No Bullshit Bible Lesson #11: Isaac

Genesis, Chapters 22-23:

When Abraham was hanging out at Abimelech's place, he was visited by God,
        “Abraham.”
        “Yes?”
        “So....you know that miracle kid your wife had? Isaac?”
        “Uh...yeah.”
        “Turns out, I’m gonna need to take him back. So, I need for you to go to Moriah, and sacrifice him to me on a to-be-disclosed mountain.”
        “Okay. First thing in the morning good for you?”
        “Sure.”

True to his word, Abraham packed up and set out to sacrifice his only (now that Ishmael had been sent away) son to God. He traveled for three days to reach the spot where he was to needlessly kill his son and only heir, with nary a lingering doubt all the while. Seeing the place in the distance, they pulled to a stop and Abraham told his servant to wait while he went to “worship.”

Abraham and Isaac went to the place of sacrifice, the boy carrying all the firewood,
        “Father,” called Isaac.
        “Yes?”
        “Um...I notice you have a torch for the fire and a knife for the killing and plenty of wood for the burning, but you seem to have forgotten the lamb to sacrifice.”
        “God will provide the lamb,” Abraham lied. Isaac, gullible with youth, accepted this, not seeing that God providing His own sacrifice was a little like a birthday-boy providing his own presents.

When they got to the spot, Abraham built an altar and tied up Isaac who, for his part, seemed unconcerned that there was no lamb in sight as he was being bound and placed onto an altar by his knife-weilding father. With this part of the task complete, Abraham grasped his knife and brought it down for the killing blow.

        “Abraham!” called an angel from the heavens.
        “Uh...what? I’m trying to kill my son here.”
        “You don’t have to kill the kid. I get the idea, you are clearly scared shitless of me, seeing as how you were totally willing to kill your only son just because I told you to,” the angel said, speaking of God in the first person for some reason.

Looking up, Abraham spotted a ram behind him (somehow) with its horns stuck in a thicket. So, clearly needing to fulfill a bloodlust, whether his own or God’s, he killed that instead.

        “Oh, hey,” came the angel’s voice again, “since you were totally willing to kill Isaac, I am so gonna multiply your seed.”

Abraham thought this sounded pretty groovy and went back home. God apparently was okay with a relatively loose definition of “seed,” because it was Abraham’s brother that ended up having his seed greatly multiplied, having 12 children with two women.

Sarah, however, never gave Abraham any more children, as she died at the age of 127. Abraham wept for her and, in his mourning, sought a place to bury her. As a powerful and respected man, a quite nice field/cave combo was gifted to him for this purpose.
        “How much do I owe you for this?” Abraham asked Ephron, the owner of the plot.
        “No, man. It’s a gift,” replied Ephron.
        “Come on, here. How much? I want to pay you. What’s the place worth?”
        “It’s worth 400 sheckels. That’s like, nothing. Just take the land and bury your wife.”

But Abraham was stubborn and gave Ephron the 400 sheckels, because he wanted to be sure that he could use the land as a family plot. Thus was born the deathcare industry.

No Bullshit Bible Lesson #10: Abraham and Abimelech

Genesis, Chapters 20-21:

Now that God had destoryed Sodom and Gomorrah, it was time to focus His energy back on Abraham.

Abraham, apparently missing the wild swinging days of his youth, traveled south with his wife Sarah and told the Abimelech, the king of that land, that Sarah was his sister. Despite the fact that she was now 90 years old, Abimelech took her.

That night, God appeared to Abimelech and said,
        “You’re a dead man.”
        “What? Why?”
        “That woman is married.”
        “Really? Okay, first, I never touched her. Second, That dude said she was his sister. And so did she! So, you can’t blame me, I was lied to.”
        “I know. That’s why I held you back from jumping her bones. Now giver her back and her husband, who is a prophet, will pray for you. If you don’t, you’ll die.”

So Abimelech went to Abraham and said,
        “Uh, what the hell, man? What did I ever do to you that you’d try to get me to have sex with your wife so that God would kill me?”
        “Eh. I figured you guys probably weren’t scared enough of Big G. Oh, and I didn’t actually lie. She is my sister. Well, half-sister. That’s just how we roll in my family.”

So Abimelech gave Abraham sheep, oxen, and both male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham, along with returning Sarah.
        “Well, sir,” Abimelech said, not messing around with a fried of God’s, “you can live anywhere on my land you want. Oh, and Sarah, I gave your ‘brother’ a thousand pieces of silver, so let’s pretend this never happened.” And she was cool with that.

So Abraham prayed to God, who healed Abimelech and his wife and his lady-slaves, and they had babies. Because, oh, yeah, God had sealed up all their wombs when Abimelech took Sarah, apparently.

