Saturday, August 8, 2009
We're back!
Just when you thought this blog had been permanently abandoned, we have a new post! The first three chapters of Exodus are up at sensiblemadness.com. Direct link: The Book of Exodus
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Genesis is complete!
So here it is kids...the first book of the Bible is finished. I've been trying to figure out a good name for this experiment, and have gone back and forth on several of them. For now, the website this little Bible translation is on is called Sensible Madness, and the Bible is simply called "The Bible: Dumbed Down Version". Someday maybe I'll come up with something with a little more pizazz. Anyway, you can see the entirety of Genesis at sensiblemadness.com
Monday, June 29, 2009
Genesis 42-43
Sorry for the long delay between posts. I've been working on a website to replace this blog, and I've sort of neglected adding any actual content. Anyway, the website is at sensiblemadness.com. It's a work in progress, but it's coming along. I'm not a big web design guru or anything, so it's kind of ugly so far, but it's no more than twice as ugly as blogger, and it serves my purposes, so it'll do for now.
Anyway, on to the next two chapters of Genesis. This same content is available on the aforementioned site, by the way.
Genesis 42
As it turned out, the famine that was proving so profitable to Joseph was making things less than comfortable for his father Jacob and his brothers. So, Jacob sent ten of his sons down to Egypt. He kept Benjamin back at home though, because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. So, apparently it’s okay if his other sons get murdered along the way or sold into slavery or any of the other nasty things that happened to people back then, but Benjamin needed to be protected.
Anyway, the ten brothers showed up in Egypt, and went to Joseph to buy some grain. Joseph of course recognized his brothers immediately, but thanks to the gobs of makeup Egyptian men wore in those days, none of the brothers recognized Joseph. Joseph, remembering his dreams predicting his brothers would bow down before him, decided to do his damndest to make sure those dreams came true. So, he accused his brothers of being spies and accused them of coming just so they could see how bad off Egypt was, presumably so their vast armies could invade or something of that nature. The brothers pleaded with Joseph, swearing that they were all honest men, and brothers in the same family. Unfortunately, they didn’t know when to keep their big mouths shut, and happened to mention that there was another brother back home. Joseph, seeing an opportunity, demanded that they send one person to bring the other brother to Egypt. To give them time to think of a good response to his demand without any unnecessary distractions, he threw them all in prison.
After three days, Joseph came to them and told them to take some corn back to their family, but bring back their youngest brother. In order to ensure their return, he demanded that one of them stay behind in prison. The other brothers, not realizing Joseph could understand everything they said because he had cleverly decided to speak only through an interpreter, began talking loudly amongst themselves. They decided that this whole mess they were in was all because they had sold their youngest brother into slavery. Reuben, eager to show everyone else up, reminded them that he had been the one to tell them not to just kill the kid, so really, he had saved them all from eternal damnation. So he definitely shouldn’t have to be the one to stay in prison.
Joseph, hearing that his brothers actually felt slightly guilty, turned away and cried like a little girl. He then turned back, took Simeon, and tied him up and threw him in the dungeon. He then ordered them to fill their sacks with corn and then, when they weren’t looking, he slipped their money back in their wallets and sent them on their way. On the way back home, the money was discovered, and the brothers got scared, assuming God was playing one of his infamous practical jokes on them, which likely meant one of them was going to be a pillar of salt soon.
At any rate, the brothers returned to Jacob, and told him they had to take Benjamin back with them. Jacob, having already lost his sons Joseph and Simeon, refused to let them take Benjamin too. Reuben, jumping a little further ahead than one would think prudent in the initial stages of a negotiation, offered to let Jacob kill his two sons if he didn’t return with Simeon and Benjamin, but Jacob still refused, claiming that if anything were to happen to little Benjamin, he (Jacob) would die from sorrow.
Genesis 43
So Jacob’s family ate all of the corn which his sons had brought back from Egypt.
After they had eaten the food, Jacob asked his sons to go back to Egypt to get more. Judah reminded Jacob that the guy that had given them corn had told them not to come back without their youngest brother. Hearing this, Jacob became irate, and asked his sons why they were stupid enough to have told this guy that they had another brother. The brothers protested that the guy had seemed trustworthy enough, and asked them a bunch of questions about their family, which they answered honestly, and how were they supposed to know the dude was going to ask them to bring their other brother over?
Judah volunteered to be responsible for Benjamin, swearing that if anything should happen to Benjamin, it would be totally his (Judah’s) fault. This was a step down from Reuben’s offer to let Jacob kill his two sons, but nevertheless Jacob relented because he was starving.
So, Jacob hatched a plan by which the brothers would return to Egypt with twice the money they needed to buy more corn. He was worried that the money had been left in his sons’ bags by accident, and the Egyptian would be pissed that they had left without paying for their corn. He also gave them some honey, spices, myrrh, nuts, and almonds, which they apparently had plenty of despite being in a major famine, to give to the Egyptian grain merchant as a bribe.
So Jacob’s sons went down to Egypt with their gifts. Joseph, seeing that they had brought Benjamin with them, ordered a feast prepared. Joseph had his servants bring his brothers into his house. Intimidated, the brothers began trying to explain what happened with the money, and trying to give it back before they were beheaded for stealing from Egypt. Joseph’s steward, however, told them it was no big deal, and gave them water and washed their feet and fed their asses. Also, he gave some food to their donkeys.
At this point, Joseph came in and asked the brothers a bunch of questions about their father. Seeing nothing unusual in this, they answered the questions honestly. Joseph then looked at Benjamin, and "his bowels did yearn upon his brother". This, we can only assume, means that Joseph was tempted to hold his brother down and fart on him, just as he had done when they were kids.
Fighting back this temptation, Joseph went off to a corner and once again cried like a little girl. After he had composed himself, he went back and ordered food for his brothers, and ordered food in a separate room for the Egyptian members of his house. Because the Egyptians were a bunch of racists who refused to eat with those dirty Hebrews. So as we can see, Egyptian-Hebrew relations were less than cordial at the time, despite the fact that Pharaoh had allowed his entire kingdom to be run by a Hebrew.
Anyway, Joseph gave Benjamin five times more food than anyone else, and everyone had a grand old time.
Anyway, on to the next two chapters of Genesis. This same content is available on the aforementioned site, by the way.
Genesis 42
As it turned out, the famine that was proving so profitable to Joseph was making things less than comfortable for his father Jacob and his brothers. So, Jacob sent ten of his sons down to Egypt. He kept Benjamin back at home though, because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. So, apparently it’s okay if his other sons get murdered along the way or sold into slavery or any of the other nasty things that happened to people back then, but Benjamin needed to be protected.
Anyway, the ten brothers showed up in Egypt, and went to Joseph to buy some grain. Joseph of course recognized his brothers immediately, but thanks to the gobs of makeup Egyptian men wore in those days, none of the brothers recognized Joseph. Joseph, remembering his dreams predicting his brothers would bow down before him, decided to do his damndest to make sure those dreams came true. So, he accused his brothers of being spies and accused them of coming just so they could see how bad off Egypt was, presumably so their vast armies could invade or something of that nature. The brothers pleaded with Joseph, swearing that they were all honest men, and brothers in the same family. Unfortunately, they didn’t know when to keep their big mouths shut, and happened to mention that there was another brother back home. Joseph, seeing an opportunity, demanded that they send one person to bring the other brother to Egypt. To give them time to think of a good response to his demand without any unnecessary distractions, he threw them all in prison.
After three days, Joseph came to them and told them to take some corn back to their family, but bring back their youngest brother. In order to ensure their return, he demanded that one of them stay behind in prison. The other brothers, not realizing Joseph could understand everything they said because he had cleverly decided to speak only through an interpreter, began talking loudly amongst themselves. They decided that this whole mess they were in was all because they had sold their youngest brother into slavery. Reuben, eager to show everyone else up, reminded them that he had been the one to tell them not to just kill the kid, so really, he had saved them all from eternal damnation. So he definitely shouldn’t have to be the one to stay in prison.
Joseph, hearing that his brothers actually felt slightly guilty, turned away and cried like a little girl. He then turned back, took Simeon, and tied him up and threw him in the dungeon. He then ordered them to fill their sacks with corn and then, when they weren’t looking, he slipped their money back in their wallets and sent them on their way. On the way back home, the money was discovered, and the brothers got scared, assuming God was playing one of his infamous practical jokes on them, which likely meant one of them was going to be a pillar of salt soon.
At any rate, the brothers returned to Jacob, and told him they had to take Benjamin back with them. Jacob, having already lost his sons Joseph and Simeon, refused to let them take Benjamin too. Reuben, jumping a little further ahead than one would think prudent in the initial stages of a negotiation, offered to let Jacob kill his two sons if he didn’t return with Simeon and Benjamin, but Jacob still refused, claiming that if anything were to happen to little Benjamin, he (Jacob) would die from sorrow.
Genesis 43
So Jacob’s family ate all of the corn which his sons had brought back from Egypt.
After they had eaten the food, Jacob asked his sons to go back to Egypt to get more. Judah reminded Jacob that the guy that had given them corn had told them not to come back without their youngest brother. Hearing this, Jacob became irate, and asked his sons why they were stupid enough to have told this guy that they had another brother. The brothers protested that the guy had seemed trustworthy enough, and asked them a bunch of questions about their family, which they answered honestly, and how were they supposed to know the dude was going to ask them to bring their other brother over?
Judah volunteered to be responsible for Benjamin, swearing that if anything should happen to Benjamin, it would be totally his (Judah’s) fault. This was a step down from Reuben’s offer to let Jacob kill his two sons, but nevertheless Jacob relented because he was starving.
So, Jacob hatched a plan by which the brothers would return to Egypt with twice the money they needed to buy more corn. He was worried that the money had been left in his sons’ bags by accident, and the Egyptian would be pissed that they had left without paying for their corn. He also gave them some honey, spices, myrrh, nuts, and almonds, which they apparently had plenty of despite being in a major famine, to give to the Egyptian grain merchant as a bribe.
So Jacob’s sons went down to Egypt with their gifts. Joseph, seeing that they had brought Benjamin with them, ordered a feast prepared. Joseph had his servants bring his brothers into his house. Intimidated, the brothers began trying to explain what happened with the money, and trying to give it back before they were beheaded for stealing from Egypt. Joseph’s steward, however, told them it was no big deal, and gave them water and washed their feet and fed their asses. Also, he gave some food to their donkeys.
At this point, Joseph came in and asked the brothers a bunch of questions about their father. Seeing nothing unusual in this, they answered the questions honestly. Joseph then looked at Benjamin, and "his bowels did yearn upon his brother". This, we can only assume, means that Joseph was tempted to hold his brother down and fart on him, just as he had done when they were kids.
Fighting back this temptation, Joseph went off to a corner and once again cried like a little girl. After he had composed himself, he went back and ordered food for his brothers, and ordered food in a separate room for the Egyptian members of his house. Because the Egyptians were a bunch of racists who refused to eat with those dirty Hebrews. So as we can see, Egyptian-Hebrew relations were less than cordial at the time, despite the fact that Pharaoh had allowed his entire kingdom to be run by a Hebrew.
Anyway, Joseph gave Benjamin five times more food than anyone else, and everyone had a grand old time.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Genesis 41
Genesis 41
Two years after freeing his butler and beheading his baker, Pharaoh ate some bad enchiladas one night and had a couple of really wacky dreams. In the first, he saw seven fat cows walk out of a river, followed by seven lean and sickly cows. Suddenly, like a scene out of a bad horror movie, the seven sickly skinny cows devoured the seven fat cows.
Pharaoh woke up screaming, but soon fell back to sleep. In his second dream, he saw seven healthy ears of corn grow on one stalk. Then, seven nasty thin and wind-blasted ears showed up on the stalk right next to it. As if the cow cannibalism wasn’t bad enough, the seven thin ears of corn suddenly devoured the seven healthy ears. Completely horrified, Pharaoh woke up shaking and vowing to behead his cook at the first opportunity for making those damn enchiladas. Oh, he also sent for all the magicians in Egypt, in hopes that one of them could tell him what the hell those dreams meant, other than that he needed to adjust his medication.
His butler, who happened to be butling in the general area at the time, heard Pharaoh complain about his dreams, and suddenly remembered that jailer that had interpreted his dreams oh so long ago. So Pharaoh sent for Joseph, who was brought from the dungeon, shaved, given a new clean set of formal rags, and sent to interpret some dreams. Pharaoh asked if Joseph could interpret dreams, and Joseph, trying not to sound too arrogant, said it was really God who interpreted the dreams, but Joseph could talk to God, so that’s how it worked. Because in Egypt, interpreting dreams was way more impressive than talking directly to God.
Anyway, Pharaoh wasted 8 verses repeating the dreams to Joseph, and Joseph made the astounding revelation that both dreams were about the same thing. Joseph then went on to say the dreams meant Egypt would soon be attacked by a wave of zombie cannibal cows, and the only way to stop them would be to breed a race of ravenous corn which would eat the cows, but would also eat all of their food crops, but hey it beats being eaten by zombie cannibal cows. Not really.
Seriously though, Joseph told Pharaoh the dreams meant Egypt would have seven years of great harvests, followed by seven years of famine. He also claimed that since there were two dreams about the same event, that meant God had already decided this is how it was going to be, so don’t bother begging him to change it, and by the way it was going to happen Real Soon Now. Joseph said that Egypt should find a discreet and wise man to rule over all of Egypt and appoint henchmen to take 20% of the harvest from all the farmers in the land and store it in preparation for the famine to come.
Pharaoh, noticing that Joseph kept pointing to himself when he referred to a "discreet and wise man", and also noticing Joseph had tattooed "discreet" on his right hand and "wise" on his left, decided to give Joseph the job. He gave Joseph his ring and gave him a nice suit and some jewelry and made him ruler over the entire country. He also gave Joseph a ridiculously long and impossible to pronounce name (Zaphnathpaaneah) and gave him a wife. So, apparently dream interpretation was pretty good work if you could get it.
During the seven years of plenty, Joseph and his goons went out and took 20% of the grain produced in Egypt and stored it away, as he had said they would do. Then, when the seven years of famine came along, Joseph set up shop and sold the grain back to the people from which he had taken it. In this way, nobody starved, and Joseph made a tidy profit. Also, during this time his wife popped out two younguns named Manasseh and Ephraim.
Two years after freeing his butler and beheading his baker, Pharaoh ate some bad enchiladas one night and had a couple of really wacky dreams. In the first, he saw seven fat cows walk out of a river, followed by seven lean and sickly cows. Suddenly, like a scene out of a bad horror movie, the seven sickly skinny cows devoured the seven fat cows.
Pharaoh woke up screaming, but soon fell back to sleep. In his second dream, he saw seven healthy ears of corn grow on one stalk. Then, seven nasty thin and wind-blasted ears showed up on the stalk right next to it. As if the cow cannibalism wasn’t bad enough, the seven thin ears of corn suddenly devoured the seven healthy ears. Completely horrified, Pharaoh woke up shaking and vowing to behead his cook at the first opportunity for making those damn enchiladas. Oh, he also sent for all the magicians in Egypt, in hopes that one of them could tell him what the hell those dreams meant, other than that he needed to adjust his medication.
His butler, who happened to be butling in the general area at the time, heard Pharaoh complain about his dreams, and suddenly remembered that jailer that had interpreted his dreams oh so long ago. So Pharaoh sent for Joseph, who was brought from the dungeon, shaved, given a new clean set of formal rags, and sent to interpret some dreams. Pharaoh asked if Joseph could interpret dreams, and Joseph, trying not to sound too arrogant, said it was really God who interpreted the dreams, but Joseph could talk to God, so that’s how it worked. Because in Egypt, interpreting dreams was way more impressive than talking directly to God.
Anyway, Pharaoh wasted 8 verses repeating the dreams to Joseph, and Joseph made the astounding revelation that both dreams were about the same thing. Joseph then went on to say the dreams meant Egypt would soon be attacked by a wave of zombie cannibal cows, and the only way to stop them would be to breed a race of ravenous corn which would eat the cows, but would also eat all of their food crops, but hey it beats being eaten by zombie cannibal cows. Not really.
Seriously though, Joseph told Pharaoh the dreams meant Egypt would have seven years of great harvests, followed by seven years of famine. He also claimed that since there were two dreams about the same event, that meant God had already decided this is how it was going to be, so don’t bother begging him to change it, and by the way it was going to happen Real Soon Now. Joseph said that Egypt should find a discreet and wise man to rule over all of Egypt and appoint henchmen to take 20% of the harvest from all the farmers in the land and store it in preparation for the famine to come.
Pharaoh, noticing that Joseph kept pointing to himself when he referred to a "discreet and wise man", and also noticing Joseph had tattooed "discreet" on his right hand and "wise" on his left, decided to give Joseph the job. He gave Joseph his ring and gave him a nice suit and some jewelry and made him ruler over the entire country. He also gave Joseph a ridiculously long and impossible to pronounce name (Zaphnathpaaneah) and gave him a wife. So, apparently dream interpretation was pretty good work if you could get it.
During the seven years of plenty, Joseph and his goons went out and took 20% of the grain produced in Egypt and stored it away, as he had said they would do. Then, when the seven years of famine came along, Joseph set up shop and sold the grain back to the people from which he had taken it. In this way, nobody starved, and Joseph made a tidy profit. Also, during this time his wife popped out two younguns named Manasseh and Ephraim.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Genesis 39-40
Sorry about the lack of posts recently...life keeps getting in the way.
