God Is Disappointed In You (5 page)

It didn’t help matters that their chariots were useless in the soft, dewy morning mud. In this muddy, chaotic combat, their heavy expensive armor just weighed them down, while the light, dollar-store weaponry of the Israelites allowed them to maneuver nimbly, hacking off the arms and heads of their mud-bound enemies.
 

In the upset of the year, the Israelites routed the Hazorites. The general in charge of the Hazorite army fled the battle, and holed up in a nearby farmer’s tent. While hiding, he asked the farmer’s wife to bring him something to drink. She served her guest a glass of warm milk, which was highly approved as an act of hospitality in those days. But then, after he fell asleep, she drove a tent peg through his skull, which was generally frowned upon. 

After Deborah’s victory, there was peace for forty years, until Israel was invaded by the Midianites, whose inherent sluttiness apparently helped them rebound nicely from the genocide Moses tried on them.
 

“I suppose this means they’ll be needing my help again,” God sighed. God approached a man named Gideon and asked him to raise an army to defend Israel. “Don’t worry,” God told him, “You’ll be marvelous. I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”

So Gideon set up a recruiting station and started visiting local high schools. Before long, he’d talked thirty thousand guys into joining his army. “You did a good job recruiting,” God told him, “but if you go into battle with that army, you’re going to get slaughtered.”

“Why? What’s wrong with my army?”
 

“Well, for one thing, it’s way too big. What’s more, it’s filled goose-bumpy farmers who’ll shit their loincloth the second things get real. Here’s what I want you to do: tell everyone who’s afraid that they can go home.”

Two-thirds of his men took Gideon up on his offer and ran home to their tents. Now he was down to having only ten thousand men. 

“But that’s everybody!” Gideon complained. Nevertheless, Gideon agreed to release anyone who’d been taken in by the recruiting posters and cool uniforms and two-thirds of them left.

“Hey. Hey, Gideon,” God said.
 

“What?” Gideon replied.

“You’re totally going to hate me, but your army’s still too big.”
As Gideon sat there wondering what he’d got himself into, God told him to pick his army by watching how his men drank water from a stream.
 

“Send anyone home who doesn’t lap the water like a dog. Trust me, you want those dog-lappers.
You can sneak up on guys who stick their whole head into the water. But you ever sneak up on a dog?”
 

Gideon nervously watched his men drink from the stream and just about fainted when only a few hundred guys turned out to be lappers. 

Gideon was left with more of a Boy Scout troop than an army. With only three hundred men, fighting a traditional battle was out of the question. But the advantage of having so few men was that they could move around quickly and quietly. He could maneuver them undetected at night and take them on field trips. Gideon discovered that he could sneak his entire force right up to the Midianite camp without anyone noticing.
 

The Midianites were all fast asleep or jerking off in their tents when they were woken up by a loud trumpet blast. They got out of bed to find themselves being ambushed. The Midianites fumbled for their weapons.
They panicked, stabbed each other in the dark, and ran away half-dressed into the night, assuming they’d been attacked by a huge army.
 

The people offered to make Gideon a judge, but he decided that he didn’t really like this kind of work. He asked for one gold earring from every man in Israel as payment for his services, and retired.

Also among the judges was Jephtah, son of Gilead. Jephtah was born poor tent park trash and was tough as nails. In a barroom brawl, he was unstoppable. But because his mother was a prostitute, the rest of his family kept him out of sight like an old pair of acid-washed jeans, until they became embroiled in a nasty land dispute with some foreigners. Knowing there was a fight coming, they turned to Jephtah and made him their leader.

Jephtah strapped on his headband and his leather vest. He mounted his low-rider camel and rode into battle. Jephtah beat the hell out of the foreigners and returned home a champion. Jephtah was feeling so good that he swore to take the first thing he saw and burn it as an offering to God. As he rolled up into the tent park, he looked around for a sheep or a goat that might be milling around in the front yard. Instead, his front door flung open and his only daughter came running out to give him a hug.
 

When he saw his only daughter running up to him, he burst into tears and tore his leather vest in grief. He told his daughter about the oath he’d made.
 

“Since you made a promise to God,” she told him, “you can’t back out, no matter how stupid it is. All I ask is that you give me two months to roam the hills and say goodbye to my friends.”

Two months later, his daughter returned and was burned as a human sacrifice to God. This started a tradition where every year the girls of Israel leave home for four days to mourn the daughter of Jephtah. Perhaps the most famous judge of all was Samson. He was sort of like the Jewish Hercules. God granted Samson supernatural strength on the condition that he never cut his hair. By this time, a tribe of seafaring merchants called the Philistines had taken over and were ruling Israel. Despite their name, the Philistines were actually a cultured, cosmopolitan people. They loved art and imported wine.
 

