God Is Disappointed In You (6 page)

“The first thing you got to do,” she told Ruth, “is to take a bath. Do you have any perfume? Can you make some out of these beets and cauliflower you brought home? Men like a sweet-smelling woman. Okay, when you go to work tomorrow, be sure to wear something flattering.”

“I can’t work in a tight fitting dress,” Ruth protested.

“I don’t care if you can work in it or not. You’re trying to win a man here, not ‘Beet-Picker of the Year.’ After work, find out where he’s sleeping. Go in there, reach under his blanket and dig around with your hand until you find the buried treasure. It’s that simple. He’ll take it from there.”

“I don’t know…”

“Oh, come on!” Naomi reassured her. “A little trouser fishing never hurt anyone! Like it or not, this is how the game is played.
Do you want to eat secondhand cauliflower for the rest of your life?”

The next day, Ruth reluctantly took her mother-in-law’s advice. Ruth found Boaz alone in the threshing room. She hid in there, secretly watching Boaz threshing barley and dripping with sweat, his shirt off and arms glistening. Then, after finishing his work, Boaz enjoyed a little nightcap and laid down to rest. This was her cue. Once he was asleep, Ruth crept in and peeled the blanket back. Boaz woke with a jolt to find himself naked, and there, among the sweaty barley and perfume, Ruth kneeling down beside him. 

“Ruth, I’ve wanted you since the moment I first saw you in the fields,” Boaz said. “I think you’re the greatest woman I’ve ever met. And I want you to be my wife. But there’s rules for this sort of thing. My people live according to the Laws of Moses, and holy shit, did that guy have a lot of laws.
One of his laws being that when a woman is widowed, her dead husband’s closest male relative gets first crack at marrying her. According to the law, before I can marry you, I have to find this guy and offer you to him. I don’t want to, but I have to.”

“So, do you want me to leave?” Ruth asked.

“Now, I didn’t say THAT,” Boaz replied.
 

The two spent the night together on the threshing floor. The next morning, Ruth got up really early because she didn’t want anyone to see her scurrying away with her hair matted and dress askew.

Now, Boaz wanted to marry Ruth, but he knew that she was so beautiful that if he simply offered her to another man, there was a good chance he’d take him up on it. So Boaz hatched a little plan: he put Naomi’s small piece of land up for sale. Boaz then summoned the relative, telling him that he had some land to sell him. Boaz told the man how lush and fertile the land was, and then, to really sweeten the pot, he offered him a rock bottom price. The guy jumped at the offer. 

Now, in ancient Israel, no deal was final until the buyer and seller swapped sandals. That way if someone tried to back out of it later, the other guy could produce his sandal in court and the judge would say, “If you didn’t have an agreement, how did he get your sandal?” at which point you’d either have to admit that you made a deal or that you were too much of a marshmallow to keep someone from knocking you over and taking your shoes. In either case, the law was not on your side.

Anyway, just before the two men were about to swap sandals, Boaz nonchalantly added, “Oh, by the way, I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, but whoever buys this old lady’s land also has to marry her widowed daughter-in-law.”

This shady fine print immediately sent the buyer into red alert.

“Wait, what was that last bit?”
 

Boaz mumbled the part about marrying Ruth again. The man said. “Oh, I see what’s going on here, you’re trying to unload some old maid on me. I was wondering why the price was so low. Thanks, but no thanks. Tell you what, if it’s such a great deal, then why don’t YOU buy the land and marry the widow?” 

Which is precisely what Boaz had in mind. Boaz and Ruth were married, Naomi moved in and soon the happy newlyweds had a baby, named Obed. Little Obed would go on to be the grandpa of King David. Like Rahab before her, Ruth would go on to become the maternal ancestor of the most famous family line in history. King David, King Solomon and Jesus Christ would be the descendants of a prostitute and a homeless woman.
 

The whole ancient world was a bag of dicks. Even God was a bit of a dick. Life was so cheap that nobody really held it against you if you killed a person or two. How could you avoid it? So mercy was pretty much out of the question. The best you could hope for was that people would honor their deals.
And people were always trying to make a deal with God. 

A woman named Hannah stumbled into the tabernacle one evening, weeping. Having no children, she begged God to give her a son. In exchange, she promised to dedicate her son to the priesthood. The high priest, Eli, came out to see what all the commotion was, assuming she was drunk, he shooed Hannah out of the tabernacle.

Her prayer worked, though. Hannah soon became pregnant. She named her child “Samuel,” which means “God heard me.” Honoring her end of the deal, Hannah took the boy to the tabernacle to make him a priest. Hannah went on to have many other babies. She just needed one to get the ball rolling. 

Eli raised Samuel to be a priest. He had also trained his sons to be priests, but they weren’t exactly cut out for that line of work. They were always sleeping with the tent-greeters and embezzling meat. In those days, when people brought an ox or a cow to sacrifice to God, the priests would burn it. They were allowed to stick a fork into the roasting beef, and whatever they pulled out was their tip. But Eli’s sons juiced the game by carving up tenderloins and pot roasts until they were barely hanging on, allowing them fork off the best cuts of meat for themselves. Basically, they were skimming from the till. 