I'm also looking to move this thing to a dedicated host at some point in the relatively near future, since blogspot kind of sucks for this sort of thing.
Anyway, here are two more chapters of Genesis.
Genesis 39
To recap, Joseph, after annoying his brothers with his constant tattling and predictions they would all bow down before him, got sold to some nomads called the Ishmeelites, who in turn sold him to Potiphar, who put him to work.
As it turned out, Joseph was really good at whatever it was that Potiphar was making him do, and so he was given a promotion to House Overseer, which not only came with a nicer room, but also a 30% reduction in beatings. Joseph likewise excelled at his new position, and made Potiphar even more obscenely rich than he already was. Potiphar eventually came to trust Joseph so much that he gave Joseph control over every aspect of his household, to the point where all he (Potiphar) had to do was sit around getting fed grapes all day while his wealth grew at the hands of Joseph.
Unfortunately for Joseph, Potiphar had a bit of a hussy for a wife. One day, Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, but he refused, saying that he wouldn’t want to repay Potiphar’s kindness by banging his wife. Potiphar’s wife, not accustomed to being refused, and also not aware of how desperate she must have looked, tried to get Joseph to sleep with her on a daily basis. Joseph did his best to avoid her, but one day he really had to pee so he went into the house and ran right into her. Since there was no one else around, she started to really lay it on thick. Joseph was really in no mood for her shenanigans, and besides his back teeth were floating, so he turned and tried to run while she was still holding his shirt. His shirt came off in her hands, and he ran off.
Potiphar’s wife, seeing that Joseph had left his shirt, called out to the other men in the house and told them that Joseph had tried to rape her, but luckily she managed to scream loud enough to scare him so badly that he forgot to take his shirt with him as he ran off. Potiphar, wisely deciding to trust his primary nooky provider over the man whom he had entrusted with all of his affairs for years, threw Joseph in prison. Once in prison, Joseph repeated his old act and kissed up to the prison keeper to the point where he was put in charge of all the other prisoners. As Potiphar before him had done, the prison keeper let Joseph do whatever he wanted, and Joseph made the place into a model prison, which in those days likely meant that he developed a highly efficient beating and starvation program.
Genesis 40
It came to pass that Pharaoh’s butler and baker offended him in some way, possibly by forgetting to grovel sufficiently when bringing him his wine and cake, and so he threw them in prison. As luck would have it, they landed in Joseph’s prison, and he was put in charge of them. After a year in prison, they both had a dream on the same night. Since apparently not having someone tell you what your dream meant was a big problem in Egypt, they were both very depressed that no dream interpreters had offended Pharaoh recently. Joseph saw that they were upset, even though they hadn't even received their daily beatings yet, and asked them what their problem was. After hearing of this whole dream interpretation thing, Joseph offered to interpret the dreams for them.
The butler had dreamed of a vine with three branches that sprouted grapes. In this dream, the butler took the grapes, made grape juice, and gave Pharaoh a cup of it. Joseph stated that this meant that the butler would get his old job back in three days. Then, Joseph gave the butler a business card and asked him to put a good word in with Pharaoh, since he was getting kind of tired of hanging out in a prison all day every day.
The baker, seeing that the butler’s dream meant he was getting out of that shithole of a prison, asked Joseph to interpret his dream too. The baker’s dream was of him holding three baskets of bread on his head. Birds came and ate the bread from the top basket. Joseph told him this meant that Pharaoh would have him hanged in three days, and birds would eat his flesh. For some reason, the baker was not thrilled by this interpretation.
Fortunately for the butler, and unfortunately for the baker, both of Joseph’s predictions came true. Unfortunately for Joseph, the butler later accidentally used the business card Joseph had given him to write down his phone number for this cute girl at the Pyramid Club, and so never got around to mentioning Joseph to Pharaoh.
I'm also looking to move this thing to a dedicated host at some point in the relatively near future, since blogspot kind of sucks for this sort of thing.
Anyway, here are two more chapters of Genesis.
Genesis 39
To recap, Joseph, after annoying his brothers with his constant tattling and predictions they would all bow down before him, got sold to some nomads called the Ishmeelites, who in turn sold him to Potiphar, who put him to work.
As it turned out, Joseph was really good at whatever it was that Potiphar was making him do, and so he was given a promotion to House Overseer, which not only came with a nicer room, but also a 30% reduction in beatings. Joseph likewise excelled at his new position, and made Potiphar even more obscenely rich than he already was. Potiphar eventually came to trust Joseph so much that he gave Joseph control over every aspect of his household, to the point where all he (Potiphar) had to do was sit around getting fed grapes all day while his wealth grew at the hands of Joseph.
Unfortunately for Joseph, Potiphar had a bit of a hussy for a wife. One day, Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, but he refused, saying that he wouldn’t want to repay Potiphar’s kindness by banging his wife. Potiphar’s wife, not accustomed to being refused, and also not aware of how desperate she must have looked, tried to get Joseph to sleep with her on a daily basis. Joseph did his best to avoid her, but one day he really had to pee so he went into the house and ran right into her. Since there was no one else around, she started to really lay it on thick. Joseph was really in no mood for her shenanigans, and besides his back teeth were floating, so he turned and tried to run while she was still holding his shirt. His shirt came off in her hands, and he ran off.
Potiphar’s wife, seeing that Joseph had left his shirt, called out to the other men in the house and told them that Joseph had tried to rape her, but luckily she managed to scream loud enough to scare him so badly that he forgot to take his shirt with him as he ran off. Potiphar, wisely deciding to trust his primary nooky provider over the man whom he had entrusted with all of his affairs for years, threw Joseph in prison. Once in prison, Joseph repeated his old act and kissed up to the prison keeper to the point where he was put in charge of all the other prisoners. As Potiphar before him had done, the prison keeper let Joseph do whatever he wanted, and Joseph made the place into a model prison, which in those days likely meant that he developed a highly efficient beating and starvation program.
Genesis 40
It came to pass that Pharaoh’s butler and baker offended him in some way, possibly by forgetting to grovel sufficiently when bringing him his wine and cake, and so he threw them in prison. As luck would have it, they landed in Joseph’s prison, and he was put in charge of them. After a year in prison, they both had a dream on the same night. Since apparently not having someone tell you what your dream meant was a big problem in Egypt, they were both very depressed that no dream interpreters had offended Pharaoh recently. Joseph saw that they were upset, even though they hadn't even received their daily beatings yet, and asked them what their problem was. After hearing of this whole dream interpretation thing, Joseph offered to interpret the dreams for them.
The butler had dreamed of a vine with three branches that sprouted grapes. In this dream, the butler took the grapes, made grape juice, and gave Pharaoh a cup of it. Joseph stated that this meant that the butler would get his old job back in three days. Then, Joseph gave the butler a business card and asked him to put a good word in with Pharaoh, since he was getting kind of tired of hanging out in a prison all day every day.
The baker, seeing that the butler’s dream meant he was getting out of that shithole of a prison, asked Joseph to interpret his dream too. The baker’s dream was of him holding three baskets of bread on his head. Birds came and ate the bread from the top basket. Joseph told him this meant that Pharaoh would have him hanged in three days, and birds would eat his flesh. For some reason, the baker was not thrilled by this interpretation.
Fortunately for the butler, and unfortunately for the baker, both of Joseph’s predictions came true. Unfortunately for Joseph, the butler later accidentally used the business card Joseph had given him to write down his phone number for this cute girl at the Pyramid Club, and so never got around to mentioning Joseph to Pharaoh.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Genesis 34-38
So I've found a less preachy source for the Bible at biblegateway.com. Bible.com was getting really annoying with their popup ads imploring me to save children or whatever, so I switched. It's all the same public domain Bible anyway, but I'm sure you were all interested in this entirely pointless aside.
Anyway, without further ado, here's another five chapters of the Bible:
Genesis 34
It came to pass that Dinah, one of Jacob’s daughters by the ugly sister, decided to go exploring in the land. Shechem, who was the son of Hamor and the possessor of one of the more unfortunate names in the Bible, saw her and, seeing she was one fine piece of ass, boned her brains out. Evidently, she was a great lay, because he immediately fell in love with her and asked his father to arrange for her to marry him.
Unfortunately for Shechem, in those days sleeping with a woman and then asking to marry her later was frowned upon. So, when Hamor went to Jacob to ask for Dinah’s hand on behalf of his son, Jacob was not terribly pleased. Hamor, sensing that the whole “sex before marriage” thing was going to be a real sticking point in these negotiations, promised Jacob anything he wanted in exchange for an agreement by which their families would be able to swap women as it suited them. Jacob, sensing an opportunity, said that he would only agree to such an arrangement if all of the men in Hamor’s clan were circumcised. Strangely enough, this request did not go over too well. However, since Shechem was developing a serious case of blue balls, he eventually agreed to the mass circumcision just so he could get back into Dinah’s pants.
So all of the men in Hamor’s clan got circumcised. While they were all still in bed suffering from the pain of the procedure, Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi decided to go and take some revenge on Hamor, and proceeded to go into the city and kill all the men. They then went on to burn and loot the city and steal all the livestock of Hamor’s people. They also enslaved all the women.
For some reason, Jacob was somewhat taken aback by the fact that his sons had slaughtered every man in the village and taken every woman into slavery. In response to Jacob’s anger, his sons simply stated that if these people had not wanted to be slaughtered and/or enslaved, they shouldn’t have let one of their own treat their sister like a whore. Thus was the Biblical principal of “an entire fucking civilization for an eye” established.
Genesis 35
So God told Jacob to go to Bethel, because God was getting tired of visiting Jacob in that shithole he was living in at the time, and build yet another altar. Jacob, in the same state of panic the rest of us get into when the landlord calls up and asks if he can stop by, started running around ordering his people to clean the place up. He also ordered them to put away all those damn idols, as he felt God might be offended by all the little stone trinkets his "chosen people" were worshipping instead of him. Oh, and if they could take a damn bath and change their underwear for once, because the smell was even starting to scare off the flies, that would be great. And so Jacob’s people gave him all of their idols and earrings, because God hates pierced ears, and he buried them under a tree by the newly destroyed village of Shechem.
Jacob and his enormous clan embarked on their journey. The people in the towns they passed by were all too scared to attempt to screw with them, and so the journey was fairly peaceful. The Bible claims the reason these people were fearful was because of the fear of God, but it’s likely at least as attributable to the fact that Jacob’s clan slaughtered every man and enslaved every woman in the previous town they had hung out in.
Anyway, eventually Jacob came to Luz in the land of Canaan and built an altar. At that place, Rebekah’s nurse Deborah died and was buried.
At around this same time, God appeared to Jacob and told him his name was now going to be Israel, apparently unaware that the vampire/angel earlier had already told Jacob this exact same thing. God then went on to make the same promise of land to Jacob as he had previously made to Abraham and Isaac. Suitably impressed, Jacob built a pillar of stone and another altar.
So it came to pass that Rachel was pregnant, and went into labor. The labor was incredibly hard, and Rachel ended up dying in childbirth. As her last wish, Rachel asked that her son be named Benoni. Fortunately for the kid, Jacob wasn’t about to be told what to do, even by his recently deceased wife, and named the kid Benjamin instead. Rachel was buried on the side of the road to Bethlehem, and the rest of the clan went on their way.
After they had made camp, Reuben (the sandwich maker) slept with one of Jacob’s mistresses. Unfortunately, the mistress was something of a screamer and Israel (aka Jacob) heard the whole thing. At any rate, Israel now had 12 sons. This number, of course, would have absolutely no significance to anything at all, and is just mentioned here because the author of the Bible had some extra space to fill.
Jacob went to visit Isaac his father. Isaac lived to be 180, yet again ignoring God’s chosen lifespan of 120 years, and died. Jacob and Esau buried him, and the chapter ended.
Genesis 36
This is another one of those insomnia-curing chapters. Esau took all of his family and cattle and whatnot and left the land where Jacob was staying, because the two of them together had too many cows for the land to support.
Also Esau begat Eliphaz, who begat Teman, Omar, Zepho, Gatam, and Kenaz. Esau also begat some other sons, and they begat a whole bunch of other people, all of whose names look like what you would get if a herd of cats walked over your keyboard. For 43 verses, people have kids and those kids have other kids, and the translator passes out from sheer boredom and the chapter ends.
Genesis 37
Jacob and his 12 sons lived in Canaan. One of his sons, Joseph, was 17 and was something of a tattletale. Pissed off that their brother kept telling their father every time one of them did anything wrong, his brothers began to hate him. After Jacob gave Joseph a coat of many colors, his brothers hated him even more, despite the fact that with that many colors Joseph was going to have a hell of a time finding any clothes to match it, and he was just in for one fashion faux pas after another.
Not content to have his brothers merely hate him, Joseph started telling them about these dreams he was having. These dreams involved sheaves of wheat and the moon and stars and whatnot, but were all really just a thinly veiled prediction that Joseph’s entire family was going to end up bowing down before him, so maybe they should stop being so mean to him now. These dreams turned the run of the mill hatred of his brothers into murderous rage.
Later, Joseph’s brothers went off to Shechem to tend to their father’s flocks there. Jacob asked Joseph to go out and find out what they were doing wrong, and tattle on them. When Joseph got to Shechem, his brothers were nowhere to be found, but some random dude told him they had all gone to Dothan. So Joseph started for Dothan, probably already rehearsing how he was going to tell Jacob that his brothers weren’t where they were supposed to be.
Joseph’s brothers saw him coming from a long way off, and began to conspire against him. Lacking creativity, they decided to just kill him and throw him into a pit and tell their father that some nasty animal with big pointy teeth had killed him. Reuben, being the squeamish sort, said they shouldn’t actually kill Joseph, because he hated blood and really, wouldn’t it be better if they just threw him in a pit and left him for dead.
The other brothers agreed to Reuben’s request, took Joseph’s coat, threw him into a dry pit, and sat down for lunch. While there, they noticed some nomads on camels who were headed for Egypt with various trade goods. Seeing an opportunity to make some money, the brothers sold Joseph to the nomads for 20 pieces of silver.
Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was no longer there, and began to panic. Thinking fast, he took Joseph’s coat and dipped it in goat’s blood and brought it to Jacob. Jacob saw it, and with no further evidence jumped to the conclusion that Joseph had obviously been torn to pieces by some beast. Jacob went into deep mourning for his “dead” son, and pouted for many days. Meanwhile, the nomads sold Joseph to Potiphar, who was the captain of the guard for Pharaoh in Egypt.
Genesis 38
Judah, another of Jacob’s many sons, went searching for a wife, and found Shuah. It came to pass that they did bone, and she had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. When Er was all grown up, Judah found him a wife by the name of Tamar. Unfortunately, Er was evil enough to really piss off God, and God killed him.
Taken aback by the bloodlust of God, Judah ordered his second son, Onan, to go sleep with Tamar, and their kids would be Er’s kids, because Tamar had been Er’s wife first. Because that totally makes sense.
Anyway, Onan wasn’t a fan of this arrangement, and instead of impregnating Tamar, he pulled out at the last second and spilled his seed on the ground. God was so incensed that someone would dare waste sperm that he killed Onan too. So, Judah told Tamar to go live with her father until his third son, Shelah, was grown up. However, figuring Tamar was some sort of black widow, Judah made the decision not to let Shelah sleep with her no matter how old he got.
Eventually Tamar noticed that Shelah had grown up, and Judah was not making any move to give him to her, so she decided to dress up like a prostitute, cover her face, and wait for Judah on the side of the road, as she had heard that he was going to be travelling that road to shear his sheep in the near future. When Judah saw her, he asked if she was in the market for a little bouncy bouncy. Tamar asked Judah what he had to pay her in exchange, and he said he was a little light on cash at the moment, but he would totally come back with a goat after they were done. Tamar agreed, but only if Judah would leave his signet, bracelets, and staff with her as a promise to return with the sheep. Judah agreed, and proceeded to nail Tamar, impregnating her in the process.
After the deed was done, Judah left, and Tamar ran off, changed clothes, and went back to her father’s house. Judah sent his friend to go find the hooker he had banged and give her the goat he had promised. However, his friend couldn’t find her, since she had run off. He asked around, but no one could remember there being any streetwalkers hanging around the place, and so he returned to Judah with the goat.
About three months later, someone told Judah that Tamar was the whore he had slept with, and furthermore she was pregnant. Judah, being morally opposed to abortion, decided to have Tamar burned instead. And so Tamar was brought to him. When she got there, she showed Judah his signet, bracelets, and staff, and told him that she was pregnant by the man who owned these things. Seeing that he was boned, Judah acknowledged that he was the father, and apologized for not giving her Shelah when he should have.
So it came to pass that Tamar had twins. During the birthing process, one of the twins stuck his hand out first, and the midwife tied a red string around his hand so that they would know he was the firstborn. After the string was tied, though, that twin brought his hand back in and the other was delivered first, followed by the one with the string on his hand. Because of this, the one without the string was called Pharez, and the other was called Zarah. Because that’s evidently what those names mean.
