God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (8 page)

Moses wandered aimlessly throughout the desert, with little or no food or water to preserve his survival. Nearing death, a Midianite shepherd discovered the emaciated Moses and brought him to his family to be rehabilitated. His shepherd savior not only nourished him to health, but also offered his eldest daughter, Zipprorah, up for marriage to Moses. Moses and Zipprorah wasted no time in ‘getting busy’ in their designated tent and shortly thereafter gave birth to a son they named Gershom.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the conditions for the Israelite slaves worsened:

In terms of comedic value and degree of rational believability, you can lump the story of Moses and the burning bush right amongst the talking snake in the Garden of Eden; Jonah surviving three days inside the stomach of a whale; and Noah and the Ark. Another fable that is well outside the boundaries of physical reality.

According to Exodus, the story has it that Moses, whilst leaving Midian and in continued exile from Egypt was leading his flock to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, an angel of the Lord appeared to him from within the flames of a burning bush. Upon seeing this remarkable occurrence, Moses says to himself:

God, seeing that Moses had walked curiously towards the bush alight in flames, called Moses from within the bush. “Moses! Moses!” summoned the voice of God. Moses looks around doesn’t see anyone speaking to him. Again the voice called, “Moses, Moses.” “Holy Shit!” Moses presumably said aloud, “The Bush is not only on fire but has a voice.” The Bush then called out:

God then proceeds to have a lengthy dialogue with Moses using the flames as his vocal cords, telling him that he has seen the misery his people, the Israelites, are enduring in Egypt, and that he has a plan to liberate them. In return, should Moses play his part in God’s strategy, he will endow the Israelites with a “land of milk and honey.”

Moses argues with God that he is not worthy of such an undertaking, and expresses his concerns that the Israelites would never listen or follow him, and the Egyptian Pharaoh would laugh him out of Egypt for daring to ask the release of the Israelites. Remember, Moses is talking to a bush on fire. In turn, God promises Moses that he will perform miracles and send signs that God was behind him and the people would follow him.

God demonstrates his support by throwing down a long wooden stick, a staff, as his first sign. Moses looks at this stick on the ground and remarks, “My God, this is but just a stick!” God replies to Moses with words to the effect, “C’mon pal, I am God, this be no ordinary stick. This be a special magic stick.” (It’s funnier with an Australian-Aboriginal accent) Moses obeys and picks the stick up from the ground. But just as his hand went to clutch the staff, it turns into a slithering snake, to Moses’ obvious amazement. I mean, who wouldn’t be impressed? That is one awesome party trick!

“This,” said the Lord, “Is so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers – the God of Abraham, Isaac and the God of Jacob – has appeared to you.”

There is subsequent to and fro banter between Moses and God, mostly God offering his reassurance to Moses that he, the Lord, will perform the necessary miracles, actions and assistance when the time is apt.

Clearly a problematic issue presents itself in these passages, as the writings clearly now claim that God has chosen the Israelites as ‘his people’. Which seems at odds with the Genesis claim that God created all of man, but now seems eager to play ‘favorites’. Wouldn’t an all knowing creator surely see that favoring a ‘chosen people’ would surely lead to war, conflict and divisiveness down the track? Wouldn’t a god of peace, justice and love promote unity rather than division? This seems to be a major lack of foresight on God’s behalf, even I would’ve seen this coming, and I can’t even create an elementary school level diorama of a plasticine volcano. That shit was hard!

With God at his back Moses arrives in Egypt to instruct the Pharaoh to free the Jewish nation. The Pharaoh is dismayed that not only is his former non-blood related brother alive after surviving in the desert all these years, but is now making far reaching demands to free the Israelite slaves. Naturally, the Pharaoh dismisses Moses’ God sponsored request, to which Moses demonstrates the ‘stick into snake trick’ to prove that he is the messenger of God’s divine will. The Pharaoh clearly unimpressed with this sorcery, summons one of his own magicians and the Egyptian father of David Copperfield was able to mirror Moses’ punch line.

Temporarily defeated, Moses turns to God for a plan B strategy. God instructs Moses to lead the Pharaoh to the banks of the Nile and once there, Moses is to strike the water with his staff and God will turn the water of the Nile into a river of blood, with all the fish destroyed and the water undrinkable for the Egyptians. A few days later, Moses does exactly as God orders in the presence of the Pharaoh. Surprisingly, once more, the Pharaoh is seemingly unmoved and replies that his magicians can perform the same trick too.

There sure was no shortage of magicians in Biblical times, which meant someone was running a pretty darn good magic school in the Nile region and, evidently, pumping out a production line of graduates.