So, back home, God decided it was time to keep his promise: thus was Sarah knocked up. She had the baby and she named him Isaac, because when God picks your baby’s name out for you, you don’t name him Mario. And, of course, when Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him.

So, after a while, Sarah happened to see Ishmael and was reminded that she frikken hated his mother, Hagar. So she went to Abraham,
        “Abe,” she said, “Now that you have a real kid, you need to send that bitch packing and tell her to take her bastard kid with her. He’s not going to inherit shit now that we have Isaac.”

Abraham was a bit conflicted because he didn’t want to send his son away, but neither did he want to sleep on the couch forever. God sensed this and came to him.
        “Do what your wife says, man! I’ll take care of the kid. Because he’s your son, he’ll get his own country.”

So Abraham packed up a hobo sack and sent Hagar and Ishmael off. After journeying for a while, they ran out of water, so Hagar pushed the kid under a shrub and went a few hundred yards away so she wouldn’t have to watch him die. As she sat there crying, and angel came to her,
        “Hey...chill out, lady. God heard your kid. Look over there.”

And when she opened her eyes, there was totally a well like, right there. So she filled up the bottle and gave some to Ishmael, who ended up growing big and strong, became an archer and married a nice Egyptian girl that his mommy picked out for him.

Around this time, Abimelech went to Abraham and said,
        “Abraham, I know you’re real tight with God. So I want to ask you straight-up: swear to me here, in front of God, that you won’t dick me over. Or any of my descendants. I did right by you, you do right by me.”
        “Sure, I swear. But, by the way, you’re in trouble because your people violently took away a well.”
        “Dude, I don’t know anything about that. Including how someone can forcibly remove a hole from the ground.”

Abraham then gave a bunch of sheep and oxen to Abimelech, and set seven lambs free to run wild.
        “Why’d you let those lambs go?” asked Abimelech.
        “Because we’re making a deal. Those are yours now, in return for you acknowledging that I dug this well.”
        “Right-O. See ya.” and Abimelech and his people took off back to the land of the Philistines. And Abraham planted a grove on that spot and hung out there for many days.

No Bullshit Bible Lesson #9: Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis, Chapter 19:

Now that God had committed himself to destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, unless he found 10 decent people there, a pair of His angels drifted into town. Lot, working the gate that night, got up and bowed to them.
        “Please, come rest yourselves in my home. We’ll get you fed and get those feet washed so you can continue on your way well-resting in the morning.”
        “Naw. We’d rather just stand here in the street all night,” they replied.
        “Okay, that’s just crazy-talk. Come on, in with you now, don’t be shy,” he pushed, until finally the men relented.

True to his word, he fed them a great feast with unleavened bread and the men ate it. While the feasting was happening, however, every man in the city surrounded Lot’s house. When they felt they had a proper mob going on, they called out to Lot,
        “Hey, Lot! Where are those guys you’ve got staying with you? Send them on out here so we can gang-rape them!”

Lot went to meet them at the door. “C’mon, don’t be like that. They’re my guests. It would be a bit rude to just hand them over to a motley gang of butt-pirates. Tell you what: I have two fine-ass daughters. Virgins, no less. I’ll send them out here and you can have them six ways from Sunday if you want. In return, you leave the total strangers I’m harboring alone.”
        “No deal,” they said, “Now stand aside and let us play priest-and-choirboy with those dudes, or you’re gonna get double what they get,” and they came close to forcing their way in.

The men in the house reached out and yanked Lot in, closing the door after him and they used their angel hoodoo to strike every man outside the door blind. The men outside the door, in turn, stumbled around, trying to find the door, clearly too concerned with their cornholing plans to worry about such small matters as sudden and complete blindness.

        “Okay, Lot,” the angels said, “get your family and your stuff and get the hell outta dodge, because God is gonna make this place look like what geologists will one day call the Archean Period, an imaginary long-ago time when the molten rock that formed the Earth began to cool.”
        “That sounds like insane babble.”
        “I know, right? Anyway, you should leave before God sends fire from the sky to punish the wicked.”
        “Makes sense.”

So Lot went and fetched his sons-in-law, casting extreme doubt upon his claim that his daughters were virgins, and told them what was happening. They p’shawed and ignored the old man, and he apparently didn’t press the issue too much, perhaps because they were douchebags.

The next morning, the angels woke up Lot, who had gone home to get a good night’s sleep on the eve of the entire nation’s fiery destruction.
        “Wake up, get your wife and daughters and get the hell outta here, or you’re going to be fried to a toasy crisp with all these other sinning a-holes.”