Anyway, without further ado, here's another five chapters of the Bible:
Genesis 34
It came to pass that Dinah, one of Jacob’s daughters by the ugly sister, decided to go exploring in the land. Shechem, who was the son of Hamor and the possessor of one of the more unfortunate names in the Bible, saw her and, seeing she was one fine piece of ass, boned her brains out. Evidently, she was a great lay, because he immediately fell in love with her and asked his father to arrange for her to marry him.
Unfortunately for Shechem, in those days sleeping with a woman and then asking to marry her later was frowned upon. So, when Hamor went to Jacob to ask for Dinah’s hand on behalf of his son, Jacob was not terribly pleased. Hamor, sensing that the whole “sex before marriage” thing was going to be a real sticking point in these negotiations, promised Jacob anything he wanted in exchange for an agreement by which their families would be able to swap women as it suited them. Jacob, sensing an opportunity, said that he would only agree to such an arrangement if all of the men in Hamor’s clan were circumcised. Strangely enough, this request did not go over too well. However, since Shechem was developing a serious case of blue balls, he eventually agreed to the mass circumcision just so he could get back into Dinah’s pants.
So all of the men in Hamor’s clan got circumcised. While they were all still in bed suffering from the pain of the procedure, Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi decided to go and take some revenge on Hamor, and proceeded to go into the city and kill all the men. They then went on to burn and loot the city and steal all the livestock of Hamor’s people. They also enslaved all the women.
For some reason, Jacob was somewhat taken aback by the fact that his sons had slaughtered every man in the village and taken every woman into slavery. In response to Jacob’s anger, his sons simply stated that if these people had not wanted to be slaughtered and/or enslaved, they shouldn’t have let one of their own treat their sister like a whore. Thus was the Biblical principal of “an entire fucking civilization for an eye” established.
Genesis 35
So God told Jacob to go to Bethel, because God was getting tired of visiting Jacob in that shithole he was living in at the time, and build yet another altar. Jacob, in the same state of panic the rest of us get into when the landlord calls up and asks if he can stop by, started running around ordering his people to clean the place up. He also ordered them to put away all those damn idols, as he felt God might be offended by all the little stone trinkets his "chosen people" were worshipping instead of him. Oh, and if they could take a damn bath and change their underwear for once, because the smell was even starting to scare off the flies, that would be great. And so Jacob’s people gave him all of their idols and earrings, because God hates pierced ears, and he buried them under a tree by the newly destroyed village of Shechem.
Jacob and his enormous clan embarked on their journey. The people in the towns they passed by were all too scared to attempt to screw with them, and so the journey was fairly peaceful. The Bible claims the reason these people were fearful was because of the fear of God, but it’s likely at least as attributable to the fact that Jacob’s clan slaughtered every man and enslaved every woman in the previous town they had hung out in.
Anyway, eventually Jacob came to Luz in the land of Canaan and built an altar. At that place, Rebekah’s nurse Deborah died and was buried.
At around this same time, God appeared to Jacob and told him his name was now going to be Israel, apparently unaware that the vampire/angel earlier had already told Jacob this exact same thing. God then went on to make the same promise of land to Jacob as he had previously made to Abraham and Isaac. Suitably impressed, Jacob built a pillar of stone and another altar.
So it came to pass that Rachel was pregnant, and went into labor. The labor was incredibly hard, and Rachel ended up dying in childbirth. As her last wish, Rachel asked that her son be named Benoni. Fortunately for the kid, Jacob wasn’t about to be told what to do, even by his recently deceased wife, and named the kid Benjamin instead. Rachel was buried on the side of the road to Bethlehem, and the rest of the clan went on their way.
After they had made camp, Reuben (the sandwich maker) slept with one of Jacob’s mistresses. Unfortunately, the mistress was something of a screamer and Israel (aka Jacob) heard the whole thing. At any rate, Israel now had 12 sons. This number, of course, would have absolutely no significance to anything at all, and is just mentioned here because the author of the Bible had some extra space to fill.
Jacob went to visit Isaac his father. Isaac lived to be 180, yet again ignoring God’s chosen lifespan of 120 years, and died. Jacob and Esau buried him, and the chapter ended.
Genesis 36
This is another one of those insomnia-curing chapters. Esau took all of his family and cattle and whatnot and left the land where Jacob was staying, because the two of them together had too many cows for the land to support.
Also Esau begat Eliphaz, who begat Teman, Omar, Zepho, Gatam, and Kenaz. Esau also begat some other sons, and they begat a whole bunch of other people, all of whose names look like what you would get if a herd of cats walked over your keyboard. For 43 verses, people have kids and those kids have other kids, and the translator passes out from sheer boredom and the chapter ends.
Genesis 37
Jacob and his 12 sons lived in Canaan. One of his sons, Joseph, was 17 and was something of a tattletale. Pissed off that their brother kept telling their father every time one of them did anything wrong, his brothers began to hate him. After Jacob gave Joseph a coat of many colors, his brothers hated him even more, despite the fact that with that many colors Joseph was going to have a hell of a time finding any clothes to match it, and he was just in for one fashion faux pas after another.
Not content to have his brothers merely hate him, Joseph started telling them about these dreams he was having. These dreams involved sheaves of wheat and the moon and stars and whatnot, but were all really just a thinly veiled prediction that Joseph’s entire family was going to end up bowing down before him, so maybe they should stop being so mean to him now. These dreams turned the run of the mill hatred of his brothers into murderous rage.
Later, Joseph’s brothers went off to Shechem to tend to their father’s flocks there. Jacob asked Joseph to go out and find out what they were doing wrong, and tattle on them. When Joseph got to Shechem, his brothers were nowhere to be found, but some random dude told him they had all gone to Dothan. So Joseph started for Dothan, probably already rehearsing how he was going to tell Jacob that his brothers weren’t where they were supposed to be.
Joseph’s brothers saw him coming from a long way off, and began to conspire against him. Lacking creativity, they decided to just kill him and throw him into a pit and tell their father that some nasty animal with big pointy teeth had killed him. Reuben, being the squeamish sort, said they shouldn’t actually kill Joseph, because he hated blood and really, wouldn’t it be better if they just threw him in a pit and left him for dead.
The other brothers agreed to Reuben’s request, took Joseph’s coat, threw him into a dry pit, and sat down for lunch. While there, they noticed some nomads on camels who were headed for Egypt with various trade goods. Seeing an opportunity to make some money, the brothers sold Joseph to the nomads for 20 pieces of silver.
Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was no longer there, and began to panic. Thinking fast, he took Joseph’s coat and dipped it in goat’s blood and brought it to Jacob. Jacob saw it, and with no further evidence jumped to the conclusion that Joseph had obviously been torn to pieces by some beast. Jacob went into deep mourning for his “dead” son, and pouted for many days. Meanwhile, the nomads sold Joseph to Potiphar, who was the captain of the guard for Pharaoh in Egypt.
Genesis 38
Judah, another of Jacob’s many sons, went searching for a wife, and found Shuah. It came to pass that they did bone, and she had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. When Er was all grown up, Judah found him a wife by the name of Tamar. Unfortunately, Er was evil enough to really piss off God, and God killed him.
Taken aback by the bloodlust of God, Judah ordered his second son, Onan, to go sleep with Tamar, and their kids would be Er’s kids, because Tamar had been Er’s wife first. Because that totally makes sense.
Anyway, Onan wasn’t a fan of this arrangement, and instead of impregnating Tamar, he pulled out at the last second and spilled his seed on the ground. God was so incensed that someone would dare waste sperm that he killed Onan too. So, Judah told Tamar to go live with her father until his third son, Shelah, was grown up. However, figuring Tamar was some sort of black widow, Judah made the decision not to let Shelah sleep with her no matter how old he got.
Eventually Tamar noticed that Shelah had grown up, and Judah was not making any move to give him to her, so she decided to dress up like a prostitute, cover her face, and wait for Judah on the side of the road, as she had heard that he was going to be travelling that road to shear his sheep in the near future. When Judah saw her, he asked if she was in the market for a little bouncy bouncy. Tamar asked Judah what he had to pay her in exchange, and he said he was a little light on cash at the moment, but he would totally come back with a goat after they were done. Tamar agreed, but only if Judah would leave his signet, bracelets, and staff with her as a promise to return with the sheep. Judah agreed, and proceeded to nail Tamar, impregnating her in the process.
After the deed was done, Judah left, and Tamar ran off, changed clothes, and went back to her father’s house. Judah sent his friend to go find the hooker he had banged and give her the goat he had promised. However, his friend couldn’t find her, since she had run off. He asked around, but no one could remember there being any streetwalkers hanging around the place, and so he returned to Judah with the goat.
About three months later, someone told Judah that Tamar was the whore he had slept with, and furthermore she was pregnant. Judah, being morally opposed to abortion, decided to have Tamar burned instead. And so Tamar was brought to him. When she got there, she showed Judah his signet, bracelets, and staff, and told him that she was pregnant by the man who owned these things. Seeing that he was boned, Judah acknowledged that he was the father, and apologized for not giving her Shelah when he should have.
So it came to pass that Tamar had twins. During the birthing process, one of the twins stuck his hand out first, and the midwife tied a red string around his hand so that they would know he was the firstborn. After the string was tied, though, that twin brought his hand back in and the other was delivered first, followed by the one with the string on his hand. Because of this, the one without the string was called Pharez, and the other was called Zarah. Because that’s evidently what those names mean.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Genesis 32-33
This past week was finals week, so I haven't had a bunch of time to write anything not school-related. Since I don't attend a Bible School, this means the translation has suffered some. However, now summer is here, so with any luck I could actually get back to work on this thing.
I did manage to crank out two chapters. I had hoped to do more before posting, but I'm averaging almost 2 full hits a day on this thing, and I can't disappoint my fan. So, here they are.
Genesis 32
Jacob started to head back to his homeland, but at the last minute realized that his brother Esau was probably still trying to kill him, so maybe he should take a step back and figure out a plan first. So, he sent some messengers out to tell Esau that his baby brother Jacob was back, and he brought lots of animals and slaves just in case there’s a need for some bribery.
The messengers came back to Jacob saying Esau was so excited that his brother was back that he was coming to greet them with 400 of his closest and most heavily armed friends. Jacob, not wanting to lose all his stuff, split his entire party into two groups, so that if Esau decided to attack one, the other would have time to escape. Meanwhile, Jacob tried to lay a guilt trip on God, mentioning that God had promised him his seed would be a great nation, and that was going to be difficult to pull off if his brother slaughtered his entire family. So if God didn’t want to find himself on the wrong end of a heavenly lawsuit, he’d better get to saving Jacob’s bacon pretty damn quick.
Deciding that splitting into two camps was not enough, the next day Jacob sent several servants to meet up with Esau and offer him bribes of animals and slaves. That night, not having a lot of faith in his bribery attempt, Jacob sent his two wives and eleven sons across a river so that they wouldn’t be slaughtered. Meanwhile, Jacob suddenly decided his best course of action at this point would be to get involved in a wrestling match with some unknown stranger.
Jacob continued to wrestle the man until he (Jacob) had pinned him. The man begged to be let go because it was almost daybreak. From this we can surmise that Jacob was most likely wrestling a vampire. Jacob refused to let go until the vampire had screamed "Uncle". Um, I mean, until he had agreed to give Jacob a blessing. Same basic idea.
So this vampire, unable to get out of Jacob’s headlock, agreed to bless Jacob in order to avoid being burned to death by the rising Sun. Since a major theme of the Bible so far is to change someone’s name whenever anything significant happens the vampire changes Jacob’s name to Israel. Also, because the "Jacobite-Palestinian Conflict" would sound silly. Anyway, because during the wrestling match the vampire messed up Jacob’s inner thigh (kinky!), the children of Israel aren’t allowed to eat that part of any animal anymore.
Genesis 33
Despite all of Jacob’s efforts to avoid it, Esau and his 400 men eventually caught up with him. Jacob took Leah and her children and put them in front of Rachel and her children, so that the ugly sister would be more likely to be killed first. A true gentleman, that Jacob.
Jacob went and bowed down before Esau, who immediately embraced him and began crying like a little girl. It turns out that despite Jacob’s tomfoolery, Esau had managed to make a pretty good living for himself in the dot-com craze, and wasn’t interested in exacting revenge anymore. Jacob insisted that Esau take his many bribes anyway, and so Esau got a little bit richer thanks to the guilty conscience of his brother.
Jacob then pauses here for a brief public service announcement about the importance of proper animal care. He says that you must not overdrive your flock if it includes baby cows or sheep or whatnot, because they’ll die. Thanks for the tip.
So with the usual “if you need anything, just call” spiel, Esau left Jacob to his own devices. Jacob began wandering again and came upon a land which he called Succoth, presumably because living there succothed. Later, he wandered some more and eventually bought some real estate and built an altar on it, as was his custom.
I did manage to crank out two chapters. I had hoped to do more before posting, but I'm averaging almost 2 full hits a day on this thing, and I can't disappoint my fan. So, here they are.
Genesis 32
Jacob started to head back to his homeland, but at the last minute realized that his brother Esau was probably still trying to kill him, so maybe he should take a step back and figure out a plan first. So, he sent some messengers out to tell Esau that his baby brother Jacob was back, and he brought lots of animals and slaves just in case there’s a need for some bribery.
The messengers came back to Jacob saying Esau was so excited that his brother was back that he was coming to greet them with 400 of his closest and most heavily armed friends. Jacob, not wanting to lose all his stuff, split his entire party into two groups, so that if Esau decided to attack one, the other would have time to escape. Meanwhile, Jacob tried to lay a guilt trip on God, mentioning that God had promised him his seed would be a great nation, and that was going to be difficult to pull off if his brother slaughtered his entire family. So if God didn’t want to find himself on the wrong end of a heavenly lawsuit, he’d better get to saving Jacob’s bacon pretty damn quick.
Deciding that splitting into two camps was not enough, the next day Jacob sent several servants to meet up with Esau and offer him bribes of animals and slaves. That night, not having a lot of faith in his bribery attempt, Jacob sent his two wives and eleven sons across a river so that they wouldn’t be slaughtered. Meanwhile, Jacob suddenly decided his best course of action at this point would be to get involved in a wrestling match with some unknown stranger.
Jacob continued to wrestle the man until he (Jacob) had pinned him. The man begged to be let go because it was almost daybreak. From this we can surmise that Jacob was most likely wrestling a vampire. Jacob refused to let go until the vampire had screamed "Uncle". Um, I mean, until he had agreed to give Jacob a blessing. Same basic idea.
So this vampire, unable to get out of Jacob’s headlock, agreed to bless Jacob in order to avoid being burned to death by the rising Sun. Since a major theme of the Bible so far is to change someone’s name whenever anything significant happens the vampire changes Jacob’s name to Israel. Also, because the "Jacobite-Palestinian Conflict" would sound silly. Anyway, because during the wrestling match the vampire messed up Jacob’s inner thigh (kinky!), the children of Israel aren’t allowed to eat that part of any animal anymore.
Genesis 33
Despite all of Jacob’s efforts to avoid it, Esau and his 400 men eventually caught up with him. Jacob took Leah and her children and put them in front of Rachel and her children, so that the ugly sister would be more likely to be killed first. A true gentleman, that Jacob.
Jacob went and bowed down before Esau, who immediately embraced him and began crying like a little girl. It turns out that despite Jacob’s tomfoolery, Esau had managed to make a pretty good living for himself in the dot-com craze, and wasn’t interested in exacting revenge anymore. Jacob insisted that Esau take his many bribes anyway, and so Esau got a little bit richer thanks to the guilty conscience of his brother.
Jacob then pauses here for a brief public service announcement about the importance of proper animal care. He says that you must not overdrive your flock if it includes baby cows or sheep or whatnot, because they’ll die. Thanks for the tip.
So with the usual “if you need anything, just call” spiel, Esau left Jacob to his own devices. Jacob began wandering again and came upon a land which he called Succoth, presumably because living there succothed. Later, he wandered some more and eventually bought some real estate and built an altar on it, as was his custom.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Genesis 29-31
Genesis 29
The next day, Jacob continued his journey, and eventually ran into a bunch of sheep hanging around a well that had a big rock on it. He noticed some people push the stone off the well, water their sheep, and push the stone back on top of the well. The stone, therefore, was primarily there to keep any drunken sheepherders from urinating in the well, which was a much bigger problem than you might think in those days.
Jacob went up to the men and asked where they were from, and by the way did they know Laban. As it turned out, they not only knew Laban, but also could introduce Jacob to Laban’s hot daughter Rachel, who just then showed up with some sheep.
In order to impress Rachel with his manly manliness, Jacob rolled the stone from the well and watered her sheep (strangely, not a euphemism). Then, he kissed Rachel, told her they were first cousins (which in those days was basically how you asked someone on a date), and she ran off to tell her father.
So it came to pass that Jacob stayed at Laban’s place for a month. He spent most of that time working for Laban, presumably pushing boulders around since that was his one demonstrated skill. At the end of that month, Laban asked how much he owed Jacob for all the work, and Jacob said he would take one of Laban’s daughters. Laban, apparently a much better negotiator than Esau had been, told Jacob he could have one of his daughters for the bargain basement price of 7 years of hard labor.
Now, Laban had two daughters: Leah, whose only good quality was that she was “tender eyed”, whatever the hell that means; and Rachel, who was a mega-hotty. So, Jacob made the obvious choice and chose Rachel.
