Deuteronomy

I'm probably going to blow through Deuteronomy because much of it is Moses recapping to the Israelites on some of the events that already happened or some of the laws that were already established.  Also considering my approach on Numbers was probably a little overwhelming, we should take a little breather from the seriousness.   So I'll just point out some things that caught my eye so we can move on.

One thing I'd like to mention is that it's implied that the Nephilim reside elsewhere aside from Canaan.  It is elaborated that the Anakites are the descendants of the Nephilim who live in Canaan, and there are others called the Rephaites who lived in Moab.  Basically, the same genetic line, different location.  (2:20 - also refer to Numbers 13:33 for specification of Anakites)  However, it seems that the Hebrews killed most of the Rephaites off.  There is also some specific detail of just how huge these descendants of the Nephilim were. [1]

Only Og king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaites.  His bed was made of iron and was more than thirteen feet long and six feet wide.  (3:11)

Don't forget to keep in mind that this is all nonsense.  Not unless you'd want to consider it to be an exaggeration, and assume that Sun Mingming from Chinese basketball could be a descendant of the Nephilim, although he's not even 8 ft tall.  But still he's an effing beast!

ANYWAY... Here's a part where God's full of shit.  God says that if you end up doing some bad things, including worshiping other gods or just disobeying God in general, if you decide that you've sinned and want to do God's will again, then he'll forgive you.

For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath.  (4:31)

Bullshit!  Yeah, so God won't abandon you, except that one time God was having a tantrum over the Israelites being afraid to conquer Canaan for a quick minute, so by the time they came to their senses, confessed and repented, and went into battle thinking God would help them, God was like "so long, and thanks for all the fish!"  Yeah, so God won't destroy you, except that one time when he set Aaron's sons on fire because they burned incense without knowing it would piss God off, or killed off 14,700 people because of a couple of guys that wanted to overthrow Moses.  Yeah, God won't break his covenant... yet.  But oh you wait and see.

 

Here's one I never quite understood that I've seen mentioned a couple of times.  Here, God is talking about what he's going to do to all of the peoples that he's planning on destroying, and he says 

"Moreover, the Lord your God will send the hornet among them until even the survivors who hide from you have perished."  (7:20)

*Ahem*  The hornet??

Oh, this is a fun part where God tells everybody that they all suck.

After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness."  No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you.  It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.  (9:4-6)

Yeah, so, if you lose a battle, it's because you suck.  If you win a battle... well, you still suck.  Interesting logic.

This is a quote I've kept in mind for many debates, when others try to say that God is the only god.

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords.  (10:17)

 From my interpretation, this is simply a title that he's just that awesome.  Like saying that this is the Cadillac of coffee mugs.  The creme dela creme.  Not at all implying that there's only one kind of "creme" or coffee mug or lord or god.  Just that this is the best of them all (which, in my opinion, God is getting a little too cocky for his britches, but that's just me).  Something to think about.

(11:25)  "The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land, wherever you go."  Doesn't that remind anyone a little of Al Qaeda at all?

This is kind of fun.  In Chapter 13 it says that if there's a prophet or a dreamer who tells you of some stuff and talks about other gods, you're to kill them, and God will appoint a prophet or dreamer of his own.  It explains that God is testing your faith by sending an evil prophet to you so you can kill him.  Even if they're your own children.  One of those "special circumstances" situations.  Like, what makes you so special that he needs to test your faith at the expense of another person's life?  *shakes head*

Weird:  "But if your servant says to you, 'I do not want to leave you,' because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, then take an awl and push it through his ear lobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life.  Do the same for your maidservant."  (15:16&17)

Here's something that I consider to be very important in debates.  A lot of people say that it isn't possible to talk to the dead or there's no such thing as magic because God would not allow such a thing.  WRONG.

Let no one be found among you who... practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist who consults the dead.  Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.  (18:10-12)
The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination.  But as for you, the Lord your God has not permitted you to do so.  (18:14)

 Nowhere does it say it isn't possible.  It just says it's not allowed.   Not to mention, God makes so many exemptions to this rule, Moses included, but we'll see more of this in the future.

In (20:5-9) God is a little considerate for his young soldiers.  If a man is so young that he hasn't begun to enjoy his house or vineyard or wife or whatever, then he should go home instead of dying in battle.  How nice.

A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.  (22:5)

Oh and for the love of God DON'T take the bird when you take its eggs!   (22:6&7)

 If a man claims that his bride is not a virgin and he was caught lying about it, he has to pay a fine.  But if it's true, the woman must DIE!!  (22:21)

Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.  (24:16)

Nevermind when God punishes seven generations because one person fucked up, or slaughters thousands of children to punish a Pharaoh or two, or goes genocide-happy when a couple of people start whining because they're starving to death.  Do as I say, not as I do!
 

If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.   (25:11&12)

In (12:4) it says to not worship God in any other way aside from that which has been instructed by God, because any other way is detestable.  Especially if you do worship God the same way that pagans worship their gods.  So, when you think about it, you're all doing it wrong.

For example:  Ever wonder what the Christmas Tree has to do with the birth of Jesus, or the Easter Bunny has to do with the resurrection of Christ?  Well, I'll tell ya.  Nothing!  That's what!  Nothing about Christmas has anything to do with Christ!  The tree, holly, mistletoe, decorations, candles, caroling, all pagan tradition celebrating the Winter Solstice and hoping for the swift return of Spring. Being that these evergreens are for-ever-green and aren't hindered by harsh winters, this gives rise to hope for the spring, and decorations often celebrated pagan gods of fertility - again - for the hopes of spring.  [2]  And Easter, well, that's just a long one in and of itself ranging anywhere between the name of the holiday - which was named after the pagan goddess of spring fertility Eostre - to the fertility symbolism of rabbits and eggs (hence the term "fucking like rabbits").  [3]  Even the day on which Christ was supposedly born doesn't correlate with the timing of the holidays.  [4]  And guess what?  All of this shit PREDATES CHRISTIANITY!   So then, why are we celebrating Christian holidays on dates that aren't original to the scripture, or in ways that are otherwise forbidden in the Bible?  Easy.  All the better to Christianize with, my dear.  Back in the day, after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as their official religion, they basically spread among Europe and converted damn near everybody to Christianity.  But the pagans weren't going to agree so easily.  So they made a deal: We'll let you celebrate however you want whenever you want, as long as you technically say it's in the name of the Christian God.  [5]  And voila!  You have Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies!

Still think I'm being too fussy?  Fine.  Let's ask the Bible what it thinks about Christmas Trees.

Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky, though the nations are terrified by them.  For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.  They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter.  Like a scarecrow in a melon patch, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk.  Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.  (Jeremiah 10:1-5)

Look it up, bitches!

Random:  "The Lord will circumcise your hearts..." (30:6)

Then the Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land.  (30:9)

Okay, so God says that if you're prosperous in anyway, it's because God made you so.  Well, what about Canaan that seems to kick so much ass in prosperity when they're all a bunch of abominable heathens?  Okay, so it's possible that God was just preparing that land for the Hebrews.  But what about Egypt?  Pharaoh clearly stated in Exodus that he had no fucking idea who this "God" was, so Egypt was a pretty "God"less country.  Yet, when Abraham set out to go do stuff back in Genesis, he and his sisterwife went to Egypt because the land they were currently staying in was going through famine and Egypt was exploding with prosperity.  Although it doesn't specifically say that you can't have a prosperous land without God, it kind of does point all of the credit to God whenever it so suits the situation.  Hrm...

Another mention of other gods.  Interpret this as you will

They made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols.  They sacrificed to demons, which are not God - gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear.  (32:16&17)

Yeah, then Moses died.  Pretty much some time shortly after he came down from that mountain where God told him to take a good look at the Promised Land that he's not going to get to step foot in, he died there in Moab.  And yeah... that's basically the end of Deuteronomy.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anak

2. http://www.religioustolerance.org/xmas_tree.htm

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_bunny#Rabbits_and_hares

4. http://biblelight.net/sukkoth.htm

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization

Numbers

This book in the Bible holds a lot of significance to me.  As I read through the Bible for the first time many years ago, I still hadn't lost all of my faith yet.  However, this is the book that sealed the deal.  I closed my book in tears and ended up putting the Bible down for about six months because I was so disgusted and heartbroken with it, and refused to be involved with this religion.  So I would like to approach this book with a level of sobriety and austerity to effectively portray this book and my reactions as accurately as I can.  I would also like to deviate from my habit of disproving and debunking for the sole purpose of demonstrating the Bible's depiction of who and what God really is.   Perhaps you'll come to a different conclusion.  Let's press forward.

The Calm Before The Storm

In the beginning of Numbers, God tells Moses to take a census of all the fighting men that were able to serve in the army, totaling out to 603,550 Israelites.  There were also some separation between the tribes depending on their tasks God has designated for them; for example, God wanted the Levites responsible for the care of the tabernacle of the Testimony, and anyone else that came near it other than the Levites were to be put to death.  There are special vows to be taken and more animal slaughter to consecrate yourself to God and making absolutely sure the camp is pure.  Basically, God is buckling down and keeping his poop in a loop hard core, so you know something is up.

God has a funny habit of adding in random issues that don't exactly fit among the rest of the situation.  This particular funny situation is about unfaithful wives.  Basically, if a husband has a suspicion that his wife is cheating on him, she is to go before a priest and drink this "bitter water" that the priest puts a curse on.  The curse states that:

If she has defiled herself and been unfaithful to her husband, then when she is made to drink the water that brings a curse, it will go into her and cause bitter suffering; her abdomen will swell and her thigh waste away, and she will become accursed among her people.  If, however, the woman has not defiled herself and is free from impurity, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.  (5:27&28)

Let's think about that.  The priest gives the woman some "bitter water" to drink, and if she's guilty she'll become infertile and sick.  Gee, that doesn't sound like poison and a set-up for failure at all.

On top of that, they definitely didn't forget the details on how to handle the opposite end of the spectrum.  Anyone ever hear the rumors of how the Bible is sexist?

The husband will be innocent of any wrongdoing, but the woman will bear the consequences of her sin.  (5:31)

Another interesting tidbit is something that God mentions for the first time.  He says,

Also at your times of rejoicing - your appointed feasts and New Moon festivals - you are to sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, and they will be a memorial for you before your God.  I am the Lord your God.  (10:10)

Okay, we know the appointed feasts: the Feast of Unleavened Bread,  Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.  But what the hell is a New Moon festival?  Like we're just supposed to know this, right?  Well, I've dug up a little bit of research on what this could possibly be, but nothing that I've found is certain.

• The New Moon festival is a memorial of God's creation of the heavenly bodies, and keeps people in remembrance of his calender month by month.  [1]
• The New Moon festival is a symbolic festival celebrating how God works and operates according to patterns and cycles.  [2]
• The New Moon festival is a Jewish festival that celebrates the start of the Hebrew month by preserving the ancient custom of reciting a blessing on the Sabbath preceding the new moon, in which fasting and mourning are not allowed.  [3]
• The New Moon festival is a celebration among many neopagan religions with a variety of different symbolic meanings attributed to a vast number of ancient pagan beliefs.  One of the more common beliefs is that of the Triple Goddess; Maiden, Mother, and Crone, attributed to the phases of the moon.  [4]

The Terrors of God

 Here's where some of the horrific incidents begin to occur.  In the beginning of chapter 11 it says,

Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the Lord, and when he heard them his anger aroused.  Then fire from the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp.

Shortly after, the Israelites became hungry and the manna (bread) that God rained down tasted disgusting and they couldn't eat it.  They began crying to Moses, and God started getting pissed.  Moses was irritated because he felt that God wasn't helping him out at all.  He said,

I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me.  If this is how you are going to treat me, put me to death right now.  (11:14&15)

So God felt bad for Moses and decided to help him out by appointing a handful of elders to lighten Moses' burden a bit.  Furthermore, God decided to help Moses by sending in a bunch of quail to feed the Israelites.  Everybody was ecstatic and gathered a bunch of them up and cooked like nobody's business.  But get this;

But while the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed, the anger of the Lord burned against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague.  Therefore the place was named Kibroth Hattaavah, because there they buried the people who had craved other food.  (11:33&34) 

Yeah, God helps Moses out by tricking them and killing a bunch of his people.  That's the loving benevolence of the lord for ya.

Reaching The Promised Land

Now we get to the real exciting part of this book.  In chapter 13, the Israelites finally reach the outskirts of the Promised Land, Canaan.  God told Moses to send twelve leaders into the land to explore it for forty days and come back with a report.  When they returned, they brought along with them a cluster of grapes and some pomegranates and figs.  They showed them to the Israelites as a sample of just how flourished Canaan really is, saying that it indeed was flowing with milk and honey.

But the men who had gone up with him said, "We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are... The land we explored devours those living in it.  All the people we saw there are of great size.  We saw the Nephilim there.  We seemed like grasshoppers in their eyes."  (13:31-33)

Wait a minute.  The Nephilim?  You remember what the Nephilim are; the hybrid offspring of angels and humans from Chapter 6 in Genesis.  But I thought when God created the Great Flood, everything on earth drown except those on Noah's Ark, right?  Well how in the hell did the Nephilim get here?  I'll tell ya how.  God didn't kill everything on earth by the Great Flood, that's how!  Makes you wonder just how "great" it actually was, being that that part of the story was exaggerated, for sure.

Well, after the Israelites heard this report from the twelve scouts, they became fearful and depressed, saying, "If only we had died in Egypt!  Or in the desert!"  Only a couple of people disagreed: Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb.  Then God became angry because they feared the Canaanites instead of believing that God could help them (although you could hardly blame them after all the shit God put them through already) but Moses begged for God to forgive them.  Then God says,

I have forgiven them, as you asked.  Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of the men... will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers.  No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it.  (14:20-23)
But you - your bodies will fall in this desert. Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert... For forty years... you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.(14:32-34)
They will meet their end in this desert; here they will die. (14:35)

So God's idea of forgiveness is slaughtering thousands more just for being afraid.

God then struck down ten of the twelve scouts with a terrible plague and killed them.  (The surviving two were Joshua and Caleb.)  Moses told the Israelites what God had said about killing them off.  But then,

Early the next morning they went up toward the high hill country.  "We have sinned," they said.  "We will go up to the place the Lord promised."  (14:40)

Thinking that if they confessed their sins and put their faith back in God, then God would forgive them and be with them as they entered the Promised Land; the Israelites entered Canaan with high hopes and spirits, only to be completely slaughtered by the people living in Canaan.  God ignored the fact that they had come to their senses and handed them over to their enemies.  They never made it to the land of milk and honey.  They never made it to the Promised Land.

This is where I put the Bible down for six months.  I was so sick and brokenhearted after reading this, I couldn't bear it.  I thought to myself, I can't believe this anymore.  Even if this god is real, I want nothing to do with him.  Even if Heaven and Hell exist, I'd rather perish in Hell than serve this thing in Heaven forever.

Well, heartbroken or not, we move on.

More Terrors and Trickery of God

While they remained stranded in the desert, they noticed a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day.  They incarcerated him until they consulted Moses to figure out what to do with him.  God told Moses to kill him, so the whole assembly took the man outside the camp and stoned him to death.

Okay, so why did this happen?  Well, let's notice that this event took place on the Sabbath day.  Remember, we're not supposed to work on the Sabbath day.  It's supposed to be a day of rest.  "Work" also consists of picking up firewood so you don't freeze to death on the harsh cold desert nights.  (At least that's what I gathered.  I can't figure out why else somebody would be picking up sticks.)

Well, considering all this death that has been happening and since the Canaanites destroyed those who came into the land, three men (namely one in particular named Korah) rose up and tried to talk Moses into stepping down from leadership.  They stood up for the rest of the Israelites, saying that they are as holy as possible.  Then they said to him,

Isn't it enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the desert?  And now you also want to lord it over us?  Moreover, you haven't brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey or given us an inheritance of fields and vineyards.  Will you gouge out the eyes of these men?  (16:12-14)

Then Moses got pissed and told God not to accept any of their offerings, and meanwhile he told the men that they and their followers were to present incense in the Tent of Meeting the next day, so God could use it as some sort of tracking device for each individual.  Without knowing the reasons why (being that God and Moses were scheming against them) they did as they were told.  Now that God knew whose incense belonged to whom (although that in and of itself was kind of funny because God is supposed to know everything already, right?) God told Moses to separate himself from the rest of the assembly.

...and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah's men and all their possessions.  They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.  At their cries, all the Israelites around them fled, shouting, "The earth is going to swallow us too!"  And fire came out from the Lord and consumed the 250 men who were offering the incense.  (16:32-35)

The next day, the Israelites became upset and told Moses that he was responsible for the death of the Lord's people.  Then God got mad and killed 14,700 people from a plague.  (16:41-50)

A little while later, the Israelites were dying of thirst, so God told Moses to smack a rock and let the water come out.  And he did.

But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them."  These were the waters of Meribah, where the Israelites quarreled with the Lord and where he showed himself holy among them.  (20:12&13)

This ultimately led to Aaron's demise shortly thereafter, because he "didn't obey God's commands at the waters of Meribah".  (20:22-29)  What exactly did Aaron do?  Well, beats the fuck out of me.  There are a couple of ideas, but none are remotely conclusive.   [5]

In the beginning of chapter 21, the Canaanites decided to kill and capture some of the Israelites.

Then Israel made this vow to the Lord: "If you will deliver these people into our hands, we will totally destroy their cities."  (21:2)
In cliffnote b of my Bible, it states that the Hebrew term for "destroy" refers to the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them.

In my notes that I scribbled in the pages, I reiterate by saying "bargaining to gather souls".

Some time later, the Israelites were traveling again, and again, they were starving and dying of thirst and all they had left was this detestable food, so they started complaining to Moses again.   Only this time Moses didn't didn't feel like asking God for help, and God didn't feel like helping on his own accord.  Instead, God sent venomous snakes among them and a bunch of Israelites died.

Balaam

Here's a seemingly useless story that I want everybody to file away.  Just trust me.  So, there's this king of Moab (a city next to where the Hebrews camped out after some traveling) and he heard of all the cities they've destroyed lately - you know, after God killed a bunch of his own people - and the king was scurred.  So he asked this guy Balaam, who specialized in spiritual shit, to place a curse on the Israelites.  Balaam agreed to venture out the next morning to the Hebrew camp to place that curse, until an angel came to him and said,

"You must not put a curse on those people, because they are blessed."  (22:12)

So Balaam was like "Alright" and pretty much did everything that the angel of the Lord told him to do from that point on.  Balaam even went on to make some oracles and spoke against his king, advising him not to fuck with the Israelites or their God.  Ultimately, even though he wasn't much of a man of God and wasn't even a part of God's people, he was a good dude who did what God told him to do for that quick minute and went about his merry way afterward.  (Chapters 22-24)

One Last Terror

There's a point where the Israelites "indulged in sexual immorality" with the women in Peor and started worshiping their gods.  God wanted Moses to take the leaders of those people and kill them and expose them in brought daylight, and then God sent a plague among everybody, and 24,000 Israelites died then too.  (Chapter 25)

Miscellaneous

Now this is some bullshit.  God tells Moses to go up this mountain and take a good look at Canaan, the Promised Land, that he's going to give to the Israelites.  After he sees it, he finds out that God is actually going to kill him before they cross the Jordan River into Canaan.  So he'll never get to see the land that God promised to deliver the Israelites to.  After all this, after taking them out of Egypt and all those years of crossing the desert, Moses will never see the land of milk and honey.  Then Joshua was appointed to succeed Moses.  Ain't that a bitch?

Then the Israelites went and conquered the Midianites from Peor, and man they conquered the shit out of them.  They killed the women that weren't virgins and children, they even killed Balaam.

Have you allowed all the women to live?  They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's people.  Now kill all the boys.  And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.  (30:15-18)

Hold on a minute.  Wasn't Balaam a good guy who did as he was told and blessed the Israelites instead of cursing them like his king told him to do?  For one thing, this is the first contradiction in the Bible that I've noticed.  For another thing, if, hypothetically, this wasn't a contradiction, then isn't it kind of funny that a single man is able to effectively curse God and his people?  Something to think about.

Later, in chapter 13, the Israelites came to Moses saying that they wanted to build pens for their livestock and cities for the women and children.  But they wanted to arm themselves and prepare for war against Canaan.

Then Moses said to them, "If you will do this - if you will arm yourselves before the Lord for battle, and if all of you will go armed over the Jordan before the Lord until he has driven his enemies out before him - then when the land is subdued before the Lord, you may return and be free from your obligation to the Lord and to Israel.  And this land will be your possession before the Lord.  But if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the Lord; and you may be sure that your sin will find you.  Build cities for your women and children, and pens for your flocks, but do what you have promised.  (32:20-24)
When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you.   Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land you possess.   (33:51-53)

As we approach the end of the book of Numbers, right before they enter into Canaan, Moses reiterates some of the major laws they need to keep in mind, like not to marry any of the women from a different clan and what not.  But there are some other interesting ones.

• Six of the towns you give the Levites will be cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone may flee.  (35:6)  It states later only if the killing is accidental.
• The avenger of blood shall put the murderer to death when he meets him.  (35:21)
• But if the accused ever goes outside the limits of the city of refuge to which he has fled and the avenger of blood finds him outside the city, the avenger of blood may kill the accused without being guilty of murder.  The accused must stay in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest; only after the death of the high priest may he return to his own property.  (35:26-28)
• Do not pollute the land where you are.  Blood-shed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.  Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the Lord, dwell among the Israelites.  (35:33&34)
  
  No... God is against bloodshed?   Who'da thunk it?

Before we end this book, I would like to point something out real quick.

The Israelites set out from Rameses on the fifteenth day of the first month, the day after the Passover.  They marched out boldly in full view of all the Egyptians, who were burying all their firstborn, whom the Lord had struck down among them; for the Lord had brought judgment on their gods.  (33:3&4)

Stop!  Rewind!  So... that definitely didn't say anything about false idols.  That was specifically talking about other gods.  Let's think back to Exodus.  Remember how Pharaoh's priests were able to match much of the magic tricks that Moses was able to perform?  Perhaps that was the power of their gods.  Thinking again back to Balaam (assuming you want to believe the story that he actually disobeyed God and put a curse on the Israelites which caused them to be defiled by the Moabites - who worship the god of Peor) and the ability he had to place a curse on God and his people by the power of his god.  Is God really the one and only all powerful God?  I would like everyone to keep this in mind as we move forward through the Bible.


1. http://www.studiesintheword.org/celebrating_the_new_moon.htm

2. http://www.dadsdayoff.net/newmoon.html

3. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/411855/New-Moon

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Goddess_%28Neopaganism%29

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meribah#The_Death_of_Moses_and_Aaron

Leviticus

I'm going to apologize a little for how much I'm going to skip or briefly brush over in this book, but really, it's for your sake as well as mine.  Otherwise my fingers would fall off and I'd bore the bajeezus out of you.  So I'm basically going to touch on a few of my favorites, as well as some of the more important and/or outrageous laws in the book of Leviticus.

Offerings

This is basically just an overview of some of the different types of offerings you're supposed to give to God.  The really meticulous details would just make you want to smack your head against a rock, so we'll skip to the good stuff.

When any of you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from either the heard or the flock.  (1:2)

• Burnt Offering
• If by bull, sheep, or goats, it must be a male without defect.
• Slaughter and skin the animal
• Sprinkle its blood all over the Tent of Meeting
• Cut them to pieces
• Arrange the pieces around, including the head and fat, on the altar
• Wash its innards and legs before putting them on the altar
• Burn it, because it's a pleasing aroma to the Lord
• If by pigeon or dove:
• Wring off its head
• Drain the blood next to the altar
• Remove the crop and feathers and throw it to the east side of the altar
                       (Yup, you throw that shit)
• Tear it open by the wings
• Burn it, because it's a pleasing aroma to the Lord
• Grain Offering 
• You bake a bunch of bread and stuff 
• Remember, NO YEAST!  For God's sake, DON'T add the yeast!
• Burn it
• Fellowship (Peace) Offering
• If by bull or cow, must be without defect
• Sprinkle its blood all over the Tent
• Arrange the following:
• Remove all of the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them, both kidneys with the fat on them, and the covering of the liver.
• Burn that, and eat the rest
• If by sheep:
• Sprinkle the blood all over the Tent
• Remove and arrange the following:
• Its fat, the entire fat tail cut off close to the backbone, all of the fat that covers or is connected to the inner parts, both kidneys with the fat on them and near the loins, and the covering of the liver
• Burn that, and eat the rest
• Sin Offering
• Basically same shit as above, except there's seven time more blood-sprinkling
• Guilt Offering
• Basically the same, but with a ram

 So I just want to point out here, this is like, straight up sociopathic behavior.  You try doing this in your own back yard, and having PEETA on your ass would be the least of your concerns.  But this is what God wants!

Random Laws


Somewhere in the middle of all of this, it specifies that;

Or if a person thoughtlessly takes an oath to do anything, whether good or evil - in any matter one might carelessly swear about - even though he is unaware of it, in any case when he learns of it he will be guilty.  (5:4)

Next time, kids, remember to keep all of your promises!  Or you'll have to go kill a cow and play with its insides to make up for it.  So, save a cow, keep a promise.

Anyway, eating blood and fat is forbidden, because only God can eat blood and fat.  What's that?  You've eaten bacon?  Shame on you!


Blah blah blah... more slaughtering shit...  Oh, fun story.  So, Aaron's sons thought that God would like it if they burned incense in the Tent, but unfortunately God didn't like it so he set them on fire and they died.  Then God told Moses to tell Aaron in relation to his sons;

Among those who approach me I will show myself holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.  (10:3)

And Aaron was all like
 

 

Then Moses goes on about a bunch of different things that God tells him to tell Aaron and all the rest of the Israelites.  One of which really stood out to me, so I shall share that with you. 

Do not let your hair become unkempt, and do not tear your clothes, or you will die and the Lord will be angry with the whole community.  (10:6) 

I rofl'd at that one.  That's a serious WTF!

Oh let's see... Don't eat rabbits or pigs, or seafood without fins or scales, a whole shit ton of different kinds of birds, and blah blah blah.

After a woman gives birth to a boy she is unclean for a month.  If it's a girl she's unclean for two months, and she can't go near anything sacred or else she'll defile it with her grossness.  Same with her period too.  If anybody touches her, they'll be unclean too.  If a dude does her, he'll be unclean for a week.  (Chapters 12 & 13)

The No-Fucking-Around Laws

Okay, now for the serious shit we've all been waiting for!

• Unlawful Sexual Relations:  As far as sex goes, basically no relations with close relatives, don't do things that aren't cool like marrying a woman and her mother, don't have sex with a woman while she's ragging, don't sacrifice your children to Molech the god of the Ammonites - wait... that's not a sexual relation... (18:21) - no bestiality, no adultery, and no man-on-man action (although lesbians and threesomes are never mentioned).
• Various Laws:  A bunch of these in Chapter 19 are already mentioned in Exodus, both in the falsely-claimed Ten Commandments and in the REAL Ten Commandments, so we'll skip those.  Here are some fun ones for you. 

Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God.  I am the Lord.  (19:14)
Do not mate different kinds of animals.
Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.
Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.  (19:19)
Do not practice divination or sorcery.  (19:26)
Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.  (19:27)
Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.  I am the Lord.  (19:28)
Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritsts, for you will be defiled by them.  I am the Lord.  (19:31)

Punishments for Sin

Let's just take a peak at some of the sins that are worthy of the death penalty, shall we?

Curses his mother and father - DEATH
Commits adultery - DEATH
Marries a woman and her mother - DEATH by burning for everybody!
Bestiality - DEATH and kill the animal
You're a medium or a spiritist - DEATH
You blaspheme - DEATH

But, if you marry your sister and commit incest, you just get to move to a different town basically.  Probably because Abraham married his sister before God decided it was bad.  Good thing Abraham didn't marry a goat, because there might be more bestiality going on in the world if he had.

Ooooh This is a fun one!

No man who has any defect may come near; no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has an eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles.  No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the offerings made to the Lord by fire.  He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God.  He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary.  I am the Lord, who makes them holy.  (21:18-23)

Chew on that one for a while.

Punishment for Disobedience

Basically, God fucks your shit up if you don't listen to him and carry out his commands.

I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease and fever that will destroy your sight and drain away your life.  You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it.  I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies... (26:14-17)
I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted.  (26:22)
If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over.  You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.(26:27-29)
I will lay waste to the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled.  (26:32)
Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.  (26:34)
Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their fathers' sins they will waste away.  (26:39)

 So, if you don't do what God says, then you're going to be plagued with deadly diseases, you'll get wild animals sent against you, you'll be forced to eat your children, God's going to wreck shop on your land, you'll be killed by your enemies or just "waste away".  Yeah, just pass me the kool-aid and I'm on board.

In Conclusion

We can safely say that we dove into much of the Mosaic Law that is constantly referenced back and forth throughout the Bible.  There's still much more to go, but this is like the creme de la creme of the Mosaic Law.  Up next in the book of Numbers, our stars finally find themselves on the outskirts of Canaan (the Promise Land of milk and honey).  What mysteries await them just beyond the borders?  And who's the surprise special guest-star that they find in Canaan?  Can Moses and his buddies make it inside the land safely?  Find out next time on The Bible Uncensored!

Exodus

I'm probably going to be a touch more serious with this book because, where Genesis can be quite ambiguous and open to interpretation, much about Exodus claims for itself to be fact, and in result directly relates to "extremist" Christians and the root of the more barbaric culture that is Islam today.  The book of Exodus (along with Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are extremely important because it is constantly referenced all throughout the Bible.  

Early Years of Moses

Here's where we get into the popular story about Moses.  The Pharaoh saw that the Israelites were growing in number, so he enslaved them and slaughtered their firstborn sons to keep their population down.  When Moses was born, his mother set him in a basket and sent him through the reeds down the Nile river to escape this fate.  Pharaoh's daughter found him and adopted him as her son.  When Moses grew up, he killed an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew, and when Pharaoh found out, he tried killing Moses.  So Moses ran away from Egypt and got married to the priest - Jethro's - daughter and had a baby and became a shepherd.  One day, he came to Horeb - the "mountain of God" (3:1) anybody else thought of Mount Olympus? - and there God appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, revealing to Moses his actual heritage as a Hebrew rather than an Egyptian.  He told Moses that he will be in charge of delivering the Hebrews out of Egypt.  And Moses was like "Yeah, okay, and what am I supposed to tell the Israelites when they ask who this god is that has ignored their cries and pain and torture until now?"  God replies,

I AM THAT I AM.  This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you'.  (3:14)

Thanks for clearing that up, God.  Then God says,

The elders of Israel will listen to you.  Then you and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt and say to him, "The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us.  Let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God."  But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him.  So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them.  (3:18-20)

Note: Letting his people go wasn't a part of the original deal.  God just wanted them to pay tribute to him for a quick minute.

So, God grants Moses special powers to be able to turn his staff into a snake, turn his own hand leprous after sticking it in his pocket, and turn water into blood to prove to the Egyptians that God is real.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do.  But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.  Then say to Pharaoh, 'This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you "Let my son go, so he may worship me."  But you refused to let him go, so I will kill your firstborn son.'"  (4:21-23)

Let's just break this down a bit, in case you didn't catch all of it.  First of all, God says that he will "harden Pharaoh's heart" so that he won't let the Hebrews go... on purpose!  Why?  So he can then stretch out his hand and strike Egypt will all his wonders.  Not just Pharaoh, no.  But all innocent people within Egypt.  (Although, even if it was just Pharaoh, there still raises the moral issue of, well, Pharaoh didn't have any choice but to refuse Moses because GOD HARDENED HIS HEART!)  Why?  To instill the fear of God in the world and to make himself known.  Yup.  God sure is a swell guy, ain't he?

So, Moses went back to Egypt and performed these miracles to the Israelites so they would believe him.  He reunited with his biological brother, Aaron, and together they went to Pharaoh and said,

This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: "Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert."  (5:1)

Pharaoh replied by saying "Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go."   (5:2)   Pharaoh became irritated with this nuisance and, in retaliation, basically doubled the Hebrew slaves' work load to try and keep them from rising against him.  The Israelites grew angry at Moses for worsening their problems as a result, and refused to listen to him.  But, diligently, Moses tried again.

The Plagues

He went and turned his staff into a snake and the Nile into blood.  Oddly enough, Pharaoh's priests could conjure up the exact same magic, so Pharaoh was unimpressed and continued to ignore Moses' demands (remember, because God hardened his heart).  A week later, God tells Moses to begin doing God's wonders with his staff and bare hands.

• Plague of Blood
• We've already covered this when Moses turned the Nile into blood
• Plague of Frogs
• Pharaoh says to Moses, "Pray to the Lord to take the frogs away from me and my people, and I will let your people go to offer sacrifices to the Lord."  (8:8)  But when there was relief, God hardened Pharaoh's heart again and wouldn't let the Hebrews go.
• Plague of Gnats
• Here's where the magicians were like "We quit!  This is the finger of God!"
• Plague of Flies   
• Again, Pharaoh asks Moses to pray for him and take the plague away.  "I will let you go to offer sacrifices to the Lord your God in the desert, but you must not go very far.  Now pray for me."  (8:28)  And again, God hardened his heart and made Pharaoh take back his agreement.
• Plague of Livestock
• Plague of Boils
• Plague of Hail
• God says he sends this plague "so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth... I have raised [Pharaoh] up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth."  (9:14&16)
• Plague of Locusts
• God said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart... so that I may perform these miraculous signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord."  (10:1-2)
• This plague was to "devour what little you have left after the hail".  (10:5)
• Pharaoh quickly begged again when this plague began, "I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you.  Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me."  Again, God hardened his heart.
• Notice a pattern here, that Pharaoh in his natural state does want to let the Hebrews go?  He keeps repenting, but God won't allow it just so he can smite the world out of pride.
• Plague of Darkness
• Here Pharaoh get's so enraged that he tells Moses to make sure he doesn't appear before him again, or he will have Moses killed.  Moses replies, "Surely as you say, I will never appear before you again."  (10:28&29)
• Plague on the Firstborn
• God said to Moses, "I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt.  After that he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely."  (11:1)
• This is the first time that full-on deliverance from Egypt is mentioned
• God said, "About midnight I will go throughout Egypt.  Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.  There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt - worse than there ever has been or ever will be again.  But among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any man or animal.  Then you will know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel."  (11:4-7)
• The Passover -  Moses told the Israelites what God had told him, to go at once and take the blood of a lamb and smear it around the doorframes to their houses.  No one should go out of their homes until morning.  "When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the... doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down."  (12:21-23)
• There's a destroyer that God needs to permit to go forward with their actions?  Could this be our angel of death and not actually God himself?
• (12:30)  "...and there was a loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead."

During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, "Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go worship the Lord as you have requested. Take your flocks and herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me. (12: 31&32)

(I lol'd at that last part there.)

Alright, let's take a break from the plot for a moment to discuss what just happened.  So, God endows Moses with all these awesome powers to bring on plagues and things - not to try and persuade Pharaoh to let his people go, because Pharaoh's just God's zombie finger puppet who's only purpose is to give God a forged and fixed justification to be angry and smite an entire country to prove he's better than everyone else.  Pharaoh otherwise repetitively has a change of heart and permits them to leave, while begging for forgiveness.  It's God who keeps hardening his heart so that all these people may suffer and die so God can flaunt his big dick around.  It goes to such an extent where God kills (or has someone else kill) every single firstborn son in Egypt.  All the innocent children.  Dead.


Now let's take a break from all this drama and try to adjust back to reality before we press on.  Yeah, so, this never really happened.  At best, it's a hugely dramatized version of a migration of peoples from one place to another toward the end of the Bronze Age and begin a basic pilgrimage over the course of several generations.  At best!  Even still, there's hardly any room for an actual Moses, given the timeline is all fucked up and there really isn't much (if any) real evidence to support such a claim.  If anything, this story is more likely to be a historical novella.  [1]

But, real or not, it's important to understand that approximately 2.3 billion people around the world not only buy into this shit, but support it.  How sick is that? [2]

So now we can proceed a little more lightheartedly.  ^_^

The Red Sea

Anyway, so God turned himself into a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide the Israelites' to the Promise Land of milk and honey (Canaan) as they head out of Egypt toward the desert.  Then God decided to change his mind and harden Pharaoh's heart again, instead of just leaving well-enough alone.

And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. (14:4)

Of course, close to total genocide to the point of even destroying their cattle wouldn't suffice. And yeah, to avoid being slaughtered on the Passover, slaughter something else and smear your house with its blood. That's not enough. Must-Kill-More!

Pharaoh and his army chased the Israelites to the Red Sea, where God told Moses to raise his staff and part the waters so that they stand up as walls to create a path for them to travel though.  (In the meantime, the "angel of God" stood between the armies and the Israelites to keep them safe.)  When the Hebrews made it to safety, Pharaoh's army was able to pursue them again into the opened sea, and God closed the sea so that it devoured them.

Well on their way, the Israelites started complaining that they were hungry - so hungry that they were saying that it would've been better if they'd stayed in Egypt.  So God decided that he'd rain down bread from heaven every day except Sunday, because they needed to just sit around and not do anything in gratitude for the day that God rested after he created the world in six days... or some such nonsense.
It's rainin' bread!  Hallelujah!  It's rainin' bread!  *dances*
 He does the same thing with water, basically, only Moses has to smack water out of a rock when the Israelites are thirsty.  Although Moses gets all pissy when his people start complaining about how they're literally dying of thirst, like they're spoiled brats or something.  (17:2&3)
Not everybody was a prince of Egypt MOSES!

Well, I bet you're probably thinking, Gee, maybe this god really ain't so bad.  He gives them bread and water when they're dying and leads them to the Promised Land.  Well, stay tuned kids.

In The Desert on Mount Sinai - The Ten Commandments

Incidentally, when God wasn't looking, the Amalekites attacked the Israelites and killed off a bunch until Moses figured out that if he lifted his hands in the air then they could win the battle for some odd reason.

God decides that Moses should climb to the top of Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights while God tells him what the Ten Commandments are (although if you look - Chapter 20 - it never actually refers to them at the Ten Commandments, only the header does).  In the meantime, everybody else has to sit at the bottom of the mountain or else they'll die.  I'm sure you know how this goes:

1. Thou shall have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shall not worship false idol.
3. Thou shall not take the Lord's name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
5. Honor thy father and mother.
6. Thou shall not murder
7. Thou shall not commit adultery.
8. Thou shall not steal.
9. Thou shall not lie about thy neighbor.
10. Thou shall not covet they neighbor's wife.

Relatively familiar, right?  Nevermind the laws about sticking a Hebrew Servants' ears to a door by piercing an awl through their lobe in order to declare them yours forever, or the "eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth" business.  (Chapter 21 if you want to know.)

Completely disregard the law that if a guy sleeps with a virgin, she must marry him; to kill sorceresses and those who worship other gods; to be nice to aliens and offer them hospitality before sending them on their way; don't charge interest on a loan; and especially forget about the law where you have to sacrifice a lamb in place of your firstborn sons - unless you don't have a lamb then you are to wring its neck (Chapter 22).

Oh, and there's totally nothing important about the Three Annual Festivals we're supposed to have.  You know, to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread (because God has an allergy to yeast or something), the Feast of Harvest with the firstfruits of one's crops, and the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year when you gather your crops.  (23:14-19)

I hope you've figured out by now that I'm being sarcastic.  Because it is important.
I also would just like to point out all of these sacrifices that are going on, like, with all these awesome blood baths and playing with animals' innards and smearing them on shit.

The Ark of the Covenant is kind of important, because people carry this bitch around everywhere.  It's a little ark where they put the two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments in, and you have to make sure you don't touch the ark because if you do, you die.

