God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (25 page)

The elders were in unanimous agreement and the new Israel was built on a platform of blatant racist ideology.

Joan Rivers

This book is somewhat of an anomaly in the Bible, as it does not directly deal with God, or even mention a single word of God in its passages. Rather, the book is the story of a Jewish orphan girl who is adopted by a Persian family and through her charm and good looks becomes the Queen of Persia through her marriage to King Xerxes in 480 BC.

The Persian Empire at this time stretched all the way from the Nile to India and after another victorious military campaign, the Persian elite celebrated the glory and splendor of their king by throwing a 180 day long banquet in the king’s palace, whereby guests drank free flowing wine from gold goblets. During this period, King Xerxes was married to Vashti, and in his drunken state, he summoned her to the main ballroom to dance provocatively, imagine Shakira meets Jenna Jamieson, for all the guests. But the Queen denied her husband’s tawdry request, as she did not want to perform a titty dance for all and sundry. The king became enraged and called for her before the high court, ending their marriage there and then. The Court granted the marriage termination on the grounds that Persian noblemen were becoming concerned their wives would also deny their husband’s requests to strip naked in front of their guests. There is some sound logic!

The King wasted no time in searching for a substitute bride and called to his personal attendants:

Hey, one has to admit that it is pretty darn funny and cunningly practical that the king appointed Hegai, bereft of testicles, to be the one responsible for the vetting process for a bunch of hot chicks.

Hegai eventually rounded up several dozen of the world’s sexiest women and kept them in the confines of the king’s palace to be pampered and cared for, so they would look their very best on the day that the king would make his choice. It’s good to be the king, right?

Hegai, the ball-less one, took particular interest in Esther and treated her most favorably over the other concubines in the king’s harem. Hegai went out of his way to provide Esther with extra exfoliations, beauty treatments and upper lip hair removal. This process of beautification took more than a year before Hegai believed the women to be adequately presentable for the king. The twist in this story is that Hegai had no idea that Esther was of Jewish origin.

On the night that it was finally Esther’s turn to perform and present for the king, she must have put on some show because the king was instantly besotted with her and wasted no time in crowning her the new Queen of Persia. The king, like Hegai, unknowing of her dirty little Jewish secret.

The Persian father who had adopted Esther from a very young age was a man by the name of Mordecai. On the evening that followed, the wedding ceremony, Mordecai overheard two of the king’s guards talking of a plot to assassinate Xerxes. Mordecai quickly informed his adopted daughter, Queen Esther, who in turn informed her husband. The guards were arrested and hung to death the next morning.

Shortly after, the King elevated a man by the name of Haman to a seat higher than all other nobles in the land. During this ceremony, Mordecai refused to bow before Haman. The guards seized Mordecai and interrogated him. During this Vegas style ‘backroom’ questioning session the interrogators were able to ascertain that the Queen was of Jewish descent and this information made its way back to Haman. Now, Haman did not want to embarrass the king who had treated him favorably, so Haman took a more Machiavellian like approach and suggested that it was the Jewish people causing problems for the Persians. He said to Xerxes:

The king listened to Haman and replied with unconditional support:

Military patrols were sent in dispatches to all corners of the kingdom to annihilate every Jew woman, child and man, young and old. Immediately, a law was put in place to ratify this murderous edict.

Mordecai went to Esther to convince her to dissuade the king from carrying through the order to exterminate the Jews in Persia, but Esther initially refused to believe her husband to be that villainous. To which Mordecai pleaded:

Esther heeded the words of wisdom and warning and sent Mordecai with a message to disperse to all the Jews urging that they pray and fast for three days. At the end of the third day, she would do all in her power in attempting to stop the king’s Jewish extermination plan, even if it meant losing her life.

As promised, she made her approach to her husband, the King and said she needed to ask a special favor of him. The King, still basking in the honeymoon glow of newlyweds, replied that he would give her half of the kingdom if that was her wish. Esther replied that rather than tell of her wish there and then on the spot, that she instead would prefer to ask the King at the conclusion of a banquet she was intending to host the following evening. Esther made a point of asking her husband that Haman be invited as an honorary guest.

