Thou Shalt Find It Impossible to Live Like the Bible Tells You to

He 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."

All through school, even at a university "where you were more likely to study the semiotics of Wicca rituals than the Judeo-Christian tradition" and where the Bible was viewed "as a fusty, ancient book with the same truth quotient as The Faerie Queene," he'd been taught that the Bible inspired "many of humankind's greatest achievements: the civil rights movement, charitable giving, the abolition of slavery." And also, of course, that "it's been used to justify our worst: war, genocide and the subjugation of others."

By his late 30s, he'd long since decided "that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world. The potential for abuse too high."

Then he became a father. And he couldn't reconcile raising a child without religion without learning more about religion. Firsthand.

As an Esquire reporter, Jacobs was into total-immersion journalism. His previous book, The Know-It-All (Simon & Schuster, 2004), detailed a year spent reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica from A through Z. Now, eyeing his small son, he mused: "If my lack of religion is a flaw, I don't want to pass it on to him."

And lo.

After poring over various versions of the Old and New Testaments and consulting with numerous clergy and academics over myriad interpretations, it began: a year in which he prayed several times daily (although, at first, merely saying the word "God" made him break out in sweats). He blew a ram's horn monthly. He stopped saying the word "Thursday" because its name derives from that of a pagan god, Thor. He refrained from turning doorknobs on Saturdays and from touching his wife for seven days after her periods. He visited Samaritans in Israel and snake handlers in Tennessee. He grew a chest-length beard that had strangers calling him ZZ Top and Gandalf; and he limited his fruit consumption to cherries -- you know, because Leviticus 19:23-25 forbids eating fruit from trees less than five years old. Peach trees start bearing at only two: "Too dangerous," Jacobs notes. "Pear trees in four. Again, too risky. But cherry trees, those are slowpokes. They take at lease five to seven from planting to produce."