The Golden Calf and The New-and-Improved Ten Commandments

Well, all this time that God is on this mountain telling Moses what the Law is (yes they're still on the mountain) and to write all this shit down on a couple of stone tablets - remember this took 40 days and 40 nights - the Israelites got all nervous and thought that God ate him or something.  So they decided to toss their gold into the fire and make a Golden Calf and worship that.  Considering God has been out to lunch for the past month and a half, the idol would probably serve a better purpose.  Not long after, Moses finally comes down the mountain and sees his people worshiping a Golden Calf, and he gets so pissed that he smashes the Ten Commandments and Miscellaneous Laws tablets into pieces.  Then he tells the Israelites a God-inspiring command - to take their swords and slaughter each other.  Whoever comes out victorious... well... lives.  Three THOUSAND people died.  Well, I suppose that's better than the original alternative, which was to just kill them all.  Isn't God thoughtful?

So, then God told Moses to come back up on the mountain to try this tablet thing again, since he smashed the last two.

God says not to trust the people who live in Canaan (the Promised Land of milk and honey) but they're to break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.  Now, watch closely at what's happening.  (34:14-26)
                *Just to note: Asherah is the goddess of the Canaanites (among others)

1. Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.  Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods... and when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons... they will lead your sons to do the same.
2. Do not make cast idols.
3. Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  For seven days eat bread made without yeast.
4. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me.
5. No one is to appear before me empty-handed.
6. Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest.
7. Celebrate the Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.
8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifices from the Passover Feast remain until morning.
9. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God.
10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk.

Still don't quite grasp the gravity of the situation?  Well, why should I explain it for you when the Bible can do a perfect job all by itself!

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel."  Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water.  And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant - the Ten Commandments.  (34:27&28)

BOOM!  What?!  OMGGGG!!!  
Yeah, I went there.  Break out the torches and pitch forks.  These are the new and improved Ten Commandments.  These are the ones that are in the Ark of the Covenant!  These are the ones in the temple of Jerusalem!  These are the commandments that won wars and formed settlements, these are the actual commandments that we are supposed to follow!  Because, remember, the original "Ten Commandments" only lasted for about five fucking minutes.

Alright, moving on and summing shit up.  So they make a bunch of crap and decide that it's holy.  There's really nothing important you need to know about all the holy crap they make, aside from the fact that there's a bunch of random crap that we're supposed to do that we're not actually doing; like have a special lampstand and table, and how to make a tabernacle, and priestly garments, and other random crap like that.  Let's see... Oh, and Aaron appoints himself as high priest and decides that only his decedents can be priests.  (Yes, remember that kids.)

In Conclusion

Well, we got to learn about the beginning of Moses.  Oh yeah, we still have a long way to go before this dude buys the farm.  We get to experience the vanity, pride, and short temper of God and how poorly he treats his people.  When you put this into perspective of all the people in the world who support this mythology, it really makes you wonder about humanity as a whole.  Tune in next time, and we'll get to see some real no-fucking-around laws in our next book.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses#Historicity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_by_country
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Genesis

Creation

I suppose there's no better place to start than at the beginning, right?  And in that beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God said "Let there be light and stuff!"  Alright, all fine and dandy.  I mean, even though it makes no sense at all that light came to be because God says so, who am I to question God's awesome power, right?  But let's look at the third paragraph in (1:6) where God says,

"Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water."  So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it.  ...God called the expanse "sky."

Okay, for those who don't have much of a mental visualization to understand what the fuck is happening here, let me break this down for you.  There's a bunch of water on this empty planet, and that's it.  Then God decides to separate this water, putting a bunch of it in a dome that hovers over the earth called the "sky".  So, according to the Bible, the sky is a dome of water.  Hrm... Gee, already we can see the demonstrable accuracy of the Bible at work here.

Let's move on.

Blah blah blah, God creates everything else and he sees that it is good and he is happy with it and blah blah blah.  But what's this?  No mention of Hell?  No creation of the Devil?  Important note to remember here.

(1:26)  Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..."

 Let "us"?  In "our" image?  Who exactly is God talking to?  Is there more than one god in charge here?  Or perhaps he's talking to his angels.  But, if we are created in God and his angel's image, then is God simply just another angel?  By saying "our" in this sense, it is implying that he's at least on par with whomever else he's speaking with.  Most arguments I hear is that God is talking to Jesus, because Jesus was there in spirit since the beginning.  "In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God."  Dats in Genesis and it's about Jesus! they say.  When, in fact, it most certainly is not in Genesis.  It's way ahead in (John 1:1), and most interpretations of this meaning is either the awesome Word that God speaks things into existence, or God's Law - aka Word of God, which was received and recorded by a prophet as commanded by the literal words of God - (which we will get into over the next few books).  Yes, there are those somewhat unofficial interpretations that specify that the "Word" is actually Jesus preaching about stuff.  But if this is so, it just doesn't make sense to me.  For one thing, you can't help but admit it's a little dishonest to take something that's written in a completely different library of books (Old vs. New Testament) - one predated the other by a good few thousand years at least - and try to attribute an earlier statement to a later meaning that doesn't even relate to the connection that one tries to fabricate.  [1]

Two, okay fine, the Bible is right even when it's wrong.  So let's play out this scenario; God is Jesus, so God is essentially talking to himself about his plans of creating mankind out of dirt.  Right, got it.

ONWARD!

Anyway, so God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden of Eden and it's so awesome because they can do whatever they want EXCEPT eat from a specific tree.  Somewhere in the middle of (2:9) it says,

...in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Two things to note here: one, there's a second tree that most people don't acknowledge - the tree of life; two, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  I just want to note that God has also created evil.  Basic principle of "it takes one to know one".

So, you know how people say that the Devil was manifested as a serpent to persuade Eve to take a bite of the apple of the tree of knowledge?  Well, look for yourself.  There is no devil.  Only a serpent, who is simply the most crafty of any of God's animals that he created.  (Chapter 3, in case you wanted to look.)  And you know the rest, I'm sure.  The serpent pointed out that God lied to them when he told Adam and Eve that they'd die if they ate the apple, and assured them that they'd become intelligent if they did, so they ate the apple and got smart and God was pissed.  The serpent was punished by having his legs taken away from him, thus we have snakes, Adam was punished by having to work for his food, and Eve was punished by having painful labor during childbirth.  (I'd just like to note that God was mad at the serpent for telling the truth and having his lie exposed.) And we are all paying - I guess - for Adam and Eve's original sin by suffering these punishments.

But (back to the note from earlier) then God says,

 The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.  He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.  (3:22) 

Again, who is God talking to?  God admits to having knowledge of evil as well as good, thus he is not all benevolent as people like to say.  And, he doesn't want humans to become "one of us".  Spelling it out for you, a GOD.  So he gives 'em the boot, not to punish them, but to eliminate his godly competition.

And you know about Cain and Able, or at least the basics.  God decided that he didn't like Cain's offerings to him, so he just kind of ignored Cain and gave all his favor to Able.  Cain got pissed and killed his brother.  God got mad and cursed Cain to be a "restless wanderer on the earth" whose crops will not yield to him.  Then Cain goes to Nod and marries his wife.