After the agreed upon 7 years, Laban was in a bit of a bind: Leah wasn’t getting any younger, and he hadn’t managed to marry her off yet. So, he decided to pull a fast one and put her in Jacob’s tent. When Jacob asked for his payment, Laban sent him to the tent. Jacob, not big on wasting time, immediately got busy with whatever female happened to be in his tent. Upon waking and finding the ugly daughter in his bed, Jacob was pissed off and went after Laban. Laban explained that if he gave away his younger daughter before the older one, he was never going to get Leah off his couch, so if Jacob could just take her, that would be great. In return, Laban would let Jacob have Rachel after just one week of hard labor, so long as he agreed to work for seven more years after that.
Leah was, other than her “tender eyes”, apparently a real two-bagger because Jacob agreed to work for seven more years just so he could have someone else to nail.
God, showing he cares for ugly chicks too, took pity on Leah and allowed her to pop out kids like a rabbit while Rachel was barren. Since the only reason anyone cared about their wives in those days was because they could bear children, Leah felt that Jacob would now love her more than Rachel.
So it came to pass that Leah had three sons: Reuben, who went on to make sandwiches for a living; Simeon, who went on to play defensive end in the National Football League; and Levi, who went on to make pants. For an encore, she popped out Judah, and then stopped having kids.
Genesis 30
Rachel got angry that she couldn’t bear any children, and blamed Jacob for it, even though he was obviously not the problem since Leah was over there popping out kids like crazy. So Jacob and Rachel had a big fight. Having learned nothing from the Sarai and Hagar situation several chapters back, Rachel gave Jacob her servant to screw so she could sort of have kids by proxy. Because apparently if your servant has kids by your husband, those kids are actually yours. Right.
Leah, not wanting to be upstaged in the whole baby-making game, gave her servant to Jacob too, and Jacob had the time of his life impregnating one servant after the other for the next several years.
Later, Leah’s son Reuben was harvesting wheat when he found a patch of mandrakes, which are a narcotic plant. Wanting to get high, Rachel asked Leah if she could have some of them. Leah, still pissed about her husband dumping her for her sister, refused to let Rachel have any of her son’s stash. Rachel, apparently the world’s first drug addict, offered to get Jacob to fuck Leah in exchange for some of that sweet, sweet mandrake.
When Jacob came back from the fields, Leah told him that she had purchased a night with him in exchange for feeding Rachel’s mandrake addiction. Apparently finding nothing unusual about this, Jacob went in and did the deed with Leah. After this, Leah, thanks to God’s meddling, bore 2 more sons and a daughter. Then, God got Rachel to have yet another son.
After all this baby making, Jacob went to Laban and asked to be released and allowed to take his wife and ludicrous number of children away to start a new life. Laban, not wanting to get rid of a good employee, begged Jacob to stay. Not having any more daughters to whore out, Laban agreed to pay Jacob by allowing him to take any of his cows that had spots, any of his brown sheep, and any of the speckled goats.
Jacob and Laban then separated to tend the flocks: Jacob the speckled and brown animals, Laban the not so speckled and not so brown. Unfortunately for Laban, Jacob was not only a scheming bastard but also an expert in animal husbandry. Through a scheme so convoluted reading about it would surely put you into a coma, Jacob assured that his flocks got stronger while Laban’s flocks got weaker. Thus, Jacob ended up with a bunch of animals and servants and was able to care for his giant flock of children.
Genesis 31
Eventually, some of Laban’s sons started to figure out that Jacob was intentionally breeding the animals in such a way that Jacob would always get the good animals and Laban the crappy ones, and that was totally going to mess up their inheritance.
Sensing that he was wearing out his welcome, Jacob decided he and his enormous family and tons of livestock should take off and go back to Canaan. In order to convince Rachel and Leah, he told them the story of how Laban had cheated him out of 14 years labor by giving him the wrong woman. For extra spice, he added some nonsense about a dream he had had in which God told him to leave. Rachel and Leah, reasoning that their inheritance was probably gone now anyway since Laban had sons and Jacob had just spent the past several years slowly taking away all of Laban’s shit, agreed to go.
Figuring just leaving wasn’t good enough, Rachel decided to steal Laban’s idols (most of the people back then were primitive and foolish, and so worshipped little trinkets rather than the invisible man in the sky most people worship these days)
Jacob and his huge family, his servants, and all of his animals somehow managed to sneak away unnoticed. After three days, someone finally realized that the place was a lot less crowded than it normally was, and told Laban that Jacob had escaped. Furious, Laban got together a posse and went after Jacob.
After seven days, Laban’s group overtook Jacob. That night, God came to Laban in a dream and warned him not to talk to Jacob. Laban, not a big God fan, went and talked to Jacob anyway. He berated Jacob for taking off without even saying goodbye. After 20 minutes of trying to guilt trip Jacob, Laban suddenly decided to take God's advice and shut up.
However, Laban was still righteously pissed that someone had taken his idols. So, he went from tent to tent trying to find them. Rachel, not wanting to get caught with someone else’s gods, hid them in the sofa and sat on them. When Laban came to search her tent, she said she couldn’t stand up because she was on the rag (seriously!), but Laban could feel free to search the place.
Jacob, not happy that Laban had decided to ransack his camp, lit into Laban and unloaded a bunch of accusations on him. After a big fight, Laban agreed to split the land up and let Jacob go. So the two built a pile of rocks, and agreed that one side was Laban’s and the other Jacob’s, and if any one crossed into the territory of the other, they were going to be in a world of pain.
After a good night’s sleep, Laban kissed his daughters and ludicrous number of grandchildren, and went back home
The next day, Jacob continued his journey, and eventually ran into a bunch of sheep hanging around a well that had a big rock on it. He noticed some people push the stone off the well, water their sheep, and push the stone back on top of the well. The stone, therefore, was primarily there to keep any drunken sheepherders from urinating in the well, which was a much bigger problem than you might think in those days.
Jacob went up to the men and asked where they were from, and by the way did they know Laban. As it turned out, they not only knew Laban, but also could introduce Jacob to Laban’s hot daughter Rachel, who just then showed up with some sheep.
In order to impress Rachel with his manly manliness, Jacob rolled the stone from the well and watered her sheep (strangely, not a euphemism). Then, he kissed Rachel, told her they were first cousins (which in those days was basically how you asked someone on a date), and she ran off to tell her father.
So it came to pass that Jacob stayed at Laban’s place for a month. He spent most of that time working for Laban, presumably pushing boulders around since that was his one demonstrated skill. At the end of that month, Laban asked how much he owed Jacob for all the work, and Jacob said he would take one of Laban’s daughters. Laban, apparently a much better negotiator than Esau had been, told Jacob he could have one of his daughters for the bargain basement price of 7 years of hard labor.
Now, Laban had two daughters: Leah, whose only good quality was that she was “tender eyed”, whatever the hell that means; and Rachel, who was a mega-hotty. So, Jacob made the obvious choice and chose Rachel.
After the agreed upon 7 years, Laban was in a bit of a bind: Leah wasn’t getting any younger, and he hadn’t managed to marry her off yet. So, he decided to pull a fast one and put her in Jacob’s tent. When Jacob asked for his payment, Laban sent him to the tent. Jacob, not big on wasting time, immediately got busy with whatever female happened to be in his tent. Upon waking and finding the ugly daughter in his bed, Jacob was pissed off and went after Laban. Laban explained that if he gave away his younger daughter before the older one, he was never going to get Leah off his couch, so if Jacob could just take her, that would be great. In return, Laban would let Jacob have Rachel after just one week of hard labor, so long as he agreed to work for seven more years after that.
Leah was, other than her “tender eyes”, apparently a real two-bagger because Jacob agreed to work for seven more years just so he could have someone else to nail.
God, showing he cares for ugly chicks too, took pity on Leah and allowed her to pop out kids like a rabbit while Rachel was barren. Since the only reason anyone cared about their wives in those days was because they could bear children, Leah felt that Jacob would now love her more than Rachel.
So it came to pass that Leah had three sons: Reuben, who went on to make sandwiches for a living; Simeon, who went on to play defensive end in the National Football League; and Levi, who went on to make pants. For an encore, she popped out Judah, and then stopped having kids.
Genesis 30
Rachel got angry that she couldn’t bear any children, and blamed Jacob for it, even though he was obviously not the problem since Leah was over there popping out kids like crazy. So Jacob and Rachel had a big fight. Having learned nothing from the Sarai and Hagar situation several chapters back, Rachel gave Jacob her servant to screw so she could sort of have kids by proxy. Because apparently if your servant has kids by your husband, those kids are actually yours. Right.
Leah, not wanting to be upstaged in the whole baby-making game, gave her servant to Jacob too, and Jacob had the time of his life impregnating one servant after the other for the next several years.
Later, Leah’s son Reuben was harvesting wheat when he found a patch of mandrakes, which are a narcotic plant. Wanting to get high, Rachel asked Leah if she could have some of them. Leah, still pissed about her husband dumping her for her sister, refused to let Rachel have any of her son’s stash. Rachel, apparently the world’s first drug addict, offered to get Jacob to fuck Leah in exchange for some of that sweet, sweet mandrake.
When Jacob came back from the fields, Leah told him that she had purchased a night with him in exchange for feeding Rachel’s mandrake addiction. Apparently finding nothing unusual about this, Jacob went in and did the deed with Leah. After this, Leah, thanks to God’s meddling, bore 2 more sons and a daughter. Then, God got Rachel to have yet another son.
After all this baby making, Jacob went to Laban and asked to be released and allowed to take his wife and ludicrous number of children away to start a new life. Laban, not wanting to get rid of a good employee, begged Jacob to stay. Not having any more daughters to whore out, Laban agreed to pay Jacob by allowing him to take any of his cows that had spots, any of his brown sheep, and any of the speckled goats.
Jacob and Laban then separated to tend the flocks: Jacob the speckled and brown animals, Laban the not so speckled and not so brown. Unfortunately for Laban, Jacob was not only a scheming bastard but also an expert in animal husbandry. Through a scheme so convoluted reading about it would surely put you into a coma, Jacob assured that his flocks got stronger while Laban’s flocks got weaker. Thus, Jacob ended up with a bunch of animals and servants and was able to care for his giant flock of children.
Genesis 31
Eventually, some of Laban’s sons started to figure out that Jacob was intentionally breeding the animals in such a way that Jacob would always get the good animals and Laban the crappy ones, and that was totally going to mess up their inheritance.
Sensing that he was wearing out his welcome, Jacob decided he and his enormous family and tons of livestock should take off and go back to Canaan. In order to convince Rachel and Leah, he told them the story of how Laban had cheated him out of 14 years labor by giving him the wrong woman. For extra spice, he added some nonsense about a dream he had had in which God told him to leave. Rachel and Leah, reasoning that their inheritance was probably gone now anyway since Laban had sons and Jacob had just spent the past several years slowly taking away all of Laban’s shit, agreed to go.
Figuring just leaving wasn’t good enough, Rachel decided to steal Laban’s idols (most of the people back then were primitive and foolish, and so worshipped little trinkets rather than the invisible man in the sky most people worship these days)
Jacob and his huge family, his servants, and all of his animals somehow managed to sneak away unnoticed. After three days, someone finally realized that the place was a lot less crowded than it normally was, and told Laban that Jacob had escaped. Furious, Laban got together a posse and went after Jacob.
After seven days, Laban’s group overtook Jacob. That night, God came to Laban in a dream and warned him not to talk to Jacob. Laban, not a big God fan, went and talked to Jacob anyway. He berated Jacob for taking off without even saying goodbye. After 20 minutes of trying to guilt trip Jacob, Laban suddenly decided to take God's advice and shut up.
However, Laban was still righteously pissed that someone had taken his idols. So, he went from tent to tent trying to find them. Rachel, not wanting to get caught with someone else’s gods, hid them in the sofa and sat on them. When Laban came to search her tent, she said she couldn’t stand up because she was on the rag (seriously!), but Laban could feel free to search the place.
Jacob, not happy that Laban had decided to ransack his camp, lit into Laban and unloaded a bunch of accusations on him. After a big fight, Laban agreed to split the land up and let Jacob go. So the two built a pile of rocks, and agreed that one side was Laban’s and the other Jacob’s, and if any one crossed into the territory of the other, they were going to be in a world of pain.
After a good night’s sleep, Laban kissed his daughters and ludicrous number of grandchildren, and went back home
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Genesis 21-28
Genesis 21
So it came to pass that God impregnated Sarah. I mean, Abraham impregnated Sarah. Yah, that’s the ticket.
Anyway, however it happened, Sarah had a son. Feeling somewhat roped into God’s suggestion because of the whole Miracle Birth thing, Abraham named the son Isaac, even though he had been secretly hoping his first legitimate son would be called Bluto.
Abraham then lopped off part of “Little Isaac” in deference to God’s command, and then gave the baby to Sarah to breastfeed. Given that Sarah was an old crone by this point, she likely was giving Isaac powdered milk. At any rate, she managed to keep the kid alive until he could be weaned, and Abraham threw a party because of it.
Sarah saw Hagar, who was busy minding her own business, and decided to heckle her for daring to have Abraham’s illegitimate son, even though Sarah herself had told Hagar to do so. Sarah heckled Hagar so much that she felt compelled to leave, and took off with her son Ishmael for greener pastures.
Unfortunately for her they were in the Middle East, and there were no greener pastures for hundreds of miles. She wandered around for a while until she ran out of water, and eventually gave up. Since she assumed her and her child were about to die, she did the logical thing and dumped the baby in a bush so she wouldn’t have to actually see him kick the bucket.
Fortunately for Hagar, God decided life would be boring without Muslims and decided to save Ishmael. So, God moved some branches out of the way and showed Hagar a well, and thus Ishmael was saved. God took Ishmael under his wing and taught him to be an archer, which would come in handy when God demanded Ishmael sacrifice all those sheep later on.
It came to pass that Abimelech (Remember him? The sucker who couldn’t get it up for Sarah earlier?) found Abraham still hanging out on his land, and begged Abraham not to lie to him again. Abraham agreed, but then started bitching about a well that he had been using until some of Abimelech’s people had decided to take it away from him. So, to recap, Abimelech gave Abraham a bunch of shit so he would stop trying to get Abimelech cursed by God, and instead of being happy with what he got, Abraham starts bitching about a well. Right on, Abraham.
Anyway, Abimelech promised to dig another well for Abraham in exchange for some sheep. Since the well’s water was of high enough quality to use in the brewing of some choice booze, the land it was on was called Beersheba.
Genesis 22
So it came to pass that God got bored one day, and decided to tell Abraham to sacrifice his only legitimate son Isaac. To add insult to injury, God ordered Abraham to travel for a long ass time and climb a giant mountain and sacrifice his son there. Abraham, not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, obeyed without question. His son, on the other hand, was a little quicker on the draw and asked his dad what was up. Like any good father, Abraham lied and told Isaac they were just going to sacrifice some sheep. When Isaac asked where the sheep were, Abraham claimed that God himself was going to provide them and stop asking questions. Assuming that God just happened to like Abraham’s grilling technique, Isaac accepted this explanation and went along with his father.
At the top of the mountain, Abraham pulled the old switcheroo and bound Isaac up, piled wood on him, and prepared to fricassee his own son.
Deciding that enough was enough, an angel of the Lord jumped out at the last minute, shouted “April Fools!” and told Abraham to take his son and take off down the mountain because God was totally satisfied that Abraham was a mindless sycophant now that would not hesitate to do anything he was asked.
So Abraham went back to Beersheba, and some unknown person showed up to tell him a bunch of boring information about his various relatives, none of which is of even the slightest importance.
Genesis 23
After sticking to God’s previously mandated lifespan of 120 years (okay, 127 years, but who’s counting), Sarah croaked. Abraham, being a habitual mooch, asked the sons of Heth for a place to bury his wife. The children of Heth, knowing what happened to people who messed with Abraham, offered him any tomb he could find.
So, Abraham picked a cave to bury Sarah in, and offered Ephron (apparently the real estate agent) four hundred shekels of silver for the property. Ephron, not wanting to risk eternal damnation, told Abraham the land was crap anyway, so no payment was needed. Suddenly deciding he should start paying for the stuff he took, Abraham paid Ephron anyway, and planted his dead wife in a cave that he now owned free and clear.
Genesis 24
It came time for Isaac to get hitched. Abraham, being an unrepentant racist, sent one of his servants to his own country to find a wife of their own kind, rather than allowing his son to marry one of those filthy degenerate Canaanites. So, the servant went off and wandered for a while. Eventually, he found a watering hole. Apparently sick of looking, the servant told God he would take the next woman who showed up at the oasis and bothered to show even the slightest modicum of respect to him and his camels.
Luckily, before long, Rebekah showed up. She not only gave the camels some water, but also had a superfluous “h” in her name, and thus was clearly the right choice for Isaac’s wife.
Abraham’s servant gave Rebekah a bunch of gold jewelry and asked for lodging for the night. Rebekah ran off to ask her brother Laban if the strange man who was giving out jewelry could stay at their house. Noticing the fancy jewelry, Laban decided to let the servant stay.
In need of some filler, the servant proceeded to tell Laban and Rebekah the purpose for his visit in incredibly long-winded fashion. Seriously, he repeated stuff that happened earlier in the chapter almost verbatim.
