Harlot by the Side of the Road

Rating:
Summary: Bible enthusiasts should also embrace the darker tales
Review: A true Bible scholar embraces the dark side as well as the good, and Kirsch dishes up the murkier details of the evil deeds people have done to one another throughout the ages. While fundamentalists often object to hearing anything less than squeaky clean coming from the Good Book, the Bible stories themselves are cautionary tales. The Bible is like an instruction manual for life, and all good manuals contain sections on troubleshooting. The Harlot By the Side of the Road has a few flaws, such as the author tends to hammer the same ideas over and over, but it is still an interesting read. I was particularly interested in the differences between the King James version and the New American Bible, and how we have lost the poetry in the new translations. It's as if we are "dumbing down" the Bible to make it more accesible, and at the same time glossing over some of the juicier tales. I feel that Kirsch's book should be placed on the shelf along side other Bible study books such as the History of God, and of course, the Holy Bible.

Rating:
Summary: A well written commentary
Review: I enjoyed this book. For two days, between doing things I HAD to do, I devoured this book. It is put together rather well. Each story is a chapter, and then there is a chapter following with the commentary on the Bible, the story and the reason the leaders of various religions sought to supress the story. Also what is interesting is that Kirsch places the actual bible verses in text boxes within the story, so that the reader can compare the two.

As I said, I liked the whole book, but the part I read extremely closely was the last chapter on who wrote the bible. I know that most fundamentalists probably won't read this book, but I think that it is an educational tool that everyone should read. Kirsch points out that for thousands of years, men have censored the stories in the bible and changed them to suit not only themselves and their society, but what they deem appropriate as a political message or moral ideal.

I would imagine that if everyone read the Bible as closely as Kirsch studied it for this book, they too would find the ambiguities or inconsistencies that are prevalent throughout.

One thing I did find kind of annoying is that in almost every chapter of commentary, there were instances of Kirsch referencing forward or back to other chapters in his book. That typically doesn't annoy me much, but I did seem to notice it in this book. But the footnotes and explanations are good, so don't let that one peeve of mine destroy the experience.

Read this book, you will be glad you did.

Rating:
Summary: Refreshingly Honest
Review: If every self-professed Christian or Jew actually read his or her family Bible from cover to cover, Kirsch's book would be superfluous. ...but the laity is too often biblically illiterate, depending on the clergy and other teachers to tell them about the Bible, rather than reading it themselves.

If every deacon, minister, pastor, priest and rabbi actually preached from the whole of Scripture, Kirsch's book would be unnecessary. ...but the clergy have severely censored the Bible, presenting to their flocks only those small portions that support their petty, parochial theologies and arguments.

Kirsch's work breaks through the self-imposed ignorance of the laity and the self-serving censorship of the clergy to expose a biblical landscape richer and far more diverse than most would imagine. By sharing stories that have often been obscured, Kirsch demonstrates to us that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus refuses to be bound by middle class morality. By revealing a bit of the sex and violence in the Bible, Kirsch shows us how God loves, nurtures and works through even the most public of scoundrels.

In an age when religion has too often been hi-jacked by fundamentalists, who demand their particular version of purity, Kirsch shows us how God works in the real, messy world with real, messy people. For those of us who are less than perfect, Kirsch's book and the "forbidden tales of the Bible" can only be received as good news.

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Summary: You mean THAT'S in the BIBLE?
Review: In a society obsessed with religion, it is hard to imagine that, for most people, the Bible is virtually an unknown book. True, many American households have one gathering dust on the bookshelf, yet if the spine is cracked at all, it's generally for the purpose of finding out great-grandma's maiden name. The fact that the Bible is seldom read in its entirety in our day makes Jonathan Kirsch's new book, THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD (Ballantine Books, 1997; 378 pages), that much more of value, for in pointing out some of its "forbidden tales," the author might just send his reader back to the source.

In HARLOT, Kirsch has picked out seven tales from the Hebrew Scriptures which set center-stage humankind in all its sinful glory. The accounts include rape, murder, genocide, and wholesale slaughter, all drawn from Holy Writ, and include such famous names as Lot, Moses, and even King David. Readers used to getting their Bible stories from Sunday services or Grolier adaptations will no doubt be shocked by what the Word of God includes.

Yet Kirsch is not writing with the now popular Bible-bashing attitude of, say, a Lloyd Graham (DECEPTIONS AND MYTHS OF THE BIBLE). While he does accept modern-day theories as to the authorship of the biblical canon, his purpose is not to poke fun; rather, he extracts from each of the tales he recounts something of value, whether it be historical or practical. This makes the book good reading for both believers and unbelievers seeking to get a handle on some of the cultural mysteries of biblical times.

