God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (7 page)

The due date for delivering the rival twins came and the first to emerge was a hairy, red-headed boy, a ‘ranga’ as we would say in Australia. They named him Esau. The second child to pop was anointed Jacob and he emerged from Rebekah’s womb clutching onto the heel of his five-minute older brother.

The boys became men, of which Esau became a skilled hunter and Jacob a lay-about, preferring to just spend his days hanging around the family tents, whilst his elder brother chased wild game throughout the land. The story takes a devious turn at this point, however, as the scripture tells of Esau returning from a hunt. He is exhausted and near starving and returns home to find his brother cooking a stew. Esau pleads with his brother, Jacob, for some food as he is famished, but his brother initially refuses him. Esau pleads with his brother again. To which, Jacob plots a heinous bribe. Jacob tells Esau that he may have some stew on one condition:

To give up one’s birthright to a sibling is the equivalent of forfeiting all inheritance and family power, but Esau agrees to Jacob’s wicked proposal, replying:

Years later, Isaac is now on his deathbed and in his final days he is anxious to bless his eldest son, whom he still believes is Esau, with the family trust. On his deathbed he summons Esau to his side and asks that he go out and catch some tasty meat for what would most likely be his father’s last supper, a meal whereby he will announce his blessing to Esau. Esau agrees and sets forth into the wilderness with his spear.

Rebekah overhears the conversation between her husband and her eldest son and she runs to Jacob to tell him what had just transpired. You see, Jacob was Rebekah’s favorite son and she wanted to ensure the inheritance did not pass to Esau. Rebekah convinced Jacob to promptly slaughter two goats in the backyard and then to dress like Esau. Jacob protested to his mother that Isaac would recognize him as him and not as his brother and accordingly this plan would be doomed before it began. Rebekah convinces Jacob that her husband’s eyesight is all but gone and if he covered himself in a fur rug Isaac would mistake the fur for the much physically hairier Esau.

Jacob did what his mother asked and walked into his father’s bedroom. Isaac called out, “Who is there?” Jacob replied, “It is me father, Esau!” Isaac called to who he thought was Esau and demanded that he come closer so he could feel his skin, to be sure of his identity. Jacob leant in and Isaac felt the fur rug covering Jacob’s smooth skin. Isaac had been duped! Isaac swallowed the devilish bait and unknowingly blessed the wrong son, Jacob:

Esau returned home from his hunting trip to discover the shocking treachery that had taken place whilst he was out obeying his dying father’s wishes. Esau rushed in to speak with Isaac, crying, “Father, what have you done?” Isaac, now confused, asked, “Who is that?” When Isaac realized he had been deceived into wrongly blessing his younger son, Jacob, he began to sob and tremble. But Isaac knew it was also too late to undo a blessing, i.e. you can’t take it back once given.

Esau cried at his father’s bedside:

Esau pleads with his dying father to bless him too, which seems only fair, but the blessing that comes forth is not the blessing that Esau either expects nor deserves. Isaac with an unjust callous voice says:

Jacob, knowing his brother would be pissed and out for revenge, flees into the countryside. After travelling for a full day he camps under a tree, using a rock as a pillow. As he drifts off to sleep, God descends from heaven and appears directly before him and says:

What? Were you expecting God to punish Jacob for his deceit, too? Not only does God choose not to punish this shyster, he rewards him with being the new ‘chosen one’. I guess God likes people that behave like himself, huh?

This incredible injustice is a lesson that teaches villainy is good and the ends do justify any means. God has set a terrible precedent in this example of judicial oversight. And it gets worse! A few years later, Jacob becomes frightened that Esau has organized a few hundred men to attack him and his family. Jacob, ever cunning, formulates an elaborate plan for escape. The night before the attack, Jacob prays to God, which reads less as a prayer and more as a reminder to God that he honor his promise to help Jacob lead his descendents as a great nation. As Jacob prepares to set off, an invisible man wrestles Jacob to the ground. I always thought the ‘Invisible Man’ was a product of Marvel comics, but clearly not. Jacob is thrown to the ground and bashed against rocks by this transparent attacker. This fight lasts a full twenty-four hours, before the invisible man eventually tired and pleaded:

But Jacob wasn’t prepared for the fight to end until he had been named victor:

At this moment, the invisible man revealed himself as God. And God said that because of Jacob’s strength he was fit to found a nation:

The fraudulent man named Jacob had now been ordained a nation by God. The nation of Israel begins.