After hearing a bunch of nonsense about how this strange man had come out of nowhere to take their daughter to some other unknown person, and that she should marry this unknown person, Rebekah’s family did the logical thing and immediately agreed to let her go in hopes of getting some of that choice bling Rebekah had been given. The servant gave them all a bunch of jewels and took off with Rebekah.
So, Rebekah agreed to go wandering off to some strange land for a husband. After many hours of camel riding, Rebekah showed up at Isaac’s place. Rebekah and Isaac then did the deed, after which Isaac didn’t feel so bad about his mother kicking the bucket earlier, thus proving that a good screw makes everything better.
Genesis 25
Deciding he had had enough of the single life, Abraham took another wife. Unlike Sarah, his new wife was capable of having kids without God intervening, and so she bore him lots of little mouths to feed. However, despite all the kids he had, he would only allow his estate to go to Isaac. Oh, and Abraham also took on a bunch of concubines and gave the kids they had some gifts and kicked them out of the house. Classy.
After 135 years, which is close enough to God’s age limit, Abraham died and he was buried next to his first wife. The Bible then takes an interlude for a bunch of “begats”.
As it turns out, Isaac’s wife Rebekah turned out to be barren just like Sarah was. Luckily, God wasn’t in the mood to mess around this time like he did with Sarah, and just let Rebekah conceive anyway. Rebekah became puzzled because it felt like two kids were having fistfights in her womb, so she asked God about it. God, obviously not an obstetrician, told her that she had twins in her womb, and they would come out of her bowels. Honestly, what is with God’s obsession with bowels?
Anyway, God told Rebekah that her sons would be heads of great nations, and the older would serve the younger. Having thus been told the entire story of her sons’ lives before they were born, and without even the benefit of a “Spoiler Alert” warning from God, Rebekah had her kids. Esau came out first, and was covered in red hair, which had to make Isaac look sidelong at the orangutans that were always hanging out around Rebekah’s tent. Jacob was born next, and he was hanging on to Esau’s heel, which is supposed to be some sort of omen, but might have just been because Jacob had a foot fetish.
Esau and Jacob grew older. Esau became a hunter and killed stuff for a living, while Jacob grew crops. Since Isaac shared God’s thirst for blood, he liked Esau better, but Rebekah liked Jacob better because he hung around at home and watched soaps with her while he waited for his crops to grow.
Esau, after a long day of hunting, came home one day really hungry. He saw Jacob was making some soup, and asked for some. Jacob, reiterating the moral of the Cain and Abel story (all farmers are evil), demanded Esau sell him his birthright in exchange for some food. Esau, who apparently wasn’t a good enough hunter to even feed himself, acquiesced and sold his entire inheritance in exchange for a bowl of lentil soup and some bread. Esau: negotiator extraordinaire.
Genesis 26
Once again, there was famine in the land. All these famines had to make Isaac wonder if God was doing him a favor promising him all this land, but rather than complain about it he just decided to go mooch off the Egyptians like his father had. Unfortunately, God showed up and told him not to go down to Egypt, but rather to go mooch off Abimelech instead.
So it came to pass that Isaac went down to Gerar, where he was hassled by some bullies who wanted his lunch money and his wife. Not wanting to be killed, he followed in his father’s footsteps and told these men Rebekah was his sister, not his wife.
Of course Abimelech was not about to get plagued again, and demanded to know what Isaac’s game was with claiming his wife was his sister just like his shiftless father had. Isaac whined that he didn’t want to die, so Abimelech told all his people not to touch Isaac’s wife, because he really was in no mood to deal with a bunch of women who couldn’t have kids again.
Isaac spent a bunch of time in Abimelech’s land, and became ridiculously rich, which made all his neighbors jealous. In retaliation, the Philistines filled all the wells Isaac had dug with dirt. Eventually, Abimelech told him he was too rich to be hanging out there, so if he could bugger off, that would be just great.
So Isaac wandered off and started digging wells in various other locations. Unfortunately for him, every time he dug a well some group of ruffians would show up to take it from him. Eventually, everyone that wanted a well had gotten one courtesy of Isaac, and he was finally able to dig a well and keep it for himself.
Since he had finally found a well that no one else wanted, Isaac made the logical choice and left it in order to go back to Beersheba and hang out with God for a while. God spent some time repeating the same old promises he had made to Abraham, and Isaac built an altar and dug yet another well.
Seeing that Isaac was God’s favorite (sort of a “deity’s pet”), Abimelech went to visit him and kiss a little ass. After a feast and a good night’s rest, Isaac sent them on their way.
Also, Esau took on two wives, which Isaac and Rebekah were none too pleased with. While the Bible doesn’t say so, we can assume Isaac was primarily pissed off because he hadn’t thought of the whole multiple wives thing first.
Genesis 27
Eventually, Isaac got old and was about to die, so he sent for his favorite son Esau. Isaac told Esau he was about to die, but before he did he would really like a nice venison steak. So, if Esau could just go and hunt up some venison for him and prepare him a nice meal, he would bless Esau, which apparently was a big deal. So Esau went off to hunt up some grub for his dying father.
Meanwhile, Rebekah, who had been eavesdropping, told Jacob to stop watching Days of Our Lives for a second and go try and steal Esau’s blessing. Figuring Isaac was too stupid to figure out the difference between venison and goat meat, Rebekah told Jacob to go kill one of their goats and cook him up. In order that Isaac would think Jacob was really his half-ape brother Esau, Rebekah glued a bunch of goat fur to Jacob. She also told him to wear Esau’s clothes, and took him to Isaac.
Now, at this point you might be asking how someone could mistake a guy covered in glued-on goat fur and reaking of goat meat for his favorite son. What you’re forgetting, though, is that Jacob also was wearing Esau’s clothes. Also, Isaac was functionally retarded.
Anyway, Jacob brought the goat meat to Isaac and pretended to be Esau. Isaac was amazed that his son, known throughout the land as the world’s shittiest hunter, had managed to bring home a dead animal so quickly. After seeing the Robin Williams-esque body hair and the ratty clothes, though, he trusted that the person in front of him was Esau, and immediately blessed him.
Shortly thereafter, the actual Esau came back and brought in some venison for his father. Isaac, feeling very guilty for accidentally blessing the wrong son, nonetheless said the system wouldn’t allow him to really correct the situation since all blessings were final, and so too bad for Esau. After some girlish sobbing and whining from Esau, Isaac finally acquiesced to giving Esau a blessing too. So he told Esau that he would be destined to serve his brother until he could manage to gain the upper hand.
For some reason, Esau was upset about this, and vowed to kill his brother. Unfortunately, he said this in his outside voice, and Rebekah, who just happened to be hanging out outside the tent with her ear pressed against the fabric, told Jacob to skedaddle before Esau found him.
Before Jacob left, though, Rebekah told him not to go carousing with those harlot daughters of Heth, because Rebekah was totally pissed off at Heth, and if Jacob ever married one of them she would just DIE. Thus was the reputation of the Jewish mother established.
Genesis 28
Before Jacob could run for his life from his brother Esau, Isaac called him in and told him not to go out and marry any of those filthy Canaanites, thus carrying on his father’s racist ways. Instead, Isaac told Jacob to go find someone in his mother’s family to marry, because apparently inbreeding is preferrable to hanging out with a bunch of degenerates.
Jacob, ever the obedient son, went off to find one of his mother’s relatives that might be up for a little carnal knowledge. Meanwhile, Esau saw all this and, just to spite his father, went off and married one of Ishmael’s daughters.
So Jacob went toward Haran, and decided to pack it in for the night. He took some stones and used them for pillows and went to sleep. Because stones make lousy pillows, Jacob had a really bizarre dream involving a ladder going up to Heaven. In the dream, God came to him and told him that the land he was laying on would be given to him, and he would have tons and tons of descendants. Further, God told Jacob that even if his descendants scattered all over the world, they would eventually end up back there. Luckily for them, no one else was ever going to live there, so they would have absolutely no problem coming back and reclaiming the land. Or something like that.
Impressed by God’s promise, Jacob built a mighty temple (okay, he stacked a few stones and put oil on them, but it’s the thought that counts) and promised that so long as God would keep blessing him, he would keep following God. Of course, the flipside of this is that as soon as God stopped heaping on the blessings, Jacob was going to drop him like a hot rock.
Oh, also Jacob promised to give a tenth of everything he earned to God. So yah, tithing. Stupid Jacob.
So it came to pass that God impregnated Sarah. I mean, Abraham impregnated Sarah. Yah, that’s the ticket.
Anyway, however it happened, Sarah had a son. Feeling somewhat roped into God’s suggestion because of the whole Miracle Birth thing, Abraham named the son Isaac, even though he had been secretly hoping his first legitimate son would be called Bluto.
Abraham then lopped off part of “Little Isaac” in deference to God’s command, and then gave the baby to Sarah to breastfeed. Given that Sarah was an old crone by this point, she likely was giving Isaac powdered milk. At any rate, she managed to keep the kid alive until he could be weaned, and Abraham threw a party because of it.
Sarah saw Hagar, who was busy minding her own business, and decided to heckle her for daring to have Abraham’s illegitimate son, even though Sarah herself had told Hagar to do so. Sarah heckled Hagar so much that she felt compelled to leave, and took off with her son Ishmael for greener pastures.
Unfortunately for her they were in the Middle East, and there were no greener pastures for hundreds of miles. She wandered around for a while until she ran out of water, and eventually gave up. Since she assumed her and her child were about to die, she did the logical thing and dumped the baby in a bush so she wouldn’t have to actually see him kick the bucket.
Fortunately for Hagar, God decided life would be boring without Muslims and decided to save Ishmael. So, God moved some branches out of the way and showed Hagar a well, and thus Ishmael was saved. God took Ishmael under his wing and taught him to be an archer, which would come in handy when God demanded Ishmael sacrifice all those sheep later on.
It came to pass that Abimelech (Remember him? The sucker who couldn’t get it up for Sarah earlier?) found Abraham still hanging out on his land, and begged Abraham not to lie to him again. Abraham agreed, but then started bitching about a well that he had been using until some of Abimelech’s people had decided to take it away from him. So, to recap, Abimelech gave Abraham a bunch of shit so he would stop trying to get Abimelech cursed by God, and instead of being happy with what he got, Abraham starts bitching about a well. Right on, Abraham.
Anyway, Abimelech promised to dig another well for Abraham in exchange for some sheep. Since the well’s water was of high enough quality to use in the brewing of some choice booze, the land it was on was called Beersheba.
Genesis 22
So it came to pass that God got bored one day, and decided to tell Abraham to sacrifice his only legitimate son Isaac. To add insult to injury, God ordered Abraham to travel for a long ass time and climb a giant mountain and sacrifice his son there. Abraham, not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, obeyed without question. His son, on the other hand, was a little quicker on the draw and asked his dad what was up. Like any good father, Abraham lied and told Isaac they were just going to sacrifice some sheep. When Isaac asked where the sheep were, Abraham claimed that God himself was going to provide them and stop asking questions. Assuming that God just happened to like Abraham’s grilling technique, Isaac accepted this explanation and went along with his father.
At the top of the mountain, Abraham pulled the old switcheroo and bound Isaac up, piled wood on him, and prepared to fricassee his own son.
Deciding that enough was enough, an angel of the Lord jumped out at the last minute, shouted “April Fools!” and told Abraham to take his son and take off down the mountain because God was totally satisfied that Abraham was a mindless sycophant now that would not hesitate to do anything he was asked.
So Abraham went back to Beersheba, and some unknown person showed up to tell him a bunch of boring information about his various relatives, none of which is of even the slightest importance.
Genesis 23
After sticking to God’s previously mandated lifespan of 120 years (okay, 127 years, but who’s counting), Sarah croaked. Abraham, being a habitual mooch, asked the sons of Heth for a place to bury his wife. The children of Heth, knowing what happened to people who messed with Abraham, offered him any tomb he could find.
So, Abraham picked a cave to bury Sarah in, and offered Ephron (apparently the real estate agent) four hundred shekels of silver for the property. Ephron, not wanting to risk eternal damnation, told Abraham the land was crap anyway, so no payment was needed. Suddenly deciding he should start paying for the stuff he took, Abraham paid Ephron anyway, and planted his dead wife in a cave that he now owned free and clear.
Genesis 24
It came time for Isaac to get hitched. Abraham, being an unrepentant racist, sent one of his servants to his own country to find a wife of their own kind, rather than allowing his son to marry one of those filthy degenerate Canaanites. So, the servant went off and wandered for a while. Eventually, he found a watering hole. Apparently sick of looking, the servant told God he would take the next woman who showed up at the oasis and bothered to show even the slightest modicum of respect to him and his camels.
Luckily, before long, Rebekah showed up. She not only gave the camels some water, but also had a superfluous “h” in her name, and thus was clearly the right choice for Isaac’s wife.
Abraham’s servant gave Rebekah a bunch of gold jewelry and asked for lodging for the night. Rebekah ran off to ask her brother Laban if the strange man who was giving out jewelry could stay at their house. Noticing the fancy jewelry, Laban decided to let the servant stay.
In need of some filler, the servant proceeded to tell Laban and Rebekah the purpose for his visit in incredibly long-winded fashion. Seriously, he repeated stuff that happened earlier in the chapter almost verbatim.
After hearing a bunch of nonsense about how this strange man had come out of nowhere to take their daughter to some other unknown person, and that she should marry this unknown person, Rebekah’s family did the logical thing and immediately agreed to let her go in hopes of getting some of that choice bling Rebekah had been given. The servant gave them all a bunch of jewels and took off with Rebekah.
So, Rebekah agreed to go wandering off to some strange land for a husband. After many hours of camel riding, Rebekah showed up at Isaac’s place. Rebekah and Isaac then did the deed, after which Isaac didn’t feel so bad about his mother kicking the bucket earlier, thus proving that a good screw makes everything better.
Genesis 25
Deciding he had had enough of the single life, Abraham took another wife. Unlike Sarah, his new wife was capable of having kids without God intervening, and so she bore him lots of little mouths to feed. However, despite all the kids he had, he would only allow his estate to go to Isaac. Oh, and Abraham also took on a bunch of concubines and gave the kids they had some gifts and kicked them out of the house. Classy.
After 135 years, which is close enough to God’s age limit, Abraham died and he was buried next to his first wife. The Bible then takes an interlude for a bunch of “begats”.
As it turns out, Isaac’s wife Rebekah turned out to be barren just like Sarah was. Luckily, God wasn’t in the mood to mess around this time like he did with Sarah, and just let Rebekah conceive anyway. Rebekah became puzzled because it felt like two kids were having fistfights in her womb, so she asked God about it. God, obviously not an obstetrician, told her that she had twins in her womb, and they would come out of her bowels. Honestly, what is with God’s obsession with bowels?
Anyway, God told Rebekah that her sons would be heads of great nations, and the older would serve the younger. Having thus been told the entire story of her sons’ lives before they were born, and without even the benefit of a “Spoiler Alert” warning from God, Rebekah had her kids. Esau came out first, and was covered in red hair, which had to make Isaac look sidelong at the orangutans that were always hanging out around Rebekah’s tent. Jacob was born next, and he was hanging on to Esau’s heel, which is supposed to be some sort of omen, but might have just been because Jacob had a foot fetish.
Esau and Jacob grew older. Esau became a hunter and killed stuff for a living, while Jacob grew crops. Since Isaac shared God’s thirst for blood, he liked Esau better, but Rebekah liked Jacob better because he hung around at home and watched soaps with her while he waited for his crops to grow.
Esau, after a long day of hunting, came home one day really hungry. He saw Jacob was making some soup, and asked for some. Jacob, reiterating the moral of the Cain and Abel story (all farmers are evil), demanded Esau sell him his birthright in exchange for some food. Esau, who apparently wasn’t a good enough hunter to even feed himself, acquiesced and sold his entire inheritance in exchange for a bowl of lentil soup and some bread. Esau: negotiator extraordinaire.
Genesis 26
Once again, there was famine in the land. All these famines had to make Isaac wonder if God was doing him a favor promising him all this land, but rather than complain about it he just decided to go mooch off the Egyptians like his father had. Unfortunately, God showed up and told him not to go down to Egypt, but rather to go mooch off Abimelech instead.
So it came to pass that Isaac went down to Gerar, where he was hassled by some bullies who wanted his lunch money and his wife. Not wanting to be killed, he followed in his father’s footsteps and told these men Rebekah was his sister, not his wife.
Of course Abimelech was not about to get plagued again, and demanded to know what Isaac’s game was with claiming his wife was his sister just like his shiftless father had. Isaac whined that he didn’t want to die, so Abimelech told all his people not to touch Isaac’s wife, because he really was in no mood to deal with a bunch of women who couldn’t have kids again.
Isaac spent a bunch of time in Abimelech’s land, and became ridiculously rich, which made all his neighbors jealous. In retaliation, the Philistines filled all the wells Isaac had dug with dirt. Eventually, Abimelech told him he was too rich to be hanging out there, so if he could bugger off, that would be just great.
So Isaac wandered off and started digging wells in various other locations. Unfortunately for him, every time he dug a well some group of ruffians would show up to take it from him. Eventually, everyone that wanted a well had gotten one courtesy of Isaac, and he was finally able to dig a well and keep it for himself.
Since he had finally found a well that no one else wanted, Isaac made the logical choice and left it in order to go back to Beersheba and hang out with God for a while. God spent some time repeating the same old promises he had made to Abraham, and Isaac built an altar and dug yet another well.
