God Is Disappointed In You (4 page)

“If two guys are fighting in the street and one of their wives jumps in and grabs the other guy’s balls, cut off her hand. The last thing we need around here is a nut-clutcher.

“Once you get around to building towns and cities, set aside three cities as places of refuge. If you accidentally kill somebody and their relatives come looking for you, try to make it to one of these three cities. Once you’re inside a city of refuge, they have to let you stay and no one can kill you.
 

If you kill somebody on purpose, however, you’re on your own. 

“If you get married and for some reason you think that your wife is not a virgin, you can take it up with the elders. If it turns out that you’re right, you can have her stoned to death. But if it turns out that you’re wrong, then you have to pay her father a hundred shekels for slandering the merchandise.
 

“Build a fence around your roof so that no one will fall off while you’re up there. It may seem silly now, but trust me, this will save you a lot of grief in the long run. 

“If you’re a soldier and you have a wet dream, you’ve got to leave camp for one whole day before you come back. Also, when you’re in camp, be sure to shit discreetly in a hole. Remember, God walks among you, and the last thing you want is for him to be stepping in your shit.

“Don’t take a man’s tools as security for a debt. If you take his livelihood from him, then how is he supposed to pay you back, dumbass? And if you take his cloak as collateral, give it back to him when night comes around so he doesn’t freeze to death. Don’t take advantage of the poor and don’t be stingy.
Once you go harvesting through your fields once, leave whatever’s left over for widows and orphans. You don’t need to squeeze every last grape out of your land. This shall be your social safety net. 

“If you do these things and observe all the other laws I’ve given you, then God will lift you above all other nations. If you don’t, then God will send a hairy foreigner to steal your girlfriend.If you have trouble remembering all these laws, then as a rule of thumb, treat each other well and you should be okay. And if God wants you to do something, don’t ask too many questions, just do it, even if it’s kind of weird.”
 

And with that, Moses died.

In which people learn not to touch God’s stuff, a series of handsome men become king, and God gets a new hobby.

These books tell the story of the rise and fall of the nation of Israel: of how God’s chosen people went from a loose affiliation of tribes ruled by amateur “judges,” to a real nation with a king and everything. King Solomon would build God a massive temple, a sort of vacation home he could live in when he came down from Heaven to check in on his Chosen People. It would at once serve as a testament to their commitment to God, and proof to the world that theirs was not just a country of shepherds and hillbillies, but a legitimate civilization.

To make God’s commute easier, they built the temple at the exact spot where they believed Heaven and Earth to meet. Then, once a year, everyone would come to the temple, sacrifice animals to God, and their best priest would enter God’s private chamber, shake his hand, and apologize for anything the people might have done to offend him.

They had never been so close, God and his people, and yet the very thing that brought them together would tear them apart. The temple was so expensive and labor-intensive that Solomon was forced to place a crushing bill on his people to pay for it. To make matters worse, he didn’t split the tab evenly, dumping most of it on the northern tribes.
Not having the money or manpower to pay their bill, they decided instead to dine and dash. The northern tribes would split off into their own kingdom, dividing Israel into two weak kingdoms. And everything would go downhill from there.

With Moses dead, Joshua became the new leader of the Israelites. He knew that if he was going to conquer Canaan with an army of hikers, he was going to need a fair amount of divine intervention.
When the time came to ask for God’s help, the last thing he needed was for God to be turned off by the sight of uncircumcised dongs. So Joshua gathered all the men who’d made it through the desert
au naturel
at the “Hill of Foreskins” and ordered a fresh round of circumcisions.
 

They sent spies ahead to see what awaited them. The spies soon came to a town called Jericho, the oldest city in the world.
The fortifications of Jericho were so high and thick that whole shops, apartments, and brothels fit inside the wall. When the spies got inside Jericho’s wall, they made a beeline past the apartments and the wall-marts to the whorehouse, where they were taken in by a prostitute named Rahab, who agreed to hide the spies if the Israelites would take care of her when they conquered the city.
 

Not long after, the cops showed up at Rahab’s door and asked if they could look around. “We got a report of some suspicious characters lurking around here.”

“This is a brothel,” she said, “we only get suspicious characters around here.”

“These guys were foreigners. They wore tassels and smelled like sheep. They were missing a piece off their dicks. You notice anyone like that?”

“Oh yeah, those guys were here, all right. They already left, though.”

“Are you sure? They were seen here only about an hour ago.”

