By the Bible, to the letter

In his immortal “Pensées,” Blaise Pascal formulates his famous Wager Argument, reasoning that faith in God is a good bet because the possible benefits of belief are infinite and the potential losses, namely, some of the pleasantries of life, are finite. He counsels that anyone convinced by the argument should simply start to use the holy water, pray and, in general, make the movements of faith. In time and by the grace of God, true religious interiority would follow.

“The Year of Living Biblically” is a diary of a year spent trying to abide by the laws of the Bible, both Old and New Testament. A secular Jew and professed agnostic, A.J. Jacobs could stand as a test case of Pascalian religious psychology. After all, the senior writer at Esquire has no religious conviction and yet carefully patterns his actions on the Good Book. But there may be one telling difference between the author and the addressee of the Wager Argument. Whereas Pascal was speaking to the earnest individual on the fence between devotion to God and mammon, the endearingly honest Jacobs confesses that he took up the biblical life because he was looking for a follow-up to his “The Know-It-All,” a book about his experience of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.

There are, of course, preliminary questions that need to be addressed before the 38-year-old can take up his staff and head into the New York subway system. If you are going to take the Bible as your Baedeker, you need to decide to what degree are you going to take it literally.

“I will try to find the original intent of the Biblical rule or teaching and follow that to the letter,” Jacobs resolves. “If the passage is unquestionably figurative . . . then I won’t obey it literally. But if there’s any doubt . . . I will err on the side of the literal.”

After multiple readings, Jacobs calculates that from Genesis through Revelation, the Bible articulates some 800 rules.

Leviticus 19:19 commands, “Nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds.”

Deuteronomy 22:11 elaborates: One must not wear clothing that mixes both wool and linen. Jacobs looks up a local fiber tester by the name of Berkowitz. Mr. Berkowtiz puts Jacobs’ garments under the microscope and out goes a good deal of the author’s wardrobe.

As Jacobs observes, the Bible seems an odd pastiche of seemingly trivial rules and supreme moral guidelines. So far as our Moses from Esquire is concerned, fretting about mixed fibers seems to be on the trivial side of the ledger.

Berkowitz, who will return for frequent prayer sessions with Jacobs, wisely counsels, “This is the law that God gave us. We have to trust him.” As Jacobs interprets his new friend, it may be even more important to follow the inexplicable rules “because it shows you’re committed.”

Jacobs’ wife, Julia, and their son Jasper play a prominent part in this project. A doting father, Jacobs attempts to act on the advice, “He who spares the rod hates his son” (Proverbs 13:24). When Jasper misbehaves, his dad ends up using a Nerf bat instead of a rod or paddle.

“When a woman has discharge of blood . . . she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her will be unclean until the evening” (Leviticus 15:19). Being a bit germophobic, Jacobs can at least relate to this precept; although his wife finds his adherence to it insulting. When it is that time of the month, Jacobs’ revenge-seeking helpmate makes a point of sitting on -- and so polluting -- virtually every chair in their apartment.

There are many such moments of comic relief in this engagingly written chronicle, but this is also a tale of Jacobs’ attempt to avoid transgressions that you do not need a Bible to recognize as sins. Within a couple of months, Jacobs comes to understand that a biblical life is all about remembering yourself. To that end, he tapes a list of his most common breaches to the bathroom mirror: lying, vanity, gossip, coveting, anger.

Oddly enough, Jacobs does not attach himself to a synagogue or church. Like Martin Luther, he opts for a relationship with Scripture that is unmediated by any institution.

The spiritual loner does, however, make a field trip to Israel, where he visits with the one person of faith in his family, the black sheep and cultish Uncle Gil.

There are trips to see snake-handling Pentecostals and Jerry Falwell’s mega-church, and there is no condescension and a good deal of tenderness in some of these encounters. After long talks with creation-scientists, Jacobs regrets an article that Esquire published on them, “Greetings From Idiot America.” “I’d wager,” he concludes, “there’s no difference in the average IQ of creationists and evolutionists.”

Prayer is, of course, an important part of the program. There are some who would argue that it is no use praying to God when you do not believe in God, or worse yet, have nothing approaching a yearning for God. Throughout the book, Jacobs prays many times a day. Though he has his epiphanies and mystical moments, he is never converted from his agnostic state.

As a graduate student, my mentor, the late Philip Rieff, once responded to my writing ambitions by remarking, “Everyone is an author in search of a topic.” In other words, most writers are not pushed along by any pressing questions but rather from the need to be heard. Pre-convinced that Jacobs’ effort was of the I-need-to-write-something ilk, I came to this memoir prepared to despise it as both a kind of sacrilege and an expression of unadulterated ambition. But within a few pages, the sneer left my face.

While there are goofy sections that seem clearly intended to entertain, “The Year of Living Biblically” is a gracefully written book with a heart. In a world that tends to medicalize every peccadillo, Jacobs’ straightforward and systematic efforts at biblically guided, moral self-purification are often surprisingly edifying.

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Gordon Marino is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.