The Uncensored Bible

I won’t go into details about the book by John Kaltner, Steven L. McKenzie and Joel Kilpatrick, The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book (HarperOne, 2008), both in order to allow readers to get the full possible enjoyment of the book, and to keep my blog G-rated. The book could be described as a survey of current scholarship proposing interpretations of various passages involving sex, toilets, S&M;, beer-making, depression, and various other elements that many readers of the Bible (and a far greater number of people who revere the Bible but rarely if ever read it) would find surprising to find within its pages. In many cases, the proposed interpretations are found by the authors to be unpersuasive; nevertheless, the book takes discussions from scholarly journals and other academic sources and presents them for consideration in a manner that is not merely accessible but entertaining, full of innuendo, double entendre, puns, and outright comedy. And the focus is entirely on the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, which will make the book more acceptable to Christian readers who can cope with Old Testament sex but might find New Testament sex too much to bear.