“Most of my guests don’t stay more than ten minutes,” Rahab said.

This story seemed to capture the cops’ imagination, so they left Rahab alone.

The spies returned to tell Joshua how high and thick the city walls were, and how cool Rahab the prostitute had been to them.
 

God surveyed the situation from his perch atop the Ark of the Covenant. Rather than attack Jericho’s walls in a frontal assault, God ordered Joshua to take advantage of his people’s natural hiking ability, marching them in circles around the city once a day for six days in a row. On the seventh day, they had to march around the city seven times. After completing all their laps around Jericho, the priests blew their trumpets, and all the soldiers screamed as hard as they could, which caused the city’s walls to collapse. Only the wall brothel was left standing. Joshua and his soldiers rushed in and killed every man, woman, and child in the city.

Jericho was destroyed, and just like that, six thousand years of civilization had come to an end.
As if it weren’t enough that the city had been obliterated, Joshua ordered his army to hand the spoils over to the priests and bury the ruins. He left no trace of the city’s existence, and threatened to kill the children of anyone who attempted to rebuild the city. Some people are just sore winners.

Rahab and her family were spared. In exchange for her treason, she was absorbed into the nation of Israel, and would go on to become the matriarch of quite an impressive family tree. King David, King Solomon and Jesus Christ would all someday be the descendants of Rahab, the helpful hooker.

Next they attacked the diminutive town of Ai. Joshua figured that after taking down the oldest city in the world, Ai would be easy pickings. But the army of Ai led Joshua’s soldiers into an ambush and routed them. Joshua concluded that the loss could not possibly be because of any failure of leadership on his part, but rather that someone must have kept some cups or plates from the Battle of Jericho. 

A man named Achen was eventually singled out, and he admitted to having taken some silver coins, a slab of gold and a fetching robe out of Jericho. Joshua had Achen, his belongings, his children, his cattle, and even the stuff he’d looted dumped into a big pile at the bottom of a valley. There, they were all stoned to death and their remains were burned. Joshua didn’t have any problems with looters after that.

 
Under Joshua’s no-nonsense style of leadership, the Israelites went on to conquer the Promised Land, city by city. Having an Ark of the Covenant to shoot death rays everywhere didn’t hurt, either.
 

Joshua then split up the new land among the twelve tribes. The Israelites finally had a land they could call Israel. As he lay on his deathbed, Joshua summoned the whole nation before him.
 

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he said. “From the time God told Abraham to build a nation,
and that whole enslavement thing in Egypt, to the forty years we spent wandering through the wilderness. But now, at last, we’ve done it. We’ve built ourselves a new home. Try not to blow it after I’m gone.”
 

Having given his farewell address, Joshua died.

Apparently, Joshua’s “mission accomplished” speech was a tad premature.
 

The Promised Land was still rotten with heathens, and without a strong leader like Joshua running the army, it wasn’t long before bigger nations started carving off pieces of the fledgling nation for themselves. 

Eglon, the morbidly obese King of the Moabites, began extorting the nation of Israel for tribute. The Israelites sent a messenger named Ehud to take Eglon his protection money. Ehud asked if he could speak to the king privately. When the two ducked into a side room, instead of giving him the money, Ehud unsheathed a sword and sunk the blade into the abundant gut of the king. The servants, assuming that the Eglon had slipped out to take one of his notoriously huge shits, didn’t bother checking up on him. When they finally found his dead body, they couldn’t pull the sword out because it was stuck in all his gut-fat.
 

By the time Ehud returned to Israel, he had become a national hero. They made Ehud their “judge,” or the person who would rule them on God’s behalf.

But Israel’s respite from foreign domination was short-lived. After Ehud died, the Hazorites started squeezing Israel. The new judge, Deborah, the only woman to ever be a Judge of Israel, raised an army to fight them off. But Deborah’s army were armed with nothing but a bunch of ramshackle bronze swords and spears. The Hazorites, on the other hand, were heavily armed with the latest, state-of-the-art war technology, including helmets, heavy body armor, and chariots. The night before their battle, Deborah led her army to the top of a mountain. It seemed like a simple matter of time before the Hazorites found Deborah’s army and destroyed them. But the next morning, the Israelite army launched a surprise attack, pouring down the east face of the mountain at sunrise. When the Hazorites looked up to defend themselves, they were blinded by the sun. Sunglasses hadn’t been invented yet.