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.