God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (12 page)
Read God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
God informs Moses that in circumstances where there are no witnesses, he has devised a holy forensic testing procedure to prove if a woman has or has not cheated on her husband. The suspicious husband is to drag his wife before the local priest. The priest will then stand her before God, before pouring a combination of holy water and dust from the Tabernacle floor through her hair. God’s curse has now been placed upon her, and should she be impure then her abdomen will swell causing her excruciating pain for days on end until death is her only relief. Cue African tribal drums. If she is innocent of the charge, she will live a normal and healthy life, not withstanding that a horse and cart, whilst crossing the main street of Moab, hit her accidentally.
This test of marital faithfulness is no more advanced than Haitian tribes practicing Voodoo magic. An ancient ritual that is so preposterously ridiculous and flawed, that it serves only to demonstrate its irrelevancy to modern societal values. I’d like to know how many Christians or Jews still prescribe this test to their wives that return home at three in the morning all liquored-up after a hen night with their girlfriends. And what would we think of someone who still did this? Nutty!
Moses awakes one morning, after another visit from God in his dreams, and says to his father-in-law, Hobad, they must set out in search for the land that God procured on behalf of his people. Departing the mountain of the Lord, they set out for three days, carrying the Ark of the Covenant with them, whilst God provided them shelter from the sun by positioning a cloud over them as a mobile UV beach tent.
Shortly after venturing out in search of God’s ‘promised land’, the Israelites, being as slow learning as they seemingly were, judging by past indiscretions of whining, punished remorselessly by God, began to complain about the food in the same manner high-school students do in a high school cafeteria.
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The rabble with them began to crave other food and again the Israelites started wailing and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna.’ The manna was like a coriander seed and looked like a resin.” (Numbers 11:4-7 NIV)
Moses eventually becomes infuriated at all this whining, “manna bread this and manna bread that”, and thus he escalates their continued gripes to God. So, what does God do? Does he smite them? Send down another fireball that incinerated Aaron’s sons for burning the wrong incense? No, he takes the Bill Cosby lesson on fatherhood, the one in which his dad, upon catching a young Cosby smoking a cigar, locks him in the cupboard until such time that he had successfully smoked every single cigar in the box, so that he will never want to look sideways at a cigar again.
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Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it for one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, but for a whole month – until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it – because you have rejected the Lord, who is among you and have wailed before him, saying, ‘Why did we ever leave Egypt?’”(Numbers11:18-21 NIV)
Hardly seems much of a punishment! I have friends that have eaten nothing but steak for twenty years and I’ve never seen a T-Bone pop out of their nostril. Stand table side at an all-you-can-eat Outback Steakhouse buffet promotion and you will witness dozens of 300lb men consuming enough steak to fall out at least one of their orifices, but it doesn’t. It seems such a juvenile punishment too, one that hardly seems ‘godly’ to me.
The dissension amongst the Israelite camps continues through the book of Numbers, as Miriam and Aaron begin to question Moses’ authority and legitimacy.
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Why does the Lord speak only through Moses and not through us?” (Numbers 12:1 NIV)
Moses leads Miriam and Aaron to the Tent of Meeting, before a pillar of cloud descends from the sky, carrying his Lordship, God. The Lord says:
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Listen to my words. When a prophet of the Lord is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (Numbers 12:6-8 NIV)
This passage requires a few questions to be asked. Firstly, we now know God has a face. Well, how about a little narrative that describes what he looks like? I would think that would be of some interest to the readers and faithful. Did he wear glasses? Was he sporting a white beard? Was he a she? Was he showing signs of aging? But not a word is spoken!
Significantly, God claims not to speak in riddles when speaking to Moses. Well now, that throws out the religious apologist’s defence that the immoral, inconsistent, incoherent and brutal laws of the Old Testament are ‘metaphors’ and open for interpretation. I always found this refute such a hard to stomach cop-out. “Oh yes, umm ahh, God does say kill your disrespectful child, but that is just a metaphor for banning him from the television for a week.”
At the conclusion of God’s speech delivered to the two sceptics, he inflicted leprosy on Miriam:
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When the cloud lifted from the above the Tent, there stood Miriam – leprous like snow.” (Numbers 12:10 NIV)
Anyway, the quest to find the ‘promised land’ continues as they set up camp in the Desert of Paran. Once camped there, God advises Moses to send some men on an exploration mission of the land of Canaan. After forty days of having a gander of the area, which encompassed the Desert of Zin, Rehob, Lebo and down to the Valley of Eshcol, the exploratory team returned back to Moses and Aaron to report their findings and they gave Moses this account:
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We went into the land to which you sent us and it does flow of milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful and the cities are fortified and very large. We can’t attack these people; they are stronger than we are…All the people we saw there are of great size… We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13:27-33 NIV)
The Israelite community, upon learning of this Intel report, began to scream and many of them wept openly. The people began to grumble again. The Israelites shouted:
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If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?’ And then they said to each other, ‘We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.’” (Numbers 14:3-4 NIV)
Now might have been the appropriate time for Aaron to step in and say, “Listen here, you whinging fuckers, my wife not only has a rump steak coming out her left nostril, but she also has leprosy for questioning the Lord.” Surely, that would’ve suppressed the fledgling uprising!
