Blogging the Bible

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David Plotz thought he knew what was in the Bible. Then, bored at a particularly tedious bat mitzvah one day, he grabbed a Bible from a rack on the pew and began to read. What he found there shocked him; a story in the middle of Genesis, about the rape of Dinah, murder, plundering of an entire village, and betrayal of family.

This was not a story Plotz had been taught in Hebrew School on Saturday mornings, or at his Christian high school. He wondered what else he was missing.

That's when David Plotz, editor of Slate.com , set out to read the Bible - every word of it. Plotz blogged his way through the Old Testament. What he found there, along with death and destruction, fratricide and smiting, was something Plotz really didn't expect; laughs.

Mary Hynes speaks with David Plotz about his series of Bible blogs, the inspiration for Plotz's Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, published by Harper.