God is a picky eater, and the last thing you want to do is to steal his meat. God decided that Eli’s sons had to go.

Israel had many enemies, but the Philistines were sort of like Israel’s division rivalry. It wasn’t long before the Philistines attacked Israel. It was never long before the Philistines attacked Israel.
Just as they had countless times before, Eli’s sons hitched the Ark of the Covenant to its carrying poles and raced out to the battle so God could come shooting out and kill their enemies, popping their organs and burning off their faces, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style. 

Instead, though, the Ark did nothing. As the battle raged on, the Ark sat there motionless, like a jammed pistol in a gunfight. Without their secret weapon, the Israelites were routed by the Philistines. The Ark of the Covenant was taken as a war trophy. When Eli heard that his sons dead and the Ark had been captured, he fell backwards out of his chair, broke his neck, and died.

At first, the Philistines gloated over having captured the Ark of the Covenant, on which rode the Israelites’ cranky God. They put the Ark in their temple, so their god, Dagon, would have some company. The two did not get along. God complained about his living situation by giving the Philistines cancer and plagues of rats. The Philistines took the hint. They hitched the Ark to a team of oxen and sent it wandering back towards Israel. As a token of respect for a God who could summon such awful curses, they sent along a bag of commemorative gold figurines in the shape of little rats and tumors. 

When the Israelites saw the oxen pulling the Ark back into town, they got excited.

“Hey look, the Ark’s back!” they shouted. “Do you think it’s still broken?” As if checking under the hood of a car, they opened the lid of the Ark and it promptly killed seventy people. “Nope. Seems to be working just fine!”
 

God was now free to start the priesthood over from scratch, preferably with someone who wouldn’t tamper with his meat. Samuel succeeded Eli as the high priest of Israel. Samuel was a good man, but he made the mistake, so common to good men, of placing his trust in fools. In this case, his own sons, whom he’d appointed as judges in spite of their corruption and incompetence. 

The people of Israel were sick of being ruled by amateurs. Now that they were a real nation, they wanted to be ruled by a professional king, just like everyone else.
 

Samuel gave in to their demands and agreed to find the people of Israel a king. Unfortunately, Samuel conducted his talent search for a king in much the same way that one would put together a boy band. Samuel came across a handsome teenager named Saul, who was out looking for some lost donkeys. Thinking this was some sort of sign, Samuel made Saul king.

It turns out that donkey-catching is not the best qualification for being a head of state, and Saul was something of a disaster.
 

It wasn’t long before the Philistines attacked again. In what has to be one of the most brilliant military maneuvers in ancient history, the Philistines began raiding Israel for the sole purpose of killing blacksmiths. After losing a few blacksmiths here, a few blacksmiths there, pretty soon hardly anyone was left who knew how to make weapons. Israel’s soldiers now went screaming into battle armed with plows, head-shears, and wheelbarrows. Despite the fact that the army was fighting with agricultural implements, Israel still managed to win battles, thanks mostly to divine intervention.
 

Samuel realized he’d made a mistake. Saul was becoming increasingly paranoid and weird. He was breaking his deals with God and, what’s worse, stealing God’s sheep.

God told Samuel to find his people another king. So Samuel went out looking for another talented young man to become king of Israel. The next guy to join Menudo was a twelve-year-old named David, whom Samuel discovered while the young man was watching his sheep and jamming on his harp.

“Here’s the deal,” Samuel explained. “God is going to ask things of you. Sometimes he’ll ask you to show mercy. Sometimes he’ll ask you to kill. God doesn’t care if you are sweet or good. He cares that you are his. God is going to make you King of Israel someday and all he asks in exchange is that you do what he asks of you.”

Knowing that he’d lost God’s confidence made Saul even more moody and unpredictable. The palace hired a harpist in hopes of soothing his nerves. And for a while, his relaxing new age compositions seemed to do the trick. In the long run, however, this was the worst thing they could have done for Saul’s sanity, because the harpist they hired was David, the boy Samuel had appointed to replace Saul.

Saul’s army was locked in a stalemate with the Philistines. They sent the new harp player out to the battlefield to take sandwiches and milk to the soldiers. While he was there, David saw this enormous Philistine, an eight foot-tall giant named Goliath, taunting the army of Israel, begging anyone who had the nerve to come down and fight him.
 

The torrent of abuse and obscenities got to David and he accepted the challenge. Amused, Goliath walked up to kill David as if he were going out to rake the leaves. The boy reacted impulsively by whipping out his slingshot and firing a racquetball-sized rock directly into Goliath’s skull, killing him instantly. Then he lifted the giant’s heavy sword into the air, and brought it down with a thud, decapitating Goliath.