Lot sort of meandered about, putting it off, so the angels grabbed him and his family and took them out of the city themselves. Once safely away, the angels reiterated the importance of not sticking around for the flaming holocaust,
        “Okay, now, seriously. Take off. Just run, okay? Don’t look back, don’t stop for a beer, just run away from here to the mountain or you will be kindling.”
        “Awww...the mountain? I hate that place. Seriously. If I have to go there, I’ll just, like, die. Can I go to the little nearby town of Zoar instead?” he asked, totally oblivious of the enormity of the situation.
        “Fine,” Said God, who must have turned up at some point, “I’ll change my plans for a Holy Cleansing of this wicked land so you don’t have to be inconvenienced. Being a picky little whiner must run in your family, though. Now go, because I can’t kill thousands of people until you get there safely.”

So Lot and his family went to Zoar and God got to rain fire from the sky at those who had pissed Him off, until there was nothing left but ash and tiny glass pebbles. While this was happening, Lot’s wife looked in the direction of the giant fireworks show in the sky, apparently the only person in Zoar to do so, because no one else was reported as having turned into a pillar of salt.

Lot got up the next morning, seemingly unfazed that his wife has been turned to salt for no reason and with no warning that looking at the display would have repercussions. His wife probably assumed when they said not to look back that they just meant to hurry up to avoid a scorching demise. Anyway, Lot was also feeling adventurous, because when he woke, he looked out at the smoking, smoldering remains of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Despite what Lot told God, he was suddenly afraid to live in Zoar and would rather live in the mountain after all. So he packed up his daughters and they moved into a cave.

        “Dad’s pretty old,” said his older, nameless daughter to her nameless younger sibling, “so he’s not likely to remarry and, let’s face it, living in a cave in a mountain, you and I aren’t getting new husbands. Ooh! Know what we should do? We should totally get Dad drunk off his ass and do him, so we can continue our bloodline.”
        “Good idea, Sis!”

So, they got him so drunk that when Older Daughter went and jumped his bones, he remembered none of it the next morning.

        “Success!” she reported the next day, “now, we’ll just get him drunk again tonight, and it’ll be your turn to have sex with Dad!”
        “Okay!”

So they got him drunk again, and Younger Daughter did the Daddy Deed.

Nine months later, they gave birth to Moab and Benammi, respectively. And thus, the precedent was set for women to always be portrayed as nameless whores, deceivers, sluts and sex-objects.

No Bullshit Bible Lesson #8: Haggling with God

Genesis, Chapter 18:

God came to Abraham once again, now that Abraham had mutilated every penis in his household. It was a hot day and God came to Abraham as he sat in the doorway of his tent. When he looked up, Abraham saw three men standing by him. “By” in a pretty loose sense, since Abraham then jumped up and ran to them. God must have ducked behind a camel, though, because Abraham seems not to have noticed Him at all.
        “Hey, don’t go anywhere! Let me send for some water, I’ll have a slave wash your feet. You just rest here under the tree! And I’ll get you some bread, as your humble servant.” he exclaimed, strangely eager to please some total strangers that wandered in out of the desert and not acting at all as a Father of nations, despite the “ah” in his name which was, somehow, meant to indicate that.

He then ran in the tent.
        “Sarah!” he called out, “Go get three measures of meal, knead it and make some cakes!” Then he ran out to the stables, found a nice, tender calf ad had the stable boy kill it expediently. Once that was finished, he brought the meat, plus milk and butter, to the men, and they all chowed down.
        “Where’s your wife, Sarah?” said one of the men.
        “Oh, over in the tent,” replied Abraham, not wondering how the hell this clown knew his wife’s name.
        “I’m gonna come back according to the time of life, and she’s gonna have a son,” the man replied, not creeping Abraham out at all.

Behind them, at the door of the tent, Sarah heard this and laughed to herself,
        “Is that guy saying that he’s going to give this 90 year old woman pleasure, which I clearly haven’t known in a while since my husband’s no spring chicken either?”

The Lord had not yet seen fit to create Viagra, after all.

And the Lord (presumably jumping out from behind the aforementioned camel) said to Abraham,
        “Why did Sarah Laugh and doubt that she shall have a child due to her grievous age?”
        “I didn’t laugh!” lied Sarah, rather than just point out that some stranger had just said he was gonna rape her next time he passed through town.
        “Uh, yeah you totally did,” the Lord retorted.

Then, the men stood and looked in the direction of Sodom, suddenly and without any apparent reason. God wondered if he should hide what he was about to do from Abraham, because he knew Abraham was a bleeding-heart Liberal. Finally, he decided to just come clean.
        “Okay, I’m going down to Sodom and Gomorrah, because I have gotten God-Vibes that there’s a lot of sinning goin’ on down there. So, I’m going down in person to see for myself and if they didn’t really sin, I’ll know. If they did, though. Oh, it’s on. I’m gonna wipe those asses off the face of My Green Earth.”

The three men took off toward Sodom, but Abraham stayed to chat with God.