Samson fought the Philistines, but not really as a freedom fighter. He was more like a seventeen-year-old in a letterman’s jacket, challenging the Philistines to a fight in the parking lot of a Burger King.
He’d wander into town, beat up a bunch of random Philistines, and later when their buddies cornered him at a whorehouse, he’d not only clobbered the guys who came to him, but he’d tear the city gates off their hinges and carry them off as a prank.

Samson also had a thing for hot Philistine women. He married a Philistine, then threw her out of the house after she cost him a bet. Nor was Samson a very gracious ex-husband. When she remarried, Samson’s wedding present to her was to take 300 foxes, light their tails on fire and set them loose in the wheat fields, destroying the Philistine’s crops. After that, about a thousand Philistines showed up at Samson’s house to kick his ass, but Samson killed them all with the jawbone of a donkey which was conveniently laying nearby.
 

Despite the flop that was his first marriage, Samson fell for another Philistine, named Delilah. Delilah was the kind of trouble that wears a name tag. Once married, she immediately started pestering Samson into telling her the secret behind his enormous strength.
He lied, telling her that if he was tied up with new rope that he would become as weak as a baby.
 

While he slept, Delilah tied him up with rope. Then she let the Philistines in to the house. They poured in to beat Samson into submission. But to Samson, their tiny little fists felt as if he were being pummeled by a declawed cat.
 

“Oh, isn’t that cute?” he said, rousing from his sleep. Then he tore through the ropes like cobwebs and demolished the Philistines with his bare hands.
 

Despite the obvious trust issues in their marriage, everything seemed to go back to normal for Samson and Delilah. And it wasn’t long before Delilah was again nagging him to tell her what made him so strong. Finally, Samson caved in and told her that his strength came from his long, beautiful, Michael Landon-esque hair.
 

That night, Delilah shaved Samson’s head while he slept. Apparently, Samson was a heavy sleeper. At last, the Philistines were able to storm the house and arrest bald Sampson without being killed by fists or animal parts. Not wanting to take any chances, the Philistines gouged out Samson’s eyes and threw him in a dungeon. 

Many years later, the King of the Philistines was having a big celebration and thought it might be fun to trot Samson out as a party favor. They fished Samson out of the dungeon and stood between the center pillars of the palace so everyone could get a good look him. What they had failed to notice, however, was the fact that Samson’s hair had grown back.
 

Standing there, amongst the shrimp cocktails and mushroom appe-teasers, Samson regretted wasting so much of his youth on bros and hoes, and taking for granted the enormous power God had given him. Samson asked God to give him his strength back one more time so that he could finally do something useful with his life. 

Blind and chained, Samson felt his biceps swell and the return of the old rush of adrenalin he felt as a young man. He reached out, grasped the pillars, and pulled them down with all his might, killing himself, the Philistine king, the cocktail servers, and everyone at the party. His hair had toppled the Philistine government.

Ruth begins with the marriage of an Israelite man to a foreign woman named Naomi. Naomi gave birth to two sons, who themselves married foreign girls, a pair of Moabites named Orpah and Ruth. Life was good for Naomi’s extended family until all three husbands died in quick succession, leaving the women in a precarious situation. In those days, a woman’s financial security depended completely on having a man around who could work the land, sell the crops and father loads of sons to do the same. Naomi inherited a tiny plot of land, but found herself without husband or sons and too old to get more of either. Things looked pretty grim for Naomi.
 

Realizing that her life had become a train wreck, Naomi told Orpah and Ruth to leave her and to return to their families in Moab. Orpah didn’t need to be told twice; without missing a beat, she caught the next camel back home. But Ruth couldn’t bring herself to leave her mother-in-law to starve or be eaten by coyotes or whatever became of old widows in those days. 

So Ruth and Naomi braced themselves for the hardscrabble existence of a couple of homeless women. They got most of their food from the welfare system Moses had created. That is to say, she worked as a gleaner, one of the people who picked through a field after it had already been harvested in order to get whatever crops had been left behind. Whatever she could scrape together from the fields was what she and Naomi would have to live on.

One day, the landlord was out supervising the harvest when he saw this young beauty in the fields, picking leftovers along with the cripples, drunks and other castoffs from Hebrew society. Intrigued, the landlord did a little snooping, and when he heard how Ruth had heroically chosen to care for her mother-in-law, he was so moved that he called her over to him. 

“My name is Boaz,” he said. “Look, I don’t want you working out there in the fields with all the snakes and weeds,” he said, “why don’t you stay here by the tents and work with my other female employees? There’s plenty of water for when you get thirsty and this way the farmhands won’t hit on you.”

After work, when Ruth told her about this fortuitous development, Naomi’s eyes lit up. Naomi smelled a golden opportunity for Ruth to snag a new husband. And having been around the block a few times, Naomi knew just how to seal the deal.