Kirsch's format is instrumental in doing this. For each of the seven tales, he recounts the narrative in novelistic style, and provides detailed examinations of the various factors involved. This is particularly effective in his chapter entitled "Tamar and Judah," where he explains the concept of brother-in-law marriage, the status of women in patriarchal times, and the true "sin" of Onan (it's not masturbation). Extensive documentation from ancient and modern times is considered, though Kirsch never strays far from the biblical source.

It's an approach that should please both scholars and casual readers alike.

Rating:
Summary: The Bible, R rated
Review: Jonathan Kirsch hits the nail right on the head when he speaks of the general populaces ignorance of what is actually in the Bible. Most people have some kind of fairy tale idea that the Bible is full of wonderful, pretty stories that always conclude with a happy ending. God is always just and fair, and his messages are easy to understand. People that have this opinion, and I know a lot of them, have no idea what they are missing. As the famous line from Kerouac reads, "that Bi-ble has some hot stuff". Man, does it ever.

Instead of magical fairy tales, the Bible is one of the most brutal and violent books you are ever going to read. It's full of genocide, divinely inspired murder and human sacrifice, and some really complex sexual situations. To deny this is really to deny the true Bible, which is an amazing work of literature. That is not to say that these examples of extreme actions are without meaning; that is far from the case. Unlike modern literature which often uses murder and sex for no reason other than better book sales, the Bible delivers some deep moral pronouncements concerning a whole array of human situations. Using the horrible consequences of certain human action, the Bible can teach us a lot of harsh but important lessons.

Kirsch delivers this message brilliantly. Using a very interesting way of getting his point across, Kirsch writes some good little novellas of the various Bible stories he proposes, helping the lay reader get a clearer grasp on what actually happens in the story. These fictionalizations are bolstered by the requisite Bible passages. After the novellas, Kirsch presents some great commentary on the various stories, bring in all kinds of varying opinions and interpretations. It really is fascinating, as some of the stories are so complex and unclear that no one in the centuries of Bible study can get a clear grasp on their true meaning. We are left with a whole host of intriguing but disparate interpretations that make for some good reading nonetheless.

Kirsch does not go the route of cheapening the stories either. I was worried that this book would be some kind of sensational attempt to sell some books by showing that the Bible was really dirty and violent. That is not true at all. Kirsch does not dwell on the wild aspects of the story, he just means to explain what they mean to us today. Additional chapters deliver some good historical backgrounds concerning who actually wrote the Biblical stories, and the motivation behind many of the.

A great example of modern Biblical analysis.

Rating:
Summary: The Bible, R rated
Review: Jonathan Kirsch hits the nail right on the head when he speaks of the general populaces ignorance of what is actually in the Bible. Most people have some kind of fairy tale idea that the Bible is full of wonderful, pretty stories that always conclude with a happy ending. God is always just and fair, and his messages are easy to understand. People that have this opinion, and I know a lot of them, have no idea what they are missing. As the famous line from Kerouac reads, "that Bi-ble has some hot stuff". Man, does it ever.

Instead of magical fairy tales, the Bible is one of the most brutal and violent books you are ever going to read. It's full of genocide, divinely inspired murder and human sacrifice, and some really complex sexual situations. To deny this is really to deny the true Bible, which is an amazing work of literature. That is not to say that these examples of extreme actions are without meaning; that is far from the case. Unlike modern literature which often uses murder and sex for no reason other than better book sales, the Bible delivers some deep moral pronouncements concerning a whole array of human situations. Using the horrible consequences of certain human action, the Bible can teach us a lot of harsh but important lessons.

Kirsch delivers this message brilliantly. Using a very interesting way of getting his point across, Kirsch writes some good little novellas of the various Bible stories he proposes, helping the lay reader get a clearer grasp on what actually happens in the story. These fictionalizations are bolstered by the requisite Bible passages. After the novellas, Kirsch presents some great commentary on the various stories, bring in all kinds of varying opinions and interpretations. It really is fascinating, as some of the stories are so complex and unclear that no one in the centuries of Bible study can get a clear grasp on their true meaning. We are left with a whole host of intriguing but disparate interpretations that make for some good reading nonetheless.

Kirsch does not go the route of cheapening the stories either. I was worried that this book would be some kind of sensational attempt to sell some books by showing that the Bible was really dirty and violent. That is not true at all. Kirsch does not dwell on the wild aspects of the story, he just means to explain what they mean to us today. Additional chapters deliver some good historical backgrounds concerning who actually wrote the Biblical stories, and the motivation behind many of the.

A great example of modern Biblical analysis.

