God Is Disappointed In You (3 page)

Moses wracked his brain for ways to keep his nation of hikers together. Finally, God decided to help Moses out. He called him up to the top of Mount Sinai and gave him a bunch of stone tablets. “Be sure to tell everyone that these are coming from me.” God told him. “If they follow these laws, I’ll always be there to watch over them,” God said. “That’s the deal.” To commemorate his deal with the people of Israel, God told Moses to build the Ark of the Covenant, a gold trunk decorated with angels. Inside the trunk, they kept the Ten Commandments and some other mementos.
They also built a Mercy Seat, a little seat on top of the ark so that when he came down from Heaven, God could ride around on top and kill people as they carried the ark with them.
 

After a few days, Moses came back down the mountain with a bunch of laws, and unlike the rules he’d tried to lay down, these laws, he told them, were given to him personally by God. A gasp went up from the crowd. This was serious poker. People were far more worried about disobeying God who, unlike
Moses, actually
could
be everywhere at once. So they cut down on cheating, robbing, and killing each other and generally cleaned up their act.

The nation of hikers was saved.

To:
 
The children of Israel
From:
Moses
Re:
 
A Few New Rules

Now that we aren’t in Egypt anymore, we’re going to need our own laws. Luckily, during our get-together on Mount Sinai, God gave me 613 easy-to-follow rules. To sum up:

First off, God wants you to make sacrifices to him. If you’ve sinned, if you’ve just had a baby, or if you just want to make God feel appreciated, you can bring him goats, sheep, cows, little cakes. You know, that sort of thing. If you’re going to make a sacrifice, though, it’s got to be primo stuff. No three-legged goats or burnt bread. 

Speaking of food— starting now, you all have to eat kosher. What does “kosher” mean? Well, it basically means there’s certain things you can’t eat. No bats and no wild birds. You have no idea what those birds are up to when they’re out flying around. No lizards (sorry, Simon the Lizard-Eater, I know this one’s especially hard on you). Fish are cool, as long as they have scales and fins. Eels and shellfish are just…I don’t know, sort of gross. You can eat any animal that has cleft hooves, EXCEPT for pigs, camels and badgers. Don’t ask me why you can’t eat badgers, you just can’t. Insects that fly are out, but insects that walk on the ground are okay. You can eat all the termites you want.

If you have a mildew problem, you have to burn your clothes and blankets. If you have a wet dream, you have to take a bath. If you have a pus-filled sore, take a bath and then burn your clothes. If someone gets a skin disease, make him take a bath and shave off all his hair.
If a man with eczema spits on you, you have to take a bath and burn all your clothes. If we can’t be the holiest people of all time, we’ll damn well be the cleanest.

God has Ten Commandments which he thinks are REALLY important. They are as follows:
 

1. No other gods (at least not that you like better than God).
    
   
2. No idols. That’s sort of like expecting your wife to be okay with keeping a picture of your ex-girlfriend on your desk.
    
   
3. No invoking God’s name in vain. If you’re going to start a fight, leave God out of it.
    
   
4. Keep the Sabbath. No working on Saturdays. Everyone needs at least one day off.
    
   
5. Don’t embarrass mom and dad Trust me, this one will come in handy when you have kids of your own.
   
6. Don’t kill each other. I would have hoped this one would be obvious.
    
   
7. No adultery. Everybody sleep in your own tent.
   
8. Don’t steal. What’s mine ISN’T yours.
   
9. Don’t lie about each other, or falsely accuse each other of crimes. Don’t make us look stupid for punishing the wrong guy. And finally…
    
   
10. Don’t get jealous over each other’s shit. None of you really have anything worth being jealous over, anyway. I don’t care how nice or expensive your neighbor’s shepherd staff is. It shouldn’t keep you awake at night.
     
    

In addition, God forbids the following: club sandwiches, gay sex between men, sorcery, incest, making fun of the deaf, bestiality, shaving, tattoos, rare steaks, gossip, cotton-and-wool twills, threesomes, crooked scales, sex with slaves, and eating animals if you don’t know how they died. 

God also gave me several penalties for breaking these laws, most of which are rather unpleasant, and frankly, complicated. For example, if a couple commits good old-fashioned adultery, they’re both to be killed. But if a guy complicates matters by sleeping with his wife’s mother, then all three of them have to be burned to death, including the wife, who might not have even known what was going on. Harsh, I know.

If a man has sex with his wife while she is on her period, then they’re merely exiled. But if a man has sex with an animal, both he and the animal have to be killed. And just so you know, if the nation as a whole ignores these laws, then your crops will be eaten by invaders and your children will be devoured by wild animals.
So there’s no safety in numbers here. 