Whilst Esther made preparations for the banquet, the King learnt that it was Mordecai that tipped Esther off about the planned coup of the two guards. The King wanted to demonstrate his gratitude by honoring Mordecai, Esther’s adopted father, at the banquet. This news reached Haman that Mordecai would be in attendance as a guest at the banquet and he was utterly disgusted that a Jew would be honored by the King and plotted to bring Mordecai’s downfall. On the second day of the banquet, the King turned to his wife and asked her:

Esther replied:

The slavery of her people would not have warranted the Queen to bother her husband?

Anyway, the king asked if there was anyone in particular she had in mind that posed a risk for her and her people. To which Esther answered:

Haman had been out-manoeuvred
and, knowing his fate, he begged for his life. But the King elected to appease his wife’s wish and, in a twist of irony, he had Haman hung on the gallows that Haman had intended to execute Mordecai on.

The same day the King issued a new edict that granted the Jews freedom from persecution. No Jew was to be harmed from this day on. For the Jews, this was a time of joy, gladness and honor.

The edict further granted the Jews the right to destroy and annihilate anyone that intended bad things against them, thus as soon as the celebrations of freedom had subdued, the Jews went on a campaign of revenge killing. If you have seen the Quentin Tarantino movie
Inglorious Basterds
, in which the movie’s plot is based on a renegade pack of Jewish militia who inflict reciprocal cruelty on captured Nazi soldiers in the name of vengeance, then this will frame the goings-on in this story. The citadel of Susa was the first to come under Jewish attack, and there they slaughtered five hundred men by the sword. By the time they had killed all those that hated the Jews, the number dead equalled more than seventy-five thousand. The blood lust continues.

Again, a reminder that the Bible is heavily weighted towards revenge and anger rather than forgiveness and grace.

Dennis Wholley

The Book of Job is written as an ancient poem and tells of the misfortune of a character by the name of Job. In fact, the great English poet, Lord Tennyson, called it, “The greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature”.

The book, via this narrative, attempts to explain why bad things happen to good believers.

Job is named as a man that lived in a place called Uz. A man that lived a morally perfect life, feared God and denied evil. Job was married, but his wife’s name is not disclosed by the author. He sired seven sons and six daughters. The prologue to this story includes an audit of Job’s agricultural balance sheet, listing his assets as seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred oxen, five hundred donkeys and a vast number of human slaves.

Job was so righteous that he would perform animal sacrifices not out of guilt that he or his children had sinned, but as a pre-emptive measure in the event that they might have unknowingly sinned against God. Job was the poster boy for goodly, godly living and the author goes to some great pains to demonstrate this. However, Job’s world soon gets turned upside down when a wager is made between God and Satan. Yes, I too asked the obvious question, why didn’t God just shoot Satan at the heavenly blackjack table, right there and then, rather than enter into a high stakes game of betting with a man’s life? The only answer to that question can be that nothing has really made any sense to this point in the Book, so why change now?

The story has it that Satan hitched a ride with a few of God’s angels to meet God face-to-face. God is surprisingly startled by the arrival of his uninvited guest and says:

Now, doesn’t this belie the claim that God is omniscient? Because if God is so, then surely he would have stated: “Hi, Satan. I saw you coming up

the driveway, now what do you want?”

Nevertheless, Satan answered:

Strangely, God still does not reply with words such as, “Oh I see, and what is it that you want now?” Rather, he interjects with an out of context introduction of this character named Job:

Satan immediately seizes on the opportunity to throw down a challenge to God and replies that Job worships God only because he is successful, with a loving and healthy family and vast wealth. Satan further asserts that if disaster struck Job, then his faith in God would surely wane. As you can see this is fast becoming a pissing-contest between the two polar opposite mythical forces and God succumbs to Satan’s implied gambit: