On to the next installment of the wild story of the Bible. Remember, suspend your perceptions of it as a basis for religion. I’m just telling the story, as a story.
So, we left off with God and his great little pets, humans. He was getting annoyed with their behavior. For example, they were starting to work together at a place called Babel, deciding that by doing so they could rule the universe. Too bad for them that’s God’s job. So, he did what anyone does when confronted with a threat to their job – he sabotaged it (by making the humans unable to speak to each other).
Here’s where things start to focus on mankind itself, like the camera sweeping from behind the zookeeper into the cage to zoom in on the playing tiger cubs.
A guy named Abraham lived in Iraq. God asked to him to move to what is today Israel, so he did. Abraham was pretty good at respecting his keeper. They spoke sometimes. Abraham even almost convinced God to spare some folks, hanging out in Sodom and Gomorrah, from total destruction. But, God decided that whole cities of bloodletting rapists probably could be cleaned up before getting to evaluating the rest. Abraham was that cool, though, so God started to think this could be his next Patient Zero, so he gave Abraham a son at the age of 90.
Just to check Abraham’s loyalty, God asked him to kill his son with no explanation as to why. Realizing that he couldn't think on God's badass level enough to get his plan, Abraham was willing to do so, though it obviously sucked. So, God let him off the hook. He decided to use Abraham’s family line to breed a special line of humans, which he’d keep when he eventually got rid of all the crappy, untrainable, ill-behaved others.
Later, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob (a/k/a Israel) had some little shits for kids – 12 of them, who’d become the 12 tribes of Israel. They sold the only cool one, Joseph, into slavery. Too bad for them, Joseph became Vice President of Egypt, the richest land around, by psychoanalyzing the Pharaoh (obviously not a Scientologist). When Abraham’s family got poor, they went to Egypt for help. Joseph was nice enough to take them in. A better man than I.
400 years passed, and things didn’t go well for Abraham’s family. Now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they were slaves, or something close to it (much like Mexican day laborers today – living in a great society, but unable to enjoy it).
God didn’t like his favorites getting beaten down by the Egyptians, who ignored him entirely. So, he picked one out and hooked him up. This guy, Moses, was lucky enough to be raised among the Egyptians and get all their secret knowledge. He learned magic, politics, and war, among all sorts of other things.
One day, though, it occurred to Moses that his own people were getting crapped on by the Egyptians he hung out with, so he took off. He and God chatted, and he went back to get his peeps. We all know how this went. He asked God to kick the crap out of the Egyptians, which God did, ending with killing the firstborn son of every family in the country, and the Isrealites picked up and left, via the parted Sea of Reeds (nope, not the Red Sea).
Moses and company fled into the desert of Saudi Arabia, where God decided to do a little training. He threw them food (manna) and brought them to a mountain, where he gave Moses rules to teach to the others (not just the Ten Commandments, but a couple hundred pages of the Bible’s worth of rules and regulations on how to acknowledge the simple fact that God is badass, by which the Jewish faith has lived for thousands of years).
God also told them how to build a radio transmitter to God; the Ark of the Covenant. As long as they followed the rules and kept in touch with him through it, he promised them a great little spot he’d picked out – the land of milk and honey (roughly modern day Israel; it's a great climate - prime real estate - part of the reason it's always been fought over).
This training was slow, hard work – 40 years’ worth. These “chosen people” – the Israelites (Jacob’s family), on repeated occasions, forgot about God and went to the same shitty habits of the rest of mankind (like acting retarded enough to worship their own jewelry).
In a really dramatic scene, Moses then brought the Israelites to some mountains overlooking the Promised Land. It was gorgeous, just the kind of place you’d want o raise a family, and a nation. And there, as his goal came into view before him, Moses died, as punishment for not training his folks better (and, admittedly, he was like 150 years old, and had just climbed that mountain).
Then, the Israelites entered the Promised Land. Sounds so serene, right? Yeah, too bad people were living there. This was prime real estate, remember. So, they proceeded to do the only logical thing – slaughter everyone there, town by town. God didn’t have a beef with this. His focus was on getting this group of his pets to behave. He’d just wipe out the rest on his own, anyway.
After this long, bloody invasion (that’s the only way it can accurately be described), which included great feats like the fall of Jericho, the 12 tribes of Israel got settled in. Their home stretched through what is today Israel, Lebanon, and much of Syria and Jordan.
From there, Israel hung out for about another 400 years, living without a human ruler. Their ruler, after all, was God, so they tried to just live by God’s rules. To deal with human failings, God would tap on the shoulder of especially cool people from time to time. These people – Judges – settled disputes and inspired the people when they needed to be led into battle defend their lands from invaders, etc. (let’s not forget – prime real estate).
That's it for this post. Next time, I’ll get into Israel asking for a king and then get into some more familiar history. I’ll even relate the movie 300 to Jesus. Frighteningly, it’s not a metaphor – they’re connected.
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