If you have any questions about these laws, take them up with the priests. Oh, and priests, we’ve got a few rules for you, too. First of all, keep your hair looking nice. God likes that. And make sure you use the right kind of oil in your ceremonies. You have to be very careful about sacrifices. You know my brother Aaron? His sons Nadab and Adihu used the wrong oil in a sacrifice and God killed them right there on the spot. So needless to say, this is a no-bullshit business.
Also, priests, you have to marry virgins. Oh, and no amputees. They have no relationship with God.

Okay, those are the laws God gave me to pass on to you. Isn’t this exciting?
 

God decided to channel his anger into more positive activities, like hobbies. It was around this time that God got bit by the real estate bug. He found this great piece of beach front property on the Mediterranean and thought it would be just perfect for his chosen people, so he promised it to them. Which is sort of like me promising you Gary’s sandwich out of the break room fridge. Despite being promised to them, the land already belonged to other people. If the Israelites wanted their Promised Land, they would have to conquer it.
 

Moses took a census of all the tribes and drafted an army. One of the problems with going to war is that while the men are away fighting, the women tend to get lonely. Moses came up with a method for testing whether a wife was cheating on her husband.
 

It went like this: The priests would put a curse on some water, and have the wife drink it. If she had remained faithful, nothing would happen to her. But if she’d been sleeping around, she would get really fat and her thighs would rot off.
It’s not clear whether this was actually expected to work, or if it was just something Moses came up with to put the minds of nervous husbands at ease.

With their army assembled, and their test for wayward wives in hand, the nation of Israel marched towards the Promised Land. At first, they were fresh and happy, blowing their trumpets, showing off the Ark of the Covenant, waving to people in the desert as they passed by.
 

After a while, though, they started getting cranky. They complained about having nothing but to eat but the bread that God magically laid out on the ground for them every night. They fantasized about the fish, cucumbers, and melons they used to eat back in Egypt. They griped to Moses.
If God could send them magic bread, couldn’t he just as easily summon up a falafel wrap or some meat?

This ingratitude really chafed God. “Oh, they want meat, do they?” he said spitefully, “I’ll give them some meat!” God sent wave after wave of quails crashing into the ground until everyone was wading up to their waists in dead birds.
Despite all the quail meat, though, people kept complaining.

Moses sent a scouting team ahead of the nation of hikers to check out the Promised Land. The scouts reported that, on the plus side, it was a veritable “land of milk and honey.” The scouts were less enthusiastic, however, about the fact that the land was populated by heavily armed giants. Of all the scouts, only two, Joshua and Caleb, recommended going forward. People weren’t eager to fight these giants, though. Moaning turned into panic and people began speaking openly of revolt and returning to Egypt.
Even Moses’ sister Miriam questioned his judgment in forging ahead into this terrifying new land. 

Now, there are few things God hates more than a whiner. As punishment for her complaining, God gave Miriam leprosy for seven days. Everyone else got snakes.
 

Poisonous snakes started popping up out of nowhere, biting people left and right. When God felt that the whiners had enough, he told Moses to build a pole with a brass snake winding around it. When the people quit their grumbling and looked up at the pole, all their snakebites were magically cured. The pole with snakes went on to become our symbol for medicine. You can still see it on the side of ambulances today, even though they rarely get called out for mass snakebites.

Wherever they went, tens of thousands of Israelites would suddenly show up uninvited, trampling the grass, devouring the crops, and drinking everything in sight. They were like a plague of locusts or hippies.

Soon, the hikers of Israel encountered the Midianites and their slutty women. Their sluttiness infuriated God, as they were always seducing the Israelite men.
So God told Moses to send the army to slaughter the Midianites. The soldiers went in and killed all the Midianite men. But when Moses showed up and saw the mountain of bodies, he wasn’t happy at all.
 

“I told you to kill ALL the Midianites. Why are there still all these women and children standing around?” The soldiers objected to killing unarmed women and children, but Moses talked them into it by letting them each keep one virgin girl as a souvenir.

On that sour note, the Israelites at last arrived at the River Jordan. Across the river lay the Promised Land. Moses died before they could cross the river, though. He left Joshua in charge.
Joshua was the kind of guy who didn’t get squeamish at the sight of blood, and that was a good thing because the killing had just begun.

Just before he died, Moses said, “I won’t be around to see it, but you’re all about to come into a whole lot of land. When that happens you will no longer be a traveling group of tribes but a bona fide nation.
So, as a parting gift, I wanted to give you a few hundred extra laws to help you along.
Everybody ready? Okay, here we go:

“Guys, don’t marry foreign girls and don’t rape any girls, foreign or not. If you rape somebody and they turn out to be engaged to be married, then your punishment is to be stoned to death. If you rape somebody and they’re 
not
engaged to be married, then your punishment is to marry her.