IN 2006, David Plotz picked up a Torah from the pew-back during a long bat mitzvah service. “Like many lax but well-educated Jews (and Christians), I have long assumed I knew what was in the Bible,” he writes. Thumbing through, he landed randomly at Genesis, Chapter 34. “I was immediately engrossed—and horrified—by a story I didn’t know. If this story was strutting cheerfully through the heart of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned?”

Inspired by that enlightening run-in with Scripture, Plotz began “Blogging the Bible,” a series on Slate. “My goal is pretty simple,” he explained in the introduction. “I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based.” The series attracted thousands of readers of all religious stripes, and eventually became Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, released yesterday by Harper. Today, Plotz answers our burning questions about what it’s like to read your religion's holy book for the first time.

Patrol: Our culture is saturated in the Bible—its stories, imagery, ideas, etc. But like all religious books, the culturally-known part is like the tip of an iceberg; seeing the rest of it can completely change the way you think about the whole. Was that the case for you? What’s the biggest part of the Bible that most people know nothing about?

David Plotz: Very well put. That’s absolutely how I felt about it. Going in, I knew the Bible that I learned as a child in Hebrew School and from the popular culture, and that Bible is full of moral lessons, divine mercy, and heroic characters. I found the actual Bible vastly messier and more confusing and more challenging. The heroes are often not heroic at all, but con artists, murders, and liars. The God of the Hebrew Bible is erratic, vindictive, and not too merciful. And there are rarely clear moral lessons. I realized just how much work we and our ancestors have had to put in to making sense of the book.

The biggest part of the Bible that people know nothing about. Hmm. There are obviously vast swathes of the Hebrew Bible that are rarely read—many of the prophets, for example. The best part of the Bible that isn’t appreciated may be Leviticus. The great parts of Leviticus—notably Chapter 19—are as gorgeous and powerful as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or a Churchill speech. And the worst parts of Leviticus will make you shudder.

Patrol: The ways you describe God’s behavior make him feel a lot more Zeusian than I would guess most religious people are used to, as he might be if he were a character in a fantasy novel or a Homeric epic. (On God’s incessant land covenants with Abraham: “God is a kind of celestial Donald Trump: He can’t go a chapter without a new real-estate deal.”) What do you think we can learn from seeing God as a character in the story, someone whose motives we can analyze and question?

Plotz: There’s a risk in doing what I do, which is ascribing human motivations to God. Obviously the point about God is that He’s God, and it’s hubris or worse to claim to understand Him. That said, particularly in the early books, God does move and walk and act among us more like Zeus than like the God we are familiar with. And I think the authors of those early books clearly want us to relate to this God as a kind of supercharged human more than as an impossibly distant creator. That’s why He drops by Abraham’s tent, or walks in the Garden to find Adam and Eve. So I think it’s fair—not to mention more fun—to treat Him as a character.

Patrol: I’ve heard a lot of arguing in Christian circles about God's sense of humor—does he have one? If so, what’s it like? In some passages, he can be devastatingly sarcastic. Did you uncover any leads on just what God finds funny, or perhaps more importantly, what he doesn't?

Plotz: I think he finds it funny when we try to elevate ourselves to his level, when we think we are better than we are. Two great examples of this: when Miriam criticizes Moses and wants to be a prophet, and God gives her skin disease. That is a funny moment. And when God shows up and chews out Job, sarcastically, that’s incredibly funny.

Most of the funny parts of the Bible, though, are not God speaking. They involve humans: Funniest scene by far is Elijah mocking the prophets of Baal.

Patrol: You had different reactions to God in different stories, ranging from impressed to offended. How did it balance out—what was your “summary” view of God?

Plotz: This is a hard question to answer, because God varies so wildly from book to book. At times He appears to be utterly ruthless and cruel, as in Deuteronomy or Joshua. At other times, in Isaiah for example, He acts with sweetness and mercy. At other times He’s very wry and funny, as in Jonah. And at other times, He simply checks out, and doesn’t want to be involved. So I love that God of mercy and humor, and am deeply, deeply troubled by the God of Joshua. And I don’t exactly know how it all adds up.

Patrol: You seemed particularly affected by one of the stories I found most shocking and unpalatable as a child—God asking Abraham to give Isaac as a sacrifice. I don’t even have kids yet, and I still think I might turn my back on God before I would do something like that. What do you think? Did you come up with any explanation for why Abraham didn’t react the same way we would have?

Plotz: As a father, I found that story nearly unbearable to read, and nearly incomprehensible. What kind of father would do such a thing? But again and again, the Bible reminds us that our love for God must be greater than our love for family. That’s not a choice I could ever dare to make, which I suppose is why I am not a very observant person. (Even more disturbing in some ways, is the story in Judges, in which Jephthah does sacrifice his child. At least Isaac gets saved!)

Patrol: What do you think is the most thought-provoking passage in the Bible?

Plotz: I’ll pick three. In Genesis 18, Abraham and God argue about the destruction of Sodom, with Abraham persuading God that He mustn’t destroy the city if there are innocents living there. That argument is extraordinary, because it puts us on the side of Abraham, against God, which is unnerving.

All of Job is a provocation, a fascinating debate over the question of whether God is just.

And I am amazed by the moment when David and Bathsheba’s son dies, and David immediately stops crying and praying and sits down for a meal.

Patrol: You say Ecclesiastes is a “godless philosophy,” or a blueprint for living well in a world without God. I think in the Slate version, if I recall, you said it was the perfect book for atheists. It’s my favorite book of the Bible, so does that make me a bad Christian?

Plotz: Yes!

Patrol: How, if at all, did reading the whole Bible change your view of the religious groups that follow it?

Plotz: Christians have the New Testament, which softens and explains and cleans up a lot of the messiness of the Hebrew Bible. Jews don't have Jesus to fall back on. The result, I think, is our tradition of argument. We have a holy book that is full of immoral heroes and an erratic, vindictive God. How do we grapple with that? By arguing: thousands of years of Talmudical, rabbinical, and other debates. So reading helped explain for me why Jews are so argumentative. And it also helped me understand why Christianity is so comforting: The New Testament brings order and peace and love to the chaotic Hebrew Bible.