He didn’t want to stone adulterers. But that was part of the deal.
November 17, 2007 Humor, Fundamentalism No CommentsHe didn’t want to stone adulterers. But that was part of the deal. That’s what A.J. Jacobs was being paid for.
“The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment,” Jacobs writes in The Year of Living Biblically (Simon & Schuster, 2007), his account of an experiment in which the lifelong agnostic spent 12 months obeying the Old Testament as literally as possible — while living in an Upper West Side apartment and working for Esquire.
“Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn’t just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.
“The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, at the very least, I should try to stone. But how?”
At the time, Jacobs was in month two of his venture, still throbbing with a neophyte’s enthusiasm: “I want to smash idols,” he surprised himself by musing. Gathering a pocketful of tiny white pebbles in Central Park, he strolled until he met an irascible old man who mocked Jacobs’ walking stick. When this man — having been asked — declared himself an adulterer, Jacobs lobbed a pebble at his chest. It bounced off.
He had grown up in a resolutely secular Jewish home — sans bar mitzvah, sans Sabbath candles; he was even named after his still-living father, such an Ashkenazic rarity that an El Al security officer, eyeing the “Jr.” on his passport six months into the experiment, doubted that Jacobs was even Jewish at all. “I’m Jewish,” he writes, “in the same way that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.”