God, being God wasn’t going to sit back and be upstaged by one or two of David Blain’s forefathers and the ‘big guy in the sky’ sent down a series of plagues to be sure that the Egyptian Pharaoh would eventually see that God via Moses would not be budged from their ultimatum to release the Israelites.

The plague of frogs covered the land with the stench of rotting frog carcasses until the Egyptian houses were smothered in the amphibians. However, the Pharaoh would not be moved.

God steps his game up again and sends down a plague of gnats to little persuasive effect, which preceded a plague of flies; a plague on livestock; a plague of boils; a plague of Locusts; and a plague of darkness. All the while the Pharaoh stood steadfast to his refusal to emancipate the Israelites. This guy was one tough cookie!

God, as you can imagine, is now furious and I’m sure uttered the words of fictional
Scarface
character Tony Montana: “You wanna go to war? I take you to war!”

With all his power and now obvious rage it begets the question, why didn’t God just smite the Pharaoh and his people so that the Jews could escape the clutches of their slave masters? As you will see in later books of the Old Testament, God repeatedly demonstrates zero restraint in exterminating entire cities and civilizations.

We know God is now enraged at the continual defiance of the Pharaoh, and so we come to the origin of the Jewish holiday of the Passover. A name of relative innocuous inference, but one which, in reality, celebrates baby killing on a grand scale.

With the failure of all the plagues inflicted on Egypt, God bumps up the ante and says to Moses, in a manner that only Stephen King could foretell:

What follows next is equally diabolical and senseless, with God instructing Moses that all Israelites are to slaughter a one year old lamb perfect of defect, then with the blood of this infant mammal each household is to grotesquely paint the doorway to his or her house on the fourteenth day of the New Year.

Looking past the obvious unjustifiable barbarism of death and destruction of innocents, it seems incredible that the omniscient, omnipresent God who supposedly can hear our prayers and audit our sins and convict us of thought crimes, would require the homes of his ‘chosen people’ to be stained in blood as a signpost to prevent the Jews from inadvertent death as a result of some mystical form of death by friendly fire.

Good to his word, God did exactly as he promised and murdered all first-born sons and animals of Egypt at midnight. Not a single Egyptian household was spared death, including the Pharaoh’s son.

Finally, with the Pharaoh’s heartbroken, he eventually caved and begrudgingly permitted Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, as Moses had requested.

I am sure Henry Kissinger has his own view on the means justifying the ends in warfare, but surely this Biblical event, even if it were true, must disturb even the most religiously apathetic.

With Moses successfully leading the Israelites out of Egypt and slavery, one would not expect the Pharaoh with the lifeless of his firstborn son clutched in his arms to just sit back and watch the Israelites flee without hindrance. He sent his army to pursue and destroy the self-proclaimed ‘chosen people’. Before long, the Egyptians had cornered the Israelites against the Red Sea, with no route for escape. Naturally, the Israelites were terrified of their pending doom and despite all the aforementioned miraculous divine interventions that God had performed to ensure their Exodus from Egypt in the previous days, the Jews still doubted their savior and complained and whined bitterly to Moses:

God hadn’t finished working his wonders and as the Pharaoh’s armies closed in on the Israelites, the Lord whipped up a storm cloud, the first ever shit storm, of sand that encircled the rear of the fleeing Jews to protect them from vengeful plunder.

God instructs Moses that come the following morning, he should hold out his staff and stretch out his hand over the sea and then God would do his part to divide the water so that the Israelites can walk through the sea on dry ground.

The oceans parted with Moses holding up a stick! A scene no less comical than that portrayed in Cecil B. De Miles
Ten Commandments
, with walls of water held at bay on either side of the ocean bed. Of course, this event never took place and only a child would believe such suspension of natural law to be possible. What Biblical scholars do agree on, however, is that it is ‘possible’ an event like this may have taken place with the Israelites fleeing a pursuing army, but due to a mistranslation of ancient Hebrew, the original wording was meant to have said, “The Israelites crossed a sea of reeds”, rather than the Red Sea. Thus, a teeny linguistic error created the parting of the waters mythology, rather than what may have occurred, in that a bunch of Jews crossed a swamp.

The Egyptian armies follow the Israelites into the parted sea. So, why did God give Pharaoh half-a-chance by releasing the protective cloud he had earlier sent down to defend his people? Nevertheless, the Egyptian chariots made it approximately half way across before God wills the wheels of their chariots to come off thus making survival impossible when the waters returned to drown the entire Egyptian Army.