        “Let me ask you a hypothetical. What if, hypothetically, there are 50 good people down there? Are you gonna kill them with all the rest, or would you spare them and only kill the wicked?”
        “Dude, if there are 50 good people in that hell-hole, I’ll spare the whole lot of them, just for the sake of that 50.”
        “What if there are only 45 good people?”
        “Fine, I’ll spare everyone if there are 45 good people,” He replied with an inward sigh.
        “What if there are 40?”
        “You’re pushing you’re luck, bro. But, sure.”
        “What if there are 30?”
        “Are you kidding me? Fine, 30 good people, and Sodom and Gomorah don’t get toasted.”
        “Good. How ‘bout 20?”
        “You are really pissing me off here. This is why I didn’t want to tell you. But, if you want, yes, I will spare everyone for the sake of 20 lousy good people.”
        “Ten?”
        “Okay, fine, whatever. If there are so many as ten decent people in that Me-Forsaken place, I’ll let the whole damn place live -- BUT YOU BETTER NOT SAY ANOTHER WORD!”

So God went to do what it is He does, and Abraham went back into his tent.

No Bullshit Bible Lesson #7: Abraham

Genesis, Chapters 16-17:

God promised Abram heirs and it was about time for him to deliver.

Abram’s wife, Sarai, finally came to terms with the fact that her womb was as fertile as a moon rock. So she went to Abram with an Idea.
        “Abram, my husband, here’s the deal; you’ve been hoisting yourself on top of me every night for years and I think we both know that no matter what you put in there, a kid is never coming out. So, since you like swinging so much, you can go do your begetting with my handmaiden, Hagar.”

So Abram took Hagar as his second wife, and she was promptly knocked up. Once she realized that she had mad child-bearing skills, Hagar totally lost all respect for Sarai and gave her the evil eye and stuff all the time. Of course, Sarai picked up the not-so-subtle hints and went to Abram with her concerns.

        “Abram, I sent Hagar to be your backup womb and now she thinks she’s hot shit, just because her womb can hold a baby! Bitch treats me like I’m dirt, when she ain’t nothin’ but a baby-momma!”
        “Hey,” Abram replied, “She’s your servant. You got a problem with her, deal with it.”

So Sarai went to Hagar, grabbed her by her nappy weave and told her what’s what. Hagar took off, afraid of getting her ass kicked.

One of God’s angels found her by a fountain in the wilderness (God doesn’t do personal appearances for a baby-momma) and said to her,
        “Why did you come here? And where will you go?”
        “I had to get away from that flat-bellied skank, Sarai.”
        “Lady, just go back and face the music. If you do, I’ll multiply your seed exceedingly. You’ll have more babies than you can count. You’re pregnant...it’s a boy, by the way. When he’s born, name him Ishmael. He is gonna be wild, too! He’s gonna fight the whole world.”

So, she did go back, and had a baby boy, and they named him Ishmael.

Thirteen years later, God came to Abram for a face-to-face.
        “I am GOD!” He said, “Walk before me and be perfect!”
Abram fell to his knees in supplication, clearly ballsy enough to disobey God’s commands both of walking and of being perfect. God deigned to talk to him, regardless.
        “Okay, so we had a deal, right? I told you that you’d have a bazillion kids and stuff, right? Well, here we go. This is gonna be awesome. Seriously. Future kings are gonna swim outta that little willy you got there....You’ll be the father of many nations. Which is why, from now on, you name will not be Abram, but Abraham!” he said, clearly believing that Abr(ah)am would understand the connection between adding “ah” to the middle of his name and being the patriarch of nations.
        “We have a covenant, see,” continued the Holy Lord, “between me, and you and all your many, many kids. And I’ll keep the covenant, and you’ll keep the covenant, and they’ll keep the covenant, and I’ll be their God. Like in the covenant that we have. Me and you an all your kids...”

And the Lord rambled on, repeating himself a few time like a drunkard, before coming to this little gem:

        “And, as a symbol of our covenant, you will cut off the end of your dick. Just the outside, skin part, though. Anyone in your family more than 8 days old, must be circumcised. Snip, snip. Starting now, and ending...never. For all time, all your descendants, all your slaves, snip, snip. And if someone has an intact willy? He is banished from your family because he broke our covenant.
        “Oh, and your wife...She gets a new name, too. Her name is now Sarah. Don’t question it. Did I mention I’m God? I’m gonna let her have a kid, too. A son, named Isaac. Now, Isaac is the one that counts, okay? Ishmael will have a fine life, he’ll father 12 princes, but my covenant will be with Isaac. Still mutilate Ishmael’s penis, though. That’s non-negotiable.”

Then God took off, and Abraham went and got a knife.

That was not a good night to be a man in the Abraham household.