A number of years later, however, a new Pharaoh took the throne and slowly instituted laws that made the Jewish nation slaves and over the course of the next 80 odd years, the Israelites were forced into labor and unjustly mistreated.

Before I end this chapter on Genesis, I would like to say to those amongst us who believe the earth to be only 7,000 years old, DINOFUCKINGSAURS! If dinosaurs roamed the planet at the same time as early man, don’t you think that somewhere in this Bible there would be a reference to some kind of lizard that stood 10 stories tall? I would expect something of the following to be included in the scripture:

Genesis Count: 30,040,001

Wikipedia estimates the world’s population at the time of the supposed flood, three millennia BCE, to be approximately 30,000,000.

The destruction of the mythical twin-cities of Sodom & Gomorrah is estimated, by Biblical scholars who believe the fable, to include +/- 1,000 inhabitants.

Lot’s wife = 1

A seven year worldwide famine = 40,000

Cumulative Count: 30,040,001

Peter O’Toole

Exodus is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God, Mount Sinai. There God, through Moses, gives the Israelites their laws and enters into a covenant with them, by which he will give them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness. The book ends with the construction of the Tabernacle.

According to tradition, Exodus and the other four books of the Torah were written by Moses in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC. But the character Moses is certainly one of fiction. Thus, even if the following events were factually true, they were recorded nearly 3,000 years after the purported events.

Exodus is not a historical document in the true scheme of things. It has never been proven archaeologically and, more significantly, the story has never been concurred by Egyptian history which has one of the longest recorded documented histories of any civilization, nor has it been validated by any other external historical records. The story is simply a myth, like the fable that President Reagan ended the Soviet Union. Egypt being one of the primary storage centers of ancient history has no recording of a character named Moses, nor is there any evidence that suggests the Israelites ever lived or worked as slaves under Pharaoh rule. We also know that the events that took place, as claimed by Exodus, occurred centuries before they were written about and with legend of hearsay and good ole ‘Chinese whispers’, we can feel safe in our educated assertion that the story of Exodus is pure fantasy.

What is further perplexing and problematic for religious scholars, however, is the question, “Where did the nation of Egypt come from?” In the generations before or after Noah the Bible makes no mention of such a place with Pharaoh Kings. And if there was an Egypt prior to the flood, then why weren’t they all killed? This nation and their people literally pop up out of nowhere, with no chronology.

The story claims that after such time that Joseph and his brothers had died, the Israelite population in Egypt had grown significant, so that “the land was filled with them.” Then a new Pharaoh came to power and fearing that the Jews had become too numerous in his land, and concerned that one day their rising numbers would have the strength to take control of Egypt, the Pharaoh empowered slave masters over the Israelites forcing them into slave labor. The greater the Israelites numbered, the greater the Egyptians came to despise them and subsequently worked them tirelessly and ruthlessly, with all kinds of hard labor.

Oppressing the Israelites did not have any affect in reducing their numbers, however, and with ruthless tyranny, the Pharaoh ordered that all newborn male Hebrew babies be killed at birth.

This early passage refers to the well-known birth of Moses, to Levite
parents. As a result of the new Pharaoh law that decreed the death of all Israelite newborn males, his mother hid baby Moses in a papyrus basket along the banks of the Nile. The floating baby capsule made its way with the flowing currents of the river, until it reached a group of women bathing and frolicking downstream. The women bathers were shocked to discover a baby inside the papyrus basket and recognized the boy baby to be of Israelite descent. However, as it turned out, one of the women bathers happened to be the sister of the Pharaoh and, having no children of her own, she decided that she would raise the baby as her own and therefore as an Egyptian. She named him Moses, which in Hebrew means to ‘draw out’, because she drew him out of the water. Why an Egyptian would bestow a Hebrew name to her adopted son at a time when Hebrew babies were being murdered makes absolutely no sense.

Moses grew into a young man in line to the throne of Pharaoh, as the Pharaoh’s sister maintained Moses’ Israelite identity a secret to all. But Moses, suffering some sort of identity crisis in his thirties, felt naturally drawn and partial to the Israelites for reasons he could not yet comprehend. Then one day, whilst working in the fields as an Egyptian project manager for the construction of some monuments in the Pharaoh’s honor, he witnessed an Egyptian slave master viciously beat an Israelite slave for falling behind in his daily work quota. Upon seeing that there were no witnesses, Moses murdered the Egyptian master of the whip and hid his in the sand. Concerned that his vengeful defence of a fellow Israelite had become known, he fled Egypt for a town called Midian.