Seeing that Isaac was God’s favorite (sort of a “deity’s pet”), Abimelech went to visit him and kiss a little ass. After a feast and a good night’s rest, Isaac sent them on their way.
Also, Esau took on two wives, which Isaac and Rebekah were none too pleased with. While the Bible doesn’t say so, we can assume Isaac was primarily pissed off because he hadn’t thought of the whole multiple wives thing first.
Genesis 27
Eventually, Isaac got old and was about to die, so he sent for his favorite son Esau. Isaac told Esau he was about to die, but before he did he would really like a nice venison steak. So, if Esau could just go and hunt up some venison for him and prepare him a nice meal, he would bless Esau, which apparently was a big deal. So Esau went off to hunt up some grub for his dying father.
Meanwhile, Rebekah, who had been eavesdropping, told Jacob to stop watching Days of Our Lives for a second and go try and steal Esau’s blessing. Figuring Isaac was too stupid to figure out the difference between venison and goat meat, Rebekah told Jacob to go kill one of their goats and cook him up. In order that Isaac would think Jacob was really his half-ape brother Esau, Rebekah glued a bunch of goat fur to Jacob. She also told him to wear Esau’s clothes, and took him to Isaac.
Now, at this point you might be asking how someone could mistake a guy covered in glued-on goat fur and reaking of goat meat for his favorite son. What you’re forgetting, though, is that Jacob also was wearing Esau’s clothes. Also, Isaac was functionally retarded.
Anyway, Jacob brought the goat meat to Isaac and pretended to be Esau. Isaac was amazed that his son, known throughout the land as the world’s shittiest hunter, had managed to bring home a dead animal so quickly. After seeing the Robin Williams-esque body hair and the ratty clothes, though, he trusted that the person in front of him was Esau, and immediately blessed him.
Shortly thereafter, the actual Esau came back and brought in some venison for his father. Isaac, feeling very guilty for accidentally blessing the wrong son, nonetheless said the system wouldn’t allow him to really correct the situation since all blessings were final, and so too bad for Esau. After some girlish sobbing and whining from Esau, Isaac finally acquiesced to giving Esau a blessing too. So he told Esau that he would be destined to serve his brother until he could manage to gain the upper hand.
For some reason, Esau was upset about this, and vowed to kill his brother. Unfortunately, he said this in his outside voice, and Rebekah, who just happened to be hanging out outside the tent with her ear pressed against the fabric, told Jacob to skedaddle before Esau found him.
Before Jacob left, though, Rebekah told him not to go carousing with those harlot daughters of Heth, because Rebekah was totally pissed off at Heth, and if Jacob ever married one of them she would just DIE. Thus was the reputation of the Jewish mother established.
Genesis 28
Before Jacob could run for his life from his brother Esau, Isaac called him in and told him not to go out and marry any of those filthy Canaanites, thus carrying on his father’s racist ways. Instead, Isaac told Jacob to go find someone in his mother’s family to marry, because apparently inbreeding is preferrable to hanging out with a bunch of degenerates.
Jacob, ever the obedient son, went off to find one of his mother’s relatives that might be up for a little carnal knowledge. Meanwhile, Esau saw all this and, just to spite his father, went off and married one of Ishmael’s daughters.
So Jacob went toward Haran, and decided to pack it in for the night. He took some stones and used them for pillows and went to sleep. Because stones make lousy pillows, Jacob had a really bizarre dream involving a ladder going up to Heaven. In the dream, God came to him and told him that the land he was laying on would be given to him, and he would have tons and tons of descendants. Further, God told Jacob that even if his descendants scattered all over the world, they would eventually end up back there. Luckily for them, no one else was ever going to live there, so they would have absolutely no problem coming back and reclaiming the land. Or something like that.
Impressed by God’s promise, Jacob built a mighty temple (okay, he stacked a few stones and put oil on them, but it’s the thought that counts) and promised that so long as God would keep blessing him, he would keep following God. Of course, the flipside of this is that as soon as God stopped heaping on the blessings, Jacob was going to drop him like a hot rock.
Oh, also Jacob promised to give a tenth of everything he earned to God. So yah, tithing. Stupid Jacob.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Genesis 11-20
Bible.com is one of those things you type into your web browser half expecting to see some truly nasty porn. As it turns out, however, it actually is a way to read the actual Bible. Since that fortuitous discovery, I’ve been using bible.com as my source for the King James Bible, which is the source for the translation of the Bible you’ve been enjoying on this site. Unfortunately, my Internet connection has sucked donkey balls lately, so I’m forced to find an alternate source for Bibley goodness. Luckily for me, as a recovering Mormon I am in possession of a Quad. As a (once) good Mormon, this Quad is even personalized with my very own name in gold leaf on the cover. It also has a lot of dust and spider webs on it.
For those of you who are too stupid to figure out how to use Google to figure out what a Quad is, it’s a collection of the major works of scripture in the LDS church: the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. While using this particular source for the Bible makes me feel the irresistible urge to expand my work to include all of these books, I will resist for now. I also pledge not to use any of the Church’s annotations in this book to aid in my translation. As a recovering Mormon, I’m well aware that many of these annotations exist solely to try to create parallels, beyond the obvious outright plagiarism from Isaiah to 3rd Nephi, between the various Mormon scriptures and the Bible, and I prefer to use my own indoctrination, not the Church’s.
With that out of the way, I’d like to start with the latest installment of the Bible in Plain English. However, before we start, I’d just like to explain a little bit why this particular installment starts out midway through Chapter 11 of Genesis rather than at the beginning of a chapter. Well, throughout this little experiment I’ve tried to avoid translating the boring “begat” sections of the Bible, of which there are several. However, it turns out that the “begat” section at the end of Chapter 11 actually contains some fairly important information, so I’m going to give a quick little overview of it. With that said, on to the good stuff:
Genesis 11 (continued)
So there was a guy named Shem (not to be confused with Shemp, who walked with Moe and Larry). Anyway, despite all that nonsense that God spouted earlier about man living to only a hundred and twenty years, Shemp…er, Shem…lived way way longer than that, and poked many a Stooge in the eyes, except when God would inspire said stooge to put his hand up in front of the bridge of his nose. Thus was written Stooge law: One shall be wary of the eye poking, and must be ever ready with the hand of thwarting to protect the eyes from the evils of the fingerpoke. Amen.
Anyway, despite the fact that God had very clearly stated that men weren’t supposed to live beyond 120 years, many generations of Shem’s children lived far longer than that. Eventually, Terah was born. Terah has no relevance to our story, except that he was Abram’s father and Lot’s grandfather. Abram, as we shall see, turned out to be kind of a big deal.
So Abram had a brother named Nahor, who got himself a wife and raised some kids. Abram, on the other hand, decided to marry Sarai, who it turns out was barren. Bummer.
So it came to pass that Terah brought the primary characters in our little story (Abram, Sarai, and Lot) to Harad, which was just beyond Canaan. He then lived well beyond God’s chosen lifespan, and finally keeled over well after anyone had stopped caring about what sort of inheritance they could expect.
Genesis 12
So it came to pass that God went to Abram and told him that he needed to leave Harad and go to some other place, to be determined later. In return, God promised to make Abram’s offspring great and powerful, which had to be a little bit of a slap in the face to Abram, given that his wife was incapable of baby making.
Since Abram knew a good deal when he saw it, he decided to listen to God, and took off for greener pastures with his wife and Lot, who has to come along because he has a key plot point in a later chapter (foreshadowing!). He found a mountain, built an altar, and kept on walking.
Unfortunately for Abram, there was a great famine on the land, and he was forced to find some rich folk to beg from. Fortunately for him, he was close to Egypt, which was ruled by the Pharaoh, who was about as rich as you could get back then.
Since Abram saw that his wife was a hotty, and also because he didn’t necessarily want to shut himself off from any choice Egyptian poontang, he told his wife to pretend like she was his sister. This she dutifully did, and was immediately taken to the Pharaoh’s house for a little bouncy bouncy. For the privilege of boning his sister, Pharaoh gave Abram lots of livestock and food. Unfortunately for him, God wasn’t too happy about this arrangement, and started plaguing the hell out of poor Pharaoh. Pharaoh, not knowing what else to do, kicked Abram and Sarai out of his kingdom. From then on, Pharaoh and the Jews lived in perfect harmony…or did they? (foreshadowing again!)
Genesis 13
Abram left Egypt with his wife and Lot (who tagged along because he was a major plot point), and settled in the general vicinity of the altar he built in chapter 12. Abram was filthy rich from the stuff he took from Egypt, and he and Lot set about building their own little livestock empires. Before long, they ran into all sorts of border disputes involving their hired hands, and they decided to split up. Lot went to Jordan, which included the cities of Sodom and Gommorah (even more foreshadowing!). Abram went to Canaan.
And it came to pass that God told Abram that he and his line would have dominion over all the land he could see. Of course, given that Abram couldn’t see anything beyond the horizon, that land probably didn’t exceed 10 square miles, but the point is God was promising Abram something. As it turns out, this promise would never be in the least controversial, and would certainly never result in three major religions fighting endlessly over the same spot.
Anyway, Abram eventually got sick of Canaan and moved to Hebron. As was his habit, he built another altar to God and set up camp and hung out for a while.
Genesis 14
It came to pass that a bunch of kings (or in today’s terms, warlords) did proceed to kicketh each others’s asses. In the melee, Lot was captured. Some busybody ran off and told Abram that his nephew was taken prisoner, and so Abram took a bunch of servants and went to go kick some ass. He and his servants kicked aforementioned ass, and got Lot back.
In order that the Mormons would have someone to name their high priests after, Melchizedek showed up to bless Abram. Like any good priest, he also extracted tithes from Abram and his clan. The King of Sodom offered help to Abram, but Abram refused, except to take provisions for his servants, because apparently Abram feels stealing is wrong unless you’re stealing from those filthy Egyptians.
Genesis 15
God came to Abram in a vision and attempted to comfort him. Abram, not being a total moron, asked God why he would bother to promise all this great stuff to Abram’s seed, when Abram’s wife was not capable of bearing children, and his only heir up to this point was not actually related to him.
God, displaying a stunning lack of understanding of the human anatomy, promises that the heir to Abram will spring from Abram’s bowels (a new and more literal definition of “dropping the kids off at the pool” perhaps?), and will not be some schmo Abram decided to name because he didn’t have any kids. God furthermore told Abram that he would have countless offspring, which would populate this land the Lord had given him.
God, being an insatiable carnivore, commanded Abram to kill a bunch of helpless animals for a sacrifice. Abram did just that, and then sat around waiting for God to show up, chasing away vultures along the way because God was taking his sweet time getting there.
At this point, God puts Abram to sleep, the better to talk to him without any sassmouth, and tells him his people will end up in bondage for a few hundred years, after which they’ll totally get that land they were promised. Pinky swear.
During the same night, God promised Abram and his seed all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. And since then, no one has ever disputed that claim, and Abram’s offspring have lived there in perfect harmony. Just kidding.
Genesis 16
So it came to pass that Sarai started feeling guilty about not being able to bear children. In order to appease her husband, she offered to let him bone her servant Hagar (who was apparently not that horrible. Oh yah, I went there) in order to get some kids. Unfortunately for her, the plan worked, and Hagar got preggo. Upset about this whole thing, which she brought on herself, Sarai decided to bitch to Abram. Abram told Sarai to deal with Hagar however she wished, and by the way stop bothering him in the middle of Wheel of Fortune.
So, Sarai made the logical choice and started beating the hell out of Hagar. Hagar took off in fear, and an angel of God caught up with her and told her to go back. Thus, God’s pro-domestic-violence stance was established.
At any rate, God told Hagar she would bear a son, and that son would be a holy terror. That son was called Ishmael. He later went on to hunt the Great White Whale, but that’s a different story.
Genesis 17
God came back to Abram to micromanage a little more. Feeling that Abram needed something of a brand rehabilitation, God decided to rename him Abraham and his wife Sarah. This event established the fact that a superfluous “h” makes any name better.
Not content with just giving away land, however, God changes the terms of the contract here, suddenly demanding that anyone he would accept into his convenant must have the tips of their tallywhackers lopped off. Not wanting to piss off God, Abram (ahem, Abraham) went along, and sacrificed what he was supposed to sacrifice.
God further went on to tell Abraham that he and his wife Sarai (who he now had to refer to as Sarah due to God’s micromanagement) would bear a child together called Isaac. Of course, since Abraham and his wife were by now decrepit old trolls, Abraham had a big laugh about this. In the meantime, Abraham went and circumcised every male member of his household, no matter how old they were, including his own son Ishmael, who was 13 at the time. Others, including Abraham himself of course, were a lot older when they elected to chop off part of their penises to appease God’s Holy Fetish.
Genesis 18
The Lord, feeling lonely, showed up at Abraham’s door again in the guise of three men. Abraham, not wanting to be rude, ordered his wife to cook up some bread and invited the men to hang out for a bit. In the meantime, he went off and slaughtered a cow for a barbecue. Not much is said as to what the three men did during the entire time Abraham was killing, dressing, and cooking a cow, but we assume foosball was involved.
Midsentence, the three men turn into one guy (God, of course), who says Sarah will bear a son. Sarah, having been through menopause, laughs heartily at this, which puts God right on the defensive.
In order to change the subject, God starts talking about the nastiness going on in Sodom and Gommorah. He muses that he should probably just destroy these cities, forgetting the lessons he learned a few chapters back about the inherent evil in Man.
Abraham, in an attempt to prove that all used car salesmen spring from his lineage, goes on to try and convince God to spare these cities through the power of bargaining. Initially, God says that he will spare the towns if he can just find 50 righteous people within them. After hours of mind-numbing negotiation, God eventually agrees to spare the city if at least 10 righteous people can be found.
Genesis 19
In order to find righteous people, two angels went door to door in Sodom. They found Lot, who took them in and gave them bread, as was the custom of the time. Unfortunately, these angels were apparently fine pieces of man meat, and so the other villagers came to Lot’s house and demanded he hand over the angels, so the mob might bone them senseless. Not wanting to subject his houseguests to rape, Lot made the next logical choice: He offered the crowd his daughters to rape instead.
Unfortunately, before this transaction could be completed, the angels pulled Lot back into the house and told him to gather up his entire extended family and belongings and leave the city. No one but his wife and daughters would listen though, and so he took his immediate family away from Sodom, so that God could feel free to destroy it without any hard feelings. God ordered him to flee far away, and never look back. Unfortunately, Lot’s wife realized at the last moment that she might have left the stove on, and glanced back in the direction of Sodom looking for any stove fires, and POOF, she was a pillar of salt.
Once Lot had left, God, deciding to go ahead and destroy evil men no matter what Friends had to say about it, proceeded to rain fire on Sodom and Gommorah, and destroyed them both.
In the meantime, Lot took his two daughters (who apparently weren’t all that perturbed about the fact that their father had tried to hand them over to a mob of rapists earlier) and lived in a cave. The daughters, concerned about their father’s prostate health, conspired to get him loaded and sleep with him. After two nights in which Lot’s daughters slept with him while he was loaded, they both got knocked up. They eventually had sons, who we assume had webbed feet and six toes, both of whom went on to have a ton of other kids.
Genesis 20
Abraham, apparently never content to stay in one place for long, went off to the land of Gerar. As was becoming something of a habit for him at this point, he gave his wife over to the king (Abimelech) so that he could ravish her while Abraham went off and did his thing. In order to grease the wheels of love, he told the king Sarah was his sister, not his wife, so don’t feel guilty about it or anything. God shows up in Abimelech’s bedroom and threatens to kill him for sleeping with a woman he was told to sleep with. Luckily for Abimelech, Sarah was a nasty old troll and he had run out of Viagra that morning, so he hadn’t actually done the deed yet. Appeased, God tells Abimelech to give Abraham back his wife, and in return no one would be killed.
Abimelech goes to lecture Abraham about why you shouldn’t go around encouraging people to sleep with your wife. Abraham, always a quick thinker, tells Abimelech that he didn’t actually lie per se, since Sarah was, in addition to being his wife, also his half sister. So if you think about it, it was really Abimelech’s fault for just assuming that just because someone offers you his sister to get down with, that must mean that sister isn’t also his wife.
For some crazy reason, Abimelech accepts Abraham’s explanation and gives him a bunch of money, livestock, and slaves to go away. Abraham, satisfied that the extortion had worked nicely, prayed to God to remove the curse over Abimelech’s house and let his women bear children again. Oh, did I mention that God had prevented all the women in the vicinity from having children because of the whole deal with Abimelech and Sarah? Well, he did. The Bible likes to leave these minor details to the end sometimes.
For those of you who are too stupid to figure out how to use Google to figure out what a Quad is, it’s a collection of the major works of scripture in the LDS church: the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. While using this particular source for the Bible makes me feel the irresistible urge to expand my work to include all of these books, I will resist for now. I also pledge not to use any of the Church’s annotations in this book to aid in my translation. As a recovering Mormon, I’m well aware that many of these annotations exist solely to try to create parallels, beyond the obvious outright plagiarism from Isaiah to 3rd Nephi, between the various Mormon scriptures and the Bible, and I prefer to use my own indoctrination, not the Church’s.