Rating:
Summary: Radical
Review: Kirsch goes out of his way to make secular religion look bad in this dose of hard corps revisionism. Still, this is well worth reading if you ever pondered some of the more troublesome stories of the Old Testament. How come ma' preacher never told me this stuff?! I'd have come to church EVERY sunday!

Rating:
Summary: Sound, accessible and tons of fun
Review: Lot's daughters drug and rape their own father. Jacob's sons sacrilegiously slaughter Hamor's recently-circumcised clan. YHWH's night attack on Moses is thwarted by a perplexing smearing of blood. A Levite abandons his concubine to gang rape and uses her death to foment genocide. All of these tales are in the Bible. Yet their content is peculiar, distasteful and difficult to reconcile with modern preferences for a God who is undemanding and unthreatening.

"The Harlot by the Side of the Road" is no mere unmasking of the sensational parts of the bible. Author Jonathan Kirsch retells each tale in a modern novelistic style, interspersed with the biblical accounts themselves, allowing us to read the original and its retelling side by side. Kirsch then uses these tales as springboards to explore ancient social mores as well as the development of the Bible itself. Kirsch helps the reader to recognize and set aside the strong moral and xenophobic tone of post-Exilic editors, allowing a peek into the looser social practices that held sway prior to Israel's return from captivity.

The book's subtitle, "Forbidden Tales of the Bible" is a bit of an overstatement. While it's hard to find a home for these tales in a typical liturgical setting, the tales are hardly forbidden. What ought to be forbidden (at least taken with a grain of salt) are the head-spinning interpretations of some serious biblical scholars. Kirsch skims the conclusions of a number of scholarly schools--including Freudian, rabbinical, radical feminist and traditional--before finally settling on something more reasonable. Tamar's seduction of father-in-law (and patriarch) Judah, for instance, is difficult only if you insist that biblical morality never changed. But learning that the anti-prostitution Mosaic moral code postdated Judah's time by hundreds of years helps us to see Judah's behavior as less of an aberration.

"The Harlot by the Side of the Road" provides no illicit thrills. But it may scandalize those who reject the idea that the Bible went through hundreds of years of telling and editing. Truth be told, Kirsch is on sound scholarly ground. The ideas in this book are old news in any middle-of-the-road biblical history course, including those taught in seminaries.

For those who want a window into the violent and alien world of ancient Israel, and who are open to the idea that the Bible is a book with human fingerprints all over it, this book is strongly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening journey through faith and doubt.
Review: Respectful yet challenging, "The Harlot by the Side of the Road" is a a riviting read and a crash course in the history of the Hewbrew Bible. Kirsh tackles head-on the Bible stories most scholars sweep under the rug, and instead singles them out for spotlight attention. He examines how and why such incongruous, even irreligious seeming stories could be part of the bible by analyzing what message they were meant to convey, and in what cultural context they would have originally been understood. Fascinating stuff! I've given copies to a number of friends, some religious, some not, and all have agreed it's not only enlightening, but a page-turner as well!

Rating:
Summary: Very interesting subject, writing style is hard to read...
Review: This is a book I thoroughly enjoyed. I bought it because it seemed a little more "entertaining" than most books that take a hard look at the Bible, but I was caught off guard by the degree of insight contained within. Not only does Kirsch artfully present six of the "forbidden" stories in such a way that they come alive, but he also offers a good deal of background to help you understand the cultural significance of the stories, as well as some insight into what they say about the whole Bible.

The stories are not going to be unfamiliar to anyone who has really read the Old Testament. It's not like these stories are hidden and can only be found "between the lines." They are just stories that seem so preposterous, so dissonent with the message you hear in Sunday School or from the pulpit that rather than look at them, we ignore them. Kirsch makes the argument that not only is that denial not necessary, it's even harmful to our understanding! These stories underscore the humanity of the characters and the writers of the Bible, making it far more rich and interesting than the few sterile verses that constitute the average person's understanding of the bible.

The stories he relates in literary form include the tale of Lot's daughters, the rape of Jacob's daughter Dinah, the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, how Moses' wife Zipporah saved him from being killed by God, the gang-rape and murder of a Levite's concubine, and the rape of David's daughter Tamar. Coupled with these principal stories is a smattering of other tidbits, including the story of Jacob wrestling with God (and defeating Him!) and the lusty excesses of King David and his sons. You won't believe what you read, and you won't want to put it down!

While I highly recommend this book, I only rate it four stars because there seems to be *some* unwillingness to admit the degree to which the stories he relates are radically sexist, and their interpretations as well as their implications stem from a horribily sexist, misguided culture, one which may contribute to the perpetuation of such nonsense to this day. Kirsch is a little too forgiving for my blood, and thus only 4 stars. Otherwise, I have no complaints and will recommend this book frequently.