts of it.

DAVID PLOTZ: Well, that was my feeling. That was the situation I found myself in. I had read parts of it. You know, I knew Ten Commandments, twelve apostles, twelve tribes, forty days and forty nights. There was rain. There was the burning bush. That was about all I knew. And I thought, if this is the thing on which my religion is based and on which 4,000 years of law and scholarship and learning and education are founded, I think it would behoove me to find out what's actually in it, and to do it kind of unmediated by the rabbis or the priests, and just to see what parts they've left out or what parts are too tricky or what parts don't seem to mean what I was told they meant back when I went to Hebrew school 25 years ago.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you start your blog entry on Genesis, when God is creating the earth.

DAVID PLOTZ: That is the beginning.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

DAVID PLOTZ: That's the beginning. I knew that much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] And you suggest that God is a tinkerer. And just to give the listeners a flavor, would you read a draft?

DAVID PLOTZ: Sure. "Creation seems so out of order. If God made light on the first day, what was giving the light, since the sun doesn't appear until the fourth day? And God tackles the major geological and astronomical features during the first two days - light, sky, water, earth. But day three is a curious interruption plant creation - that is followed by a return to massive universe-shaping projects on day four, with the sun, moon and stars. The plant venture is a tangent, like putting a refrigerator into a house before you've put the roof on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So what's your goal here?

DAVID PLOTZ: First of all, just to see what happens to me, sort of theologically and intellectually, as I do it, but also to offer a kind of an everyman's reaction. To me, what's been surprising about the whole experience is that the parts that, in fact, that you aren't taught or they discourage you from reading, you know, all the weird incest moments or the kind of genocide committed by the Israelites against various people they came across, are so much worse than you could imagine. But at the same time, the good parts, these laws of Moses that are, you know, kind of too complicated to get into in Sunday school, laws about how you treat the poor, how you treat the blind and the deaf, laws about what justice is, what a judge must do they're just beautiful and profound.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: One thing that you observed from the start is that God seems included to prefer clever behavior to good behavior.

DAVID PLOTZ: That's right. And again and again throughout the Bible you see that the man who takes action or the woman who takes action occasionally it's a woman even if it's vicious, even if it's immoral, unethical but it leads to kind of progress, that God appreciates that, that God shows favor on those who are the smartest. And we see that Jacob is the paramount example, but Joseph that's true of, and Moses it's true of, and Abraham. I mean, all these, the kind of older Biblical figures, aren't really the most admirable men in the world. And because the Old Testament shows so many stories in which there's so much immorality, in which the Jews themselves behave so badly, it's required to try to find moral rules in this kind of stew of immorality and viciousness. And the result, I think, is a religion which works really hard intellectually. And a lot of Jews have actually objected to my reading the Bible, as I read it, because they say, Jews are not supposed to read it this way, because they're supposed to read it with a teacher, because it's so intellectually demanding and because it's so liable to confuse you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You had some people objecting to the fact that you were reading this book without a teacher. You were, however, blogging it. Was there something particularly attractive about using the blog format?

DAVID PLOTZ: I think blogging parallels the way people really read the Bible. And in churches or in synagogues, you have a reading for that week, and so I was trying to mimic that. And the blog format turns out to be just a perfect match for it. You know, I can write 800 to 1,500 words, and that really can capture sort of what a good day's reading of the Bible is. And it gives readers a way to connect with me immediately, so that I - you know, I checked before I came in here. I have 3,288 unread messages about this column. You know, I pose a lot of questions for which I need answers from my readers, and so like , you know, I get hundreds of answers. I get incredibly interesting commentaries. I get, you know, corrections. I get denunciations. I have various people who write me two or three times a day. It's an incredibly useful and vital way to stay in touch with readers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I have to say I [LAUGHING] laughed out loud when you talked about the massive circumcisions that went on before they entered the Promised Land.

DAVID PLOTZ: Yeah, the "Hill of the Foreskins." [LAUGHTER] Yeah, there are a million, the million Israelites who crossed over into the Promised Land, and for some reason - I posit it's the lack of bagels and lox [BROOKE LAUGHS] - they did not perform circumcisions while they were in the wilderness wandering for 40 years. And so they all get circumcised in this gigantic ceremony, and I guess they leave the evidence in this one spot, which I plan never to visit when I'm in Israel.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] You imagine taking your kids there. No, honey, don't pick that up! [LAUGHS]

DAVID PLOTZ: Right. [LAUGHS] Right. Don't put that in your mouth!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Now, have you found that your reading of the Bible this way has influenced or changed your understanding of your religion?

DAVID PLOTZ: I'm somebody who kind of believes in God but in a very vague way. And what's happened is that I've sort of found myself in this kind of conversation with God all the time, where not just when I'm reading it when you read it, you sort of say, why are you doing this, God, or good move, God, but I start to think about, well, why would God do something like that? And I don't think it's made me a greater believer in the existence of God than I was before, but I think I'm having a kind of a conversation about the sort of moral and theological issues raised in the Bible in a way that I just haven't for however long I've been alive 36 years.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: David, thank you very much.

DAVID PLOTZ: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Plotz is the deputy editor of Slate, and author of the book, The Genius Factory. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]