With that out of the way, I’d like to start with the latest installment of the Bible in Plain English. However, before we start, I’d just like to explain a little bit why this particular installment starts out midway through Chapter 11 of Genesis rather than at the beginning of a chapter. Well, throughout this little experiment I’ve tried to avoid translating the boring “begat” sections of the Bible, of which there are several. However, it turns out that the “begat” section at the end of Chapter 11 actually contains some fairly important information, so I’m going to give a quick little overview of it. With that said, on to the good stuff:
Genesis 11 (continued)
So there was a guy named Shem (not to be confused with Shemp, who walked with Moe and Larry). Anyway, despite all that nonsense that God spouted earlier about man living to only a hundred and twenty years, Shemp…er, Shem…lived way way longer than that, and poked many a Stooge in the eyes, except when God would inspire said stooge to put his hand up in front of the bridge of his nose. Thus was written Stooge law: One shall be wary of the eye poking, and must be ever ready with the hand of thwarting to protect the eyes from the evils of the fingerpoke. Amen.
Anyway, despite the fact that God had very clearly stated that men weren’t supposed to live beyond 120 years, many generations of Shem’s children lived far longer than that. Eventually, Terah was born. Terah has no relevance to our story, except that he was Abram’s father and Lot’s grandfather. Abram, as we shall see, turned out to be kind of a big deal.
So Abram had a brother named Nahor, who got himself a wife and raised some kids. Abram, on the other hand, decided to marry Sarai, who it turns out was barren. Bummer.
So it came to pass that Terah brought the primary characters in our little story (Abram, Sarai, and Lot) to Harad, which was just beyond Canaan. He then lived well beyond God’s chosen lifespan, and finally keeled over well after anyone had stopped caring about what sort of inheritance they could expect.
Genesis 12
So it came to pass that God went to Abram and told him that he needed to leave Harad and go to some other place, to be determined later. In return, God promised to make Abram’s offspring great and powerful, which had to be a little bit of a slap in the face to Abram, given that his wife was incapable of baby making.
Since Abram knew a good deal when he saw it, he decided to listen to God, and took off for greener pastures with his wife and Lot, who has to come along because he has a key plot point in a later chapter (foreshadowing!). He found a mountain, built an altar, and kept on walking.
Unfortunately for Abram, there was a great famine on the land, and he was forced to find some rich folk to beg from. Fortunately for him, he was close to Egypt, which was ruled by the Pharaoh, who was about as rich as you could get back then.
Since Abram saw that his wife was a hotty, and also because he didn’t necessarily want to shut himself off from any choice Egyptian poontang, he told his wife to pretend like she was his sister. This she dutifully did, and was immediately taken to the Pharaoh’s house for a little bouncy bouncy. For the privilege of boning his sister, Pharaoh gave Abram lots of livestock and food. Unfortunately for him, God wasn’t too happy about this arrangement, and started plaguing the hell out of poor Pharaoh. Pharaoh, not knowing what else to do, kicked Abram and Sarai out of his kingdom. From then on, Pharaoh and the Jews lived in perfect harmony…or did they? (foreshadowing again!)
Genesis 13
Abram left Egypt with his wife and Lot (who tagged along because he was a major plot point), and settled in the general vicinity of the altar he built in chapter 12. Abram was filthy rich from the stuff he took from Egypt, and he and Lot set about building their own little livestock empires. Before long, they ran into all sorts of border disputes involving their hired hands, and they decided to split up. Lot went to Jordan, which included the cities of Sodom and Gommorah (even more foreshadowing!). Abram went to Canaan.
And it came to pass that God told Abram that he and his line would have dominion over all the land he could see. Of course, given that Abram couldn’t see anything beyond the horizon, that land probably didn’t exceed 10 square miles, but the point is God was promising Abram something. As it turns out, this promise would never be in the least controversial, and would certainly never result in three major religions fighting endlessly over the same spot.
Anyway, Abram eventually got sick of Canaan and moved to Hebron. As was his habit, he built another altar to God and set up camp and hung out for a while.
Genesis 14
It came to pass that a bunch of kings (or in today’s terms, warlords) did proceed to kicketh each others’s asses. In the melee, Lot was captured. Some busybody ran off and told Abram that his nephew was taken prisoner, and so Abram took a bunch of servants and went to go kick some ass. He and his servants kicked aforementioned ass, and got Lot back.
In order that the Mormons would have someone to name their high priests after, Melchizedek showed up to bless Abram. Like any good priest, he also extracted tithes from Abram and his clan. The King of Sodom offered help to Abram, but Abram refused, except to take provisions for his servants, because apparently Abram feels stealing is wrong unless you’re stealing from those filthy Egyptians.
Genesis 15
God came to Abram in a vision and attempted to comfort him. Abram, not being a total moron, asked God why he would bother to promise all this great stuff to Abram’s seed, when Abram’s wife was not capable of bearing children, and his only heir up to this point was not actually related to him.
God, displaying a stunning lack of understanding of the human anatomy, promises that the heir to Abram will spring from Abram’s bowels (a new and more literal definition of “dropping the kids off at the pool” perhaps?), and will not be some schmo Abram decided to name because he didn’t have any kids. God furthermore told Abram that he would have countless offspring, which would populate this land the Lord had given him.
God, being an insatiable carnivore, commanded Abram to kill a bunch of helpless animals for a sacrifice. Abram did just that, and then sat around waiting for God to show up, chasing away vultures along the way because God was taking his sweet time getting there.
At this point, God puts Abram to sleep, the better to talk to him without any sassmouth, and tells him his people will end up in bondage for a few hundred years, after which they’ll totally get that land they were promised. Pinky swear.
During the same night, God promised Abram and his seed all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. And since then, no one has ever disputed that claim, and Abram’s offspring have lived there in perfect harmony. Just kidding.
Genesis 16
So it came to pass that Sarai started feeling guilty about not being able to bear children. In order to appease her husband, she offered to let him bone her servant Hagar (who was apparently not that horrible. Oh yah, I went there) in order to get some kids. Unfortunately for her, the plan worked, and Hagar got preggo. Upset about this whole thing, which she brought on herself, Sarai decided to bitch to Abram. Abram told Sarai to deal with Hagar however she wished, and by the way stop bothering him in the middle of Wheel of Fortune.
So, Sarai made the logical choice and started beating the hell out of Hagar. Hagar took off in fear, and an angel of God caught up with her and told her to go back. Thus, God’s pro-domestic-violence stance was established.
At any rate, God told Hagar she would bear a son, and that son would be a holy terror. That son was called Ishmael. He later went on to hunt the Great White Whale, but that’s a different story.
Genesis 17
God came back to Abram to micromanage a little more. Feeling that Abram needed something of a brand rehabilitation, God decided to rename him Abraham and his wife Sarah. This event established the fact that a superfluous “h” makes any name better.
Not content with just giving away land, however, God changes the terms of the contract here, suddenly demanding that anyone he would accept into his convenant must have the tips of their tallywhackers lopped off. Not wanting to piss off God, Abram (ahem, Abraham) went along, and sacrificed what he was supposed to sacrifice.
God further went on to tell Abraham that he and his wife Sarai (who he now had to refer to as Sarah due to God’s micromanagement) would bear a child together called Isaac. Of course, since Abraham and his wife were by now decrepit old trolls, Abraham had a big laugh about this. In the meantime, Abraham went and circumcised every male member of his household, no matter how old they were, including his own son Ishmael, who was 13 at the time. Others, including Abraham himself of course, were a lot older when they elected to chop off part of their penises to appease God’s Holy Fetish.
Genesis 18
The Lord, feeling lonely, showed up at Abraham’s door again in the guise of three men. Abraham, not wanting to be rude, ordered his wife to cook up some bread and invited the men to hang out for a bit. In the meantime, he went off and slaughtered a cow for a barbecue. Not much is said as to what the three men did during the entire time Abraham was killing, dressing, and cooking a cow, but we assume foosball was involved.
Midsentence, the three men turn into one guy (God, of course), who says Sarah will bear a son. Sarah, having been through menopause, laughs heartily at this, which puts God right on the defensive.
In order to change the subject, God starts talking about the nastiness going on in Sodom and Gommorah. He muses that he should probably just destroy these cities, forgetting the lessons he learned a few chapters back about the inherent evil in Man.
Abraham, in an attempt to prove that all used car salesmen spring from his lineage, goes on to try and convince God to spare these cities through the power of bargaining. Initially, God says that he will spare the towns if he can just find 50 righteous people within them. After hours of mind-numbing negotiation, God eventually agrees to spare the city if at least 10 righteous people can be found.
Genesis 19
In order to find righteous people, two angels went door to door in Sodom. They found Lot, who took them in and gave them bread, as was the custom of the time. Unfortunately, these angels were apparently fine pieces of man meat, and so the other villagers came to Lot’s house and demanded he hand over the angels, so the mob might bone them senseless. Not wanting to subject his houseguests to rape, Lot made the next logical choice: He offered the crowd his daughters to rape instead.
Unfortunately, before this transaction could be completed, the angels pulled Lot back into the house and told him to gather up his entire extended family and belongings and leave the city. No one but his wife and daughters would listen though, and so he took his immediate family away from Sodom, so that God could feel free to destroy it without any hard feelings. God ordered him to flee far away, and never look back. Unfortunately, Lot’s wife realized at the last moment that she might have left the stove on, and glanced back in the direction of Sodom looking for any stove fires, and POOF, she was a pillar of salt.
Once Lot had left, God, deciding to go ahead and destroy evil men no matter what Friends had to say about it, proceeded to rain fire on Sodom and Gommorah, and destroyed them both.
In the meantime, Lot took his two daughters (who apparently weren’t all that perturbed about the fact that their father had tried to hand them over to a mob of rapists earlier) and lived in a cave. The daughters, concerned about their father’s prostate health, conspired to get him loaded and sleep with him. After two nights in which Lot’s daughters slept with him while he was loaded, they both got knocked up. They eventually had sons, who we assume had webbed feet and six toes, both of whom went on to have a ton of other kids.
Genesis 20
Abraham, apparently never content to stay in one place for long, went off to the land of Gerar. As was becoming something of a habit for him at this point, he gave his wife over to the king (Abimelech) so that he could ravish her while Abraham went off and did his thing. In order to grease the wheels of love, he told the king Sarah was his sister, not his wife, so don’t feel guilty about it or anything. God shows up in Abimelech’s bedroom and threatens to kill him for sleeping with a woman he was told to sleep with. Luckily for Abimelech, Sarah was a nasty old troll and he had run out of Viagra that morning, so he hadn’t actually done the deed yet. Appeased, God tells Abimelech to give Abraham back his wife, and in return no one would be killed.
Abimelech goes to lecture Abraham about why you shouldn’t go around encouraging people to sleep with your wife. Abraham, always a quick thinker, tells Abimelech that he didn’t actually lie per se, since Sarah was, in addition to being his wife, also his half sister. So if you think about it, it was really Abimelech’s fault for just assuming that just because someone offers you his sister to get down with, that must mean that sister isn’t also his wife.
For some crazy reason, Abimelech accepts Abraham’s explanation and gives him a bunch of money, livestock, and slaves to go away. Abraham, satisfied that the extortion had worked nicely, prayed to God to remove the curse over Abimelech’s house and let his women bear children again. Oh, did I mention that God had prevented all the women in the vicinity from having children because of the whole deal with Abimelech and Sarah? Well, he did. The Bible likes to leave these minor details to the end sometimes.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Genesis 2-11
Okay, so I have a little bit of a confession to make: I've never actually read the Bible the entire way through. Sure, in my wild and misspent youth I would occasionally decide to make a pact with myself to read the entire Bible cover to cover, but I would rarely make it out of Genesis before giving up. My personal record is all of Genesis and about two thirds of the way through Exodus.
However, I don't feel all that guilty about that though, because I have a dirty little secret that will rock the foundations of religion itself: Nobody has ever read the Bible front to back. Ever. Not even the Pope. It's boring as hell. Sure, some people might claim to have read the whole thing, but then they give themselves away by spouting some nonsense about how God is love or whatever. They can't fool me, because as someone who has personally read almost two entire books in the Bible, I can tell you God is kind of a dick sometimes. Hell, if you're talking Old Testament only, he's a dick most of the time.
Anyway, now that we have that out of the way, I present to you Genesis Chapters 2 through 11:
Genesis 2
So finally God had finished his work, and he decided to take a day off. In order to avoid being called a lazy bastard by all the other gods, he decided to declare the seventh day a day off for everyone. That way, people would be too busy jet skiing in Lake Heaven to harp on God's lack of work ethic.
After that, though, God had his work cut out for him. You see, it turns out that although God is great at the creating stuff thing, he sucks at planning ahead. Since he had failed to make it rain and had likewise failed to create some creature smart enough to work the fields for him, he had to do all that shit himself. So, because God didn't want to have to keep working the fields himself (I swear I am not making this up), he created Man. Then, he planted a garden specifically for the man to toil over. He also created a bunch of rivers, and put Man in the middle of everything to keep the place up, so as to protect the Divine Resale Value.
In order that Man should have lots of shade, God planted tons of trees. God told Man he could eat whatever he wanted, but please don't go near the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because that's where God kept his porn stash. Then, although God had already formed every beast and bird on Earth in the previous chapter, he decided to do so again for no readily apparent reason, and brought them all to Adam (oh, did we mention Man's name was Adam? No? Oh, well it is). The wording of this passage suggests he was really bringing forth all these animals so Adam could pick one to do the nasty with, but unfortunately Adam wasn't big on bestiality, so he found no "help meet for him". Seriously, that's what it says.
Frustrated with Adam's high standards, God chloroforms him and takes out one of his ribs and forms a woman with it, modeled in the image of God's Real Doll.
Genesis 3
Lo and behold, it turns out that God had decided to make snakes along with all the other animals. Not just any snakes mind you, but talking snakes. So, eventually one of these talking snakes decides to talk to the woman and convince her that God is a filthy liar, and that eating from the tree of knowledge actually won't kill anyone, but will instead only allow them to know the difference between good and evil. As it turns out, the serpent is actually telling the truth and God was in fact lying through his immaculate teeth, but we're still supposed to consider the serpent a villain. Okey dokey then.
Anyway, the woman decided to not only eat, but also rope her husband in as well, and thus they both learned the horrors of knowledge: Suddenly, instead of gallivanting around in the buff all over the garden, they decided they shouldn't really be seeing each others' naughty bits. Not only that, they began to suspect this whole naked people in a garden thing was really just a way for God to make some extra cash with a webcam peep show, and thus decided to start hiding themselves from God. Of course, this made God and his accountant very angry, so he came down to see what the deal was.
Upon being confronted by God, Adam immediately rats out his wife, and the wife blames the snake, who by this point has escaped with God's porno to a knothole in the Tree of Life for a little alone time. In response, God curses Adam for being stupid enough to listen to his wife, and curses his wife for being a disobedient bitch.
Then, to make matters worse, God dispatches a couple of angels with giant swords to keep Adam and Eve (the wife's name is Eve, by the way, although we didn't find that out until a couple of verses ago) from eating from the Tree of Life, which supposedly would make them live forever. However, since God has already been shown to be something of a fibber, the Tree of Life more than likely would have just given them herpes or something.
Genesis 4
So it came to pass that Adam and Eve did fucketh, and out of their loins came Cain and Abel. Abel took care of sheep for a living, which is a fairly easy job. Basically, you let the sheep eat grass, and you make sure they don't go wandering off a cliff, and you're all set. Cain, on the other hand, busted his ass growing crops in the ground. Anyway, Abel decides to murder an innocent sheep to sacrifice to God, while Cain sacrifices some of the crops he's worked his ass off on for months. Unfortunately, God is a carnivore, and tells Cain he needs to come up with some meat pronto, or no blessings for him. So, since Cain didn't raise animals, he made the next logical choice: He made meat out of his brother.
So God found out about this, and instead of being pleased with the sacrifice of human meat, he cursed Cain to go live away from his family in misery in a land called Nod, which apparently existed even though the bible said there were only four people on Earth at this point. I mean seriously, what the fuck guys. We went from four people on the whole planet to suddenly a whole other country where Cain could hang out, meet a wife, and pop out some kids. The rest of the chapter is just a bunch of nonsense about how all these previously nonexistent people went on to have more kids, and so on and so forth.
Genesis 5
A bunch of people had a bunch of kids. A bunch of people lived for a ludicrously long amount of time. Eventually, Noah was born. Yay.
Genesis 6
At this point, God decided the population was getting out of hand, and decided to decree that men would only live to 120 years old. Also, he was about to go on vacation, so if someone could maybe feed the cats every so often, that would be great, and he would see everyone in a few millennia.
Also, there were giants on the earth. For whatever that's worth. I don't know, someone thought it was worth mentioning. Also, sometimes daughters of men would have kids with these giants and they would be great men whose births must have hurt like a motherfucker.
Anyway, God eventually decided that men were a bunch of evil bastards, probably because not enough of them were sacrificing sheep to him, and decided to destroy everyone and take a mulligan on this whole Earth thing. Unfortunately, God owed Noah a big favor, and couldn't just kill him along with everyone else. So, God told Noah to make a three story ship and cram two of every living thing into it, because even though God wanted to destroy men, he was really in no mood to go through that whole creation thing again. So Noah, who apparently didn't mind the overpowering stench of animal feces, agreed to build the boat.
Genesis 7
God, apparently deciding Noah agreed a little too quickly for his liking, changes the rules a bit in this chapter. Instead of Noah bringing two of every animal, now Noah has to bring seven of every clean animal, including birds, and two of every unclean animal. Noah, being a six hundred year old man (seriously!) was nevertheless one hell of a trouper, because he did everything God asked him to, and in return he got to spend 190 days (40 days of rain, and another 150 to wait for things to dry off) in a rickety wooden boat with thousands of smelly animals (such as his sons and their families. Zing!)
Anyway, everything else on Earth died. Sucks to be them.
Genesis 8
Eventually, God remembered he had sent this Noah guy to drift around on a boat, and decided to dry up the waters and let the boat crash into a mountain. For a month or two, Noah sent out various birds to find dry land. Eventually they did, and Noah released all the animals. Then, Noah decides to take several of the animals he's been carting around all over the world for 6 months and burn them to make God happy. Because if there's one thing God loves, it's a barbecue. After a long night of beer and burnt goat flesh, God agrees not to destroy the whole Earth again because, as the very special episode of Friends he had watched the previous Thursday had taught him, man was inherently evil, and as the creator of Man it was not cool for him to punish them for the nature he himself hoisted on them in the first place. And thus God learned a valuable lesson. Filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Genesis 9
After the flood, God told Noah and his family that they should go out and eat whatever animals they wanted, and don't worry because PETA wasn't going to be invented for several thousand years yet. He also decided that his previous promise not to destroy the Earth wasn't good enough, so he brought forth a little bling in the form of a rainbow as a symbol of his promise not to go drowning everyone again.
So it came to pass that Noah decided to make wine and, being the first person to have come up with the idea of fermenting grapes, got pretty loaded and fell asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, found him that way and told his brothers, who covered him up. Noah, waking up with the mother of all hangovers, learned that his son Ham had seen him naked and, as any reasonable father would do, sold Ham's entire family line into slavery under his brothers as punishment. Noah lived a whole helluva lot longer, and finally kicked it. End of Chapter 9.
Chapter 10
A whole bunch of generations were born, and evidently lots of time passed. For whatever reason, people developed different languages and someone got the bright idea to name one of their kids Nimrod, thus inventing the wedgie. That's about all that's going on in this chapter.
Chapter 11
At this point the whole Earth all spoke one language. Wait a minute, didn't the last chapter just say that people developed their own tongues? What the fuck happened to that?
Anyway, as usually happens when you get a large group of people together, some really crazy ideas took shape. The people decided to build a big tower so as to reach Heaven, since God was no longer returning anyone's phone calls. God, not liking the idea that these uppity humans could come up with a clever idea if they worked together, destroyed the tower and confused everyone so they all started speaking different languages. This made the Tower of Babel Reunion Party a real ordeal.
However, I don't feel all that guilty about that though, because I have a dirty little secret that will rock the foundations of religion itself: Nobody has ever read the Bible front to back. Ever. Not even the Pope. It's boring as hell. Sure, some people might claim to have read the whole thing, but then they give themselves away by spouting some nonsense about how God is love or whatever. They can't fool me, because as someone who has personally read almost two entire books in the Bible, I can tell you God is kind of a dick sometimes. Hell, if you're talking Old Testament only, he's a dick most of the time.
Anyway, now that we have that out of the way, I present to you Genesis Chapters 2 through 11:
Genesis 2
So finally God had finished his work, and he decided to take a day off. In order to avoid being called a lazy bastard by all the other gods, he decided to declare the seventh day a day off for everyone. That way, people would be too busy jet skiing in Lake Heaven to harp on God's lack of work ethic.
After that, though, God had his work cut out for him. You see, it turns out that although God is great at the creating stuff thing, he sucks at planning ahead. Since he had failed to make it rain and had likewise failed to create some creature smart enough to work the fields for him, he had to do all that shit himself. So, because God didn't want to have to keep working the fields himself (I swear I am not making this up), he created Man. Then, he planted a garden specifically for the man to toil over. He also created a bunch of rivers, and put Man in the middle of everything to keep the place up, so as to protect the Divine Resale Value.
In order that Man should have lots of shade, God planted tons of trees. God told Man he could eat whatever he wanted, but please don't go near the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because that's where God kept his porn stash. Then, although God had already formed every beast and bird on Earth in the previous chapter, he decided to do so again for no readily apparent reason, and brought them all to Adam (oh, did we mention Man's name was Adam? No? Oh, well it is). The wording of this passage suggests he was really bringing forth all these animals so Adam could pick one to do the nasty with, but unfortunately Adam wasn't big on bestiality, so he found no "help meet for him". Seriously, that's what it says.
Frustrated with Adam's high standards, God chloroforms him and takes out one of his ribs and forms a woman with it, modeled in the image of God's Real Doll.
Genesis 3
Lo and behold, it turns out that God had decided to make snakes along with all the other animals. Not just any snakes mind you, but talking snakes. So, eventually one of these talking snakes decides to talk to the woman and convince her that God is a filthy liar, and that eating from the tree of knowledge actually won't kill anyone, but will instead only allow them to know the difference between good and evil. As it turns out, the serpent is actually telling the truth and God was in fact lying through his immaculate teeth, but we're still supposed to consider the serpent a villain. Okey dokey then.
Anyway, the woman decided to not only eat, but also rope her husband in as well, and thus they both learned the horrors of knowledge: Suddenly, instead of gallivanting around in the buff all over the garden, they decided they shouldn't really be seeing each others' naughty bits. Not only that, they began to suspect this whole naked people in a garden thing was really just a way for God to make some extra cash with a webcam peep show, and thus decided to start hiding themselves from God. Of course, this made God and his accountant very angry, so he came down to see what the deal was.
Upon being confronted by God, Adam immediately rats out his wife, and the wife blames the snake, who by this point has escaped with God's porno to a knothole in the Tree of Life for a little alone time. In response, God curses Adam for being stupid enough to listen to his wife, and curses his wife for being a disobedient bitch.
Then, to make matters worse, God dispatches a couple of angels with giant swords to keep Adam and Eve (the wife's name is Eve, by the way, although we didn't find that out until a couple of verses ago) from eating from the Tree of Life, which supposedly would make them live forever. However, since God has already been shown to be something of a fibber, the Tree of Life more than likely would have just given them herpes or something.
Genesis 4
So it came to pass that Adam and Eve did fucketh, and out of their loins came Cain and Abel. Abel took care of sheep for a living, which is a fairly easy job. Basically, you let the sheep eat grass, and you make sure they don't go wandering off a cliff, and you're all set. Cain, on the other hand, busted his ass growing crops in the ground. Anyway, Abel decides to murder an innocent sheep to sacrifice to God, while Cain sacrifices some of the crops he's worked his ass off on for months. Unfortunately, God is a carnivore, and tells Cain he needs to come up with some meat pronto, or no blessings for him. So, since Cain didn't raise animals, he made the next logical choice: He made meat out of his brother.
So God found out about this, and instead of being pleased with the sacrifice of human meat, he cursed Cain to go live away from his family in misery in a land called Nod, which apparently existed even though the bible said there were only four people on Earth at this point. I mean seriously, what the fuck guys. We went from four people on the whole planet to suddenly a whole other country where Cain could hang out, meet a wife, and pop out some kids. The rest of the chapter is just a bunch of nonsense about how all these previously nonexistent people went on to have more kids, and so on and so forth.
Genesis 5
A bunch of people had a bunch of kids. A bunch of people lived for a ludicrously long amount of time. Eventually, Noah was born. Yay.
Genesis 6
At this point, God decided the population was getting out of hand, and decided to decree that men would only live to 120 years old. Also, he was about to go on vacation, so if someone could maybe feed the cats every so often, that would be great, and he would see everyone in a few millennia.
Also, there were giants on the earth. For whatever that's worth. I don't know, someone thought it was worth mentioning. Also, sometimes daughters of men would have kids with these giants and they would be great men whose births must have hurt like a motherfucker.
Anyway, God eventually decided that men were a bunch of evil bastards, probably because not enough of them were sacrificing sheep to him, and decided to destroy everyone and take a mulligan on this whole Earth thing. Unfortunately, God owed Noah a big favor, and couldn't just kill him along with everyone else. So, God told Noah to make a three story ship and cram two of every living thing into it, because even though God wanted to destroy men, he was really in no mood to go through that whole creation thing again. So Noah, who apparently didn't mind the overpowering stench of animal feces, agreed to build the boat.
Genesis 7
God, apparently deciding Noah agreed a little too quickly for his liking, changes the rules a bit in this chapter. Instead of Noah bringing two of every animal, now Noah has to bring seven of every clean animal, including birds, and two of every unclean animal. Noah, being a six hundred year old man (seriously!) was nevertheless one hell of a trouper, because he did everything God asked him to, and in return he got to spend 190 days (40 days of rain, and another 150 to wait for things to dry off) in a rickety wooden boat with thousands of smelly animals (such as his sons and their families. Zing!)
Anyway, everything else on Earth died. Sucks to be them.
Genesis 8
Eventually, God remembered he had sent this Noah guy to drift around on a boat, and decided to dry up the waters and let the boat crash into a mountain. For a month or two, Noah sent out various birds to find dry land. Eventually they did, and Noah released all the animals. Then, Noah decides to take several of the animals he's been carting around all over the world for 6 months and burn them to make God happy. Because if there's one thing God loves, it's a barbecue. After a long night of beer and burnt goat flesh, God agrees not to destroy the whole Earth again because, as the very special episode of Friends he had watched the previous Thursday had taught him, man was inherently evil, and as the creator of Man it was not cool for him to punish them for the nature he himself hoisted on them in the first place. And thus God learned a valuable lesson. Filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Genesis 9
After the flood, God told Noah and his family that they should go out and eat whatever animals they wanted, and don't worry because PETA wasn't going to be invented for several thousand years yet. He also decided that his previous promise not to destroy the Earth wasn't good enough, so he brought forth a little bling in the form of a rainbow as a symbol of his promise not to go drowning everyone again.
So it came to pass that Noah decided to make wine and, being the first person to have come up with the idea of fermenting grapes, got pretty loaded and fell asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, found him that way and told his brothers, who covered him up. Noah, waking up with the mother of all hangovers, learned that his son Ham had seen him naked and, as any reasonable father would do, sold Ham's entire family line into slavery under his brothers as punishment. Noah lived a whole helluva lot longer, and finally kicked it. End of Chapter 9.
Chapter 10
A whole bunch of generations were born, and evidently lots of time passed. For whatever reason, people developed different languages and someone got the bright idea to name one of their kids Nimrod, thus inventing the wedgie. That's about all that's going on in this chapter.
Chapter 11
At this point the whole Earth all spoke one language. Wait a minute, didn't the last chapter just say that people developed their own tongues? What the fuck happened to that?
Anyway, as usually happens when you get a large group of people together, some really crazy ideas took shape. The people decided to build a big tower so as to reach Heaven, since God was no longer returning anyone's phone calls. God, not liking the idea that these uppity humans could come up with a clever idea if they worked together, destroyed the tower and confused everyone so they all started speaking different languages. This made the Tower of Babel Reunion Party a real ordeal.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Genesis 1: Translated
Genesis 1
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. God created heaven because he needed a place to live, as the '76 Pacer he was living in at the time was getting a little cramped. The reasons for creating the earth are thus far unexplained.
The earth in its initial design was formless and generally uninteresting. So, God decided to create light. He created night and day, and wisely decided to let the whole thing sit for a 24 hour "burn-in" period, just to make sure everything was kosher.
On the second day, God created the firmament, which he called Heaven. Since he already created a heaven on the first day, we have to assume this second Heaven was something of a do-over. As we'll see throughout the Bible, God is a big fan of do-overs, at least when he's the one screwing up. God makes a special point to keep water up there in Heaven, because he's a big jetskier. This concludes the second day.
On the third day, God decided to create dry land that would rise above the water that he had apparently created at some earlier point. God called the land Earth, and the water Sea, which shows He has something of a creative flair. But then again, what would you expect from a god named God?
Having decided creating all that land wasn't enough for one day, God decided to go ahead and plant some trees while he was at it. He created grass and other various plants. He also created hayfever, since, as we will see many times over the course of the Bible, God has something of a sick sense of humor. So ends the third day.
On the fourth day, God created two lights in the sky to rule over day and night. This is despite the fact that he had already created light, and had already differentiated between day and night. Furthermore, one of these lights, as we would later find out, wasn't really an independent light source at all. Actually, it was just reflecting the light from the first source (the Sun). We can only assume this was done because God is lazy. So endeth the fourth day.
On the fifth day, God created a bunch of sea creatures and birds. Other than His apparent affinity for whales (is that a fat joke directed at Mrs. God?), nothing else interesting happened on the fifth day. Oh, except God tells all the sea creatures to get it on. But really, what's so interesting about whales humping?
On the sixth day, God created all the land animals, including cows and spiders. Not a lot of detail as to what was created here, but since this is Friday, and God tends to check out around noon on Fridays, this is not surprising.
Later that same day, God decided to create humans in his own image. We assume this is because it was already getting late, and he was eager for the weekend and didn't want to come up with some entirely new design. Since they were in his own image, he decided unilaterally to give humans dominion over everything. This is what nepotism gets you, people. No mention is made of ribs or creating male before female or anything like that. God just popped out a couple of kids and called it good.
Thus ends Genesis Chapter 1.
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. God created heaven because he needed a place to live, as the '76 Pacer he was living in at the time was getting a little cramped. The reasons for creating the earth are thus far unexplained.
The earth in its initial design was formless and generally uninteresting. So, God decided to create light. He created night and day, and wisely decided to let the whole thing sit for a 24 hour "burn-in" period, just to make sure everything was kosher.
On the second day, God created the firmament, which he called Heaven. Since he already created a heaven on the first day, we have to assume this second Heaven was something of a do-over. As we'll see throughout the Bible, God is a big fan of do-overs, at least when he's the one screwing up. God makes a special point to keep water up there in Heaven, because he's a big jetskier. This concludes the second day.
On the third day, God decided to create dry land that would rise above the water that he had apparently created at some earlier point. God called the land Earth, and the water Sea, which shows He has something of a creative flair. But then again, what would you expect from a god named God?
Having decided creating all that land wasn't enough for one day, God decided to go ahead and plant some trees while he was at it. He created grass and other various plants. He also created hayfever, since, as we will see many times over the course of the Bible, God has something of a sick sense of humor. So ends the third day.
On the fourth day, God created two lights in the sky to rule over day and night. This is despite the fact that he had already created light, and had already differentiated between day and night. Furthermore, one of these lights, as we would later find out, wasn't really an independent light source at all. Actually, it was just reflecting the light from the first source (the Sun). We can only assume this was done because God is lazy. So endeth the fourth day.
On the fifth day, God created a bunch of sea creatures and birds. Other than His apparent affinity for whales (is that a fat joke directed at Mrs. God?), nothing else interesting happened on the fifth day. Oh, except God tells all the sea creatures to get it on. But really, what's so interesting about whales humping?
On the sixth day, God created all the land animals, including cows and spiders. Not a lot of detail as to what was created here, but since this is Friday, and God tends to check out around noon on Fridays, this is not surprising.
Later that same day, God decided to create humans in his own image. We assume this is because it was already getting late, and he was eager for the weekend and didn't want to come up with some entirely new design. Since they were in his own image, he decided unilaterally to give humans dominion over everything. This is what nepotism gets you, people. No mention is made of ribs or creating male before female or anything like that. God just popped out a couple of kids and called it good.
Thus ends Genesis Chapter 1.
The Bible in Plain English: Introduction
So a while back I had this grandiose idea to translate the entire Bible into language the average imbecile could understand. Since, as a recovering Mormon, I have the unshakable belief that the King James Version is the only true Bible, I had my work cut out for me. After all, who would possibly tackle translating a 17th century text into modern English, other than the thousands who have tried before me? No one, that's who.
So, I wrote up a quick translation of Genesis 1. I hope it will inspire you as it has inspired me. But first, a translation of the preface to the King James version of the Bible:
Dear King James,
You are the greatest. Seriously, don't ever change. Here is the manuscript of the translated Bible you ordered. Since you are so magnificent, it can't possibly hold a candle to your awesomeness. Seriously, have you been working out?
Anyway, enjoy the book. And please don't kill us.
So, I wrote up a quick translation of Genesis 1. I hope it will inspire you as it has inspired me. But first, a translation of the preface to the King James version of the Bible:
Dear King James,
You are the greatest. Seriously, don't ever change. Here is the manuscript of the translated Bible you ordered. Since you are so magnificent, it can't possibly hold a candle to your awesomeness. Seriously, have you been working out?
Anyway, enjoy the book. And please don't kill us.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
All the good names are taken
I was going to name this blog "Sensible Madness" because I like that name, but the URL was taken. So, I went with the 100% guaranteed to be accurate Babelfish French translation of "Sensible Madness". Because really, what's funnier than French? Nothing, that's what.
Coincidentally, nothing is precisely what I have in mind for this thing. Maybe it will be abandoned. Maybe it will become the one true source of brilliance on the Internet. Only time will tell.
Coincidentally, nothing is precisely what I have in mind for this thing. Maybe it will be abandoned. Maybe it will become the one true source of brilliance on the Internet. Only time will tell.
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