Wait... what? 

Okay, let me see.  So, first you get Adam and Eve, who got busy and made some babies named Cain and Able.  As far as we're concerned, those are the only people in the world, right?  So... who's this random chick from Nod?  This remains to be unanswered.

The Nephilim, The Revolt, and Fall of the Angels

Now, here's one of my favorite parts of the Bible, the beginning of chapter 6 in Genesis.  For one thing, this story lacks a lot of specifics that other texts like the Torah and the Apocrypha elaborate more on.  Putting the pieces together makes for a very lovely story.  For another, there is a very important detail that the Bible refers back to numerous times that I'm going to point out shortly.

To start things out, I'm going to give you the full version of this story so you understand better what's happening here.  Keep in mind that the Old Testament and the Torah are really the same thing.  (The Apocrypha is kind of like a collection of things to fill in the blanks.)  Some people just decided that certain details are better kept out of the Bible.

So, before God created Eve (and Lilith, but let's not get pedantic) he was so proud with his creation of Adam that he commanded all of his angels to come to earth and bow to Adam.  So they all did, except Lucifer wouldn't bow.  When God asked what his problem was, Lucifer was like "But... why do we need to bow to this insignificant little man?  You created us first, and made us so much more powerful and able to serve you.  I want to worship you, not this Adam man.  How is this not idol worship?  I thought I was your most beloved, that man should worship us.  Please, God.  I am your friend."  But God was like "Pfft, whatever.  Quit whining and go away."  Heartbroken, Lucifer was then cast out of Heaven for disobeying God.  Over the generations, Lucifer's sadness turned into jealousy, which led to anger, then hate, and eventually wrath.  During these transitions, Lucifer had been talking with the rest of the angels, and about a third of them (I believe - I don't have these scripts at my disposal) agreed with Lucifer that this whole thing was ridiculous and demeaning.  Then, one day, out of jealousy and rage, Lucifer and his followers devised a plan to desecrate God's "perfect creation" as a means of vengeance and reclaiming their place as most beloved in God's eyes.  (Here's where you get back to specific Bible scripture.)  These angels came to earth and raped women, impregnating them and giving birth to the Nephilim.  The Nephilim, a hybrid of angels and humans, were super strong and super powerful; they were giants measuring between 9 and 11 feet tall (depending on what version of the Bible you read).  And the Bible also explains Greek mythology by claiming that the Nephilim were "the heroes of old, the men of renown".  (6:4)  And they were an abomination, because they were the result of the desecration of God's perfect creation.  Back to the Torah/Book of Enoch- the angels that revolted taught the women and their Nephilim children how to sin properly, and so these teachings spread.  This is where God became furious with Lucifer and his followers, so he created Hell for them to fall to and forever live in agonizing eternity without their God.  Back to the Bible - when the Nephilim began to multiply, God basically became disgusted and decided to wipe the earth clean of all this nonsense via flood. [2]

So here's where you get Noah and his righteous family and a couple of pairs of all the animals in the world fitting on a little arc that is actually smaller in measurement than the Titanic to be saved from the purging of the world by the great flood, then God feels bad and promises never to destroy the world by flood (loophole) again, and then - of course - you'll need to proceed while totally disregarding the question of how Noah's little family reproduced if everybody in the world is wiped out.  Unless you look at it this way... in (6:4) it says,

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward...

Does this imply that they, at least, survived the flood?  Of course it does!  But you'll find that out later in the book of Numbers.

(I just want to add a little food for thought here that the creation story and the great flood story are IN NO WAY original to the Bible.  Just do, like, a Google search for ancient mythologies that have similar, if not the same, creation and flood myth.) [3]

Tower of Babel, Circumcision, Etc.

Let's move on to the Tower of Babel in chapter 11.  Everybody's at least heard of Babel, and it seems to me that most people believe that God came to earth to confuse everybody and make them speak a babbling language because they sinned somehow and needed to be punished.  Wrong.  Turns out, even though we humans are finite and mortal - thanks to God making sure of that - God was still a bit intimidated by us and our level of intelligence.  He saw that all these people were becoming a great society and learning how to use the resources of the earth to create things of their own.  And God said,

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. (11:6)

And WAHBOOM you have different languages.

Okay, blah blah blah...  As I look at my Bible now to skim over the less important details, I notice some of my own notes that I scribbled in the pages.  One note simply says "STDs?"  Let me reiterate the story that led me to this possible conclusion.  So Abram and his wife Sarai left their little land because there was a severe famine and headed for Egypt.  Abram told his wife to lie to the Egyptians and say that she is his sister, because he was worried the Pharaoh would kill him and take Sarai for his own wife.  Well, Abram's life was spared because of the lie, but that didn't stop the Pharaoh from taking Sarai for his wife anyway.  Then it says that God inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh because of Sarai.  So naturally I came to the STD conclusion.  (12:10-20)

Then you get to the introduction of circumcision in chapter 17.  God kind of has a habit of changing people's names.  He tells Abram (which means "exalted father") to change his name to Abraham (which means "father of many") and Sarai to change her name to Sarah... which I'm assuming means "mother of nations".  Then he declares that every male of eight days old must be circumcised as a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham, that his "...covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant..." and anybody who is uncircumcised is to be cut off from their people.  (17:13-14) 

First of all, gross.  Second of all, GROSS.  I'm sorry, who in their right mind would go, "Yeah!  Let's hack up our baby's penis and devote the foreskin to God!  That sounds like a totally rational thing to do."??  Just sayin'.

Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah

Chapter 18: The Three Visitors.  Basically, God appears to Abraham in the form of three men and says that Sarah will bear him a child by the same time next year.  Mind you, Sarah is 90 years old.  And yeah, that's about it.  Just a weird part of the chapter.  Well, Abraham hears that God is planning on destroying Sodom and Gomorrah because they're wicked or something, and he gets all upset.  So God says that if he can find so much as 10 righteous people in Sodom, then he'll spare the whole city for their sake.  Isn't that nice?

In Sodom (chapter 19) there's this dude named Lot who sees a couple of angels kind of scouting out the place for those 10 righteous people, and Lot's like "Hey dudes!  Come stay with me and wash your feet and stuff!  Me casa su casa!"  So they did, and while everybody's hanging out at Lot's house, all the men from Sodom, both young and old, surrounded the house and said to Lot "Bring those two purdy boys out here so'z we can do the dirty with them.  Mhmm!"  (Sodom = sodomy)  Lot's all like "No, don't do that.  Here, have my two extremely young less-than-mature virgin daughters instead and do whatever you want to them."  But all the guys in town weren't interested in his daughters and they started making a fuss.  Well, the angels that were in Lot's house (although in verse 12 they