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.
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