Moses and Aaron take the gripes of the Israelites to the Lord. Which is strange in itself, as God is proclaimed to be omnipresent, thus he should be able to hear their complaints without Moses and Aaron relaying the message. Regardless, I am just relaying to you what it says in the Bible and God learns of their displeasure. Upon hearing this, God gets fucking pissy. He is not a happy Creator:
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How long will this wicked community grumble against me?” (Numbers 14: 27 NIV)
Wait a minute, God! These are your chosen people. No held a gun to your head and demanded that you ‘choose’ them. Seems in hindsight that the Egyptians would’ve been far less maintenance than this lot. You made your bed now, big guy. You did this all by yourself and now you are calling them a ‘wicked community’. Well, make up your mind for Christ’s sake, which one is it? Chosen or wicked?
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I have heard the complaints of these grumbling Israelites. So tell them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do to you the very things I heard you say: In this desert your bodies will fall – everyone of you twenty years old or more who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against me. Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home…Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert.’” (Numbers 14:27-34 NIV)
Following this maniacal edict, God then sends down a plague to kill all the men responsible for creating the exploratory intelligence report of the new land.
God then goes on a killing spree and, because he is so fed up with the complaining Israelites, he takes the drastic step of switching sides and therefore empowers the enemies of Israel, namely, the Caanites and the Amalekites, to defeat his own chosen people in battle. God then tells Moses to kill one of his tribe, by stoning, for gathering wood on the Sabbath. God opens up the earth to swallow Korah, his family, his tribe of 250 men and women and his possessions for daring to question Moses’ leadership.
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The ground underneath them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them... They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned.” (Numbers 16:31-34 NIV)
More grumbling and quarrelling amongst the Israelites ensues, with a shortage of water. The community makes the same grumbles they had made before, such as. “Why didn’t we stay in Egypt? It sucks balls here!” Moses takes the tribal leaders to a huge rock, taps on the rock twice with his staff, the rock splits open and water pours out.
The Israelites’ thirst is now quenched, at least for the time being anyway. But it didn’t take long for the ‘water from rock’ trick to lose its luster and the people began to whinge again, with the same old gripe heard a hundred times already, “Why did you lead us out of Egypt? Yadda, yadda, yadda”. God hears their bickering and sends down some venomous snakes, which bit many and they died. If this has a matter-of-fact tone, it is because this is how it is told in the Bible. I guess the sight of God killing his own people for complaining was becoming old hat!
We’ve already had the talking snake (Genesis), but now a chatty ass. The story tells of an Israelite shepherd named Balaam. His donkey sees an angel on a narrow path, but Balaam does not see it, the donkey moves to get out of the way of it, but in taking evasive action the donkey accidentally crushed Balaam’s foot against a rock wall. Balaam proceeds to beat the shit out of the donkey. The donkey looks up at Balaam and says:
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What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?” (Numbers 22:28 NIV)
A conversation then follows between man and ass that is too stupefying to warrant mention even in this book.
In terms of God trying to fuck with our small minds, this passage surely ranks somewhere in his top 5. How so? Because he gives us a command that is impossible to follow, when he says to Moses to prepare an animal sacrifice in his honor:
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Tell the people of Israel to bring you a red heifer without defect. In which there is no blemish.” (Numbers 19:2 NIV)
Whilst this may seem like any of the many number of animal sacrifices that God demands in worship of his name and for placating of his insecurities, there is but a wee little problem with this demand.
God hasn’t invented a red cow
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In fact, 2000 evolutionary years later we still don’t have a red cow. Although, this hasn’t stopped a group of fundamentalist nutbags from, ironically, trying to scientifically breed a red cow in Israel to prove God’s word, on this particular clause, true. Apparently, one mob got close to breeding one, but they were eventually disappointed that she grew white hairs. Another bag full of money flushed down the drain in attempting to give Biblical mythology some scientific credence.
After God was done, for the time being anyway, with inflicting his umpteenth plague on his own people, he instructs Moses to take another census of the whole Israelite community so that he may number all those above the age of 20 years that are fit and able to serve in the army of Israel.
Yet another example that seems to belittle God’s omnipresent eyes in the sky capabilities, because if he can hear us all murmur prayer to him then it would be fair to assume that at least he knows how many of us are down here, right? Well, wrong!
At the conclusion of the counting of the clans, the total number of men of Israel was 601,730.
Moses then reports the number back to God and God gives instructions on how the ‘promised land’ (when found) is to be divided amongst the clans. God now assuming the role of celestial real estate broker says:
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The land is to be allotted to them as an inheritance and to a smaller group a smaller one; each is to receive its inheritance according to the number of those listed. Be sure that the land is distributed by lot. What each group inherits will be according to the names for its ancestral tribe. Each inheritance is to be distributed by lot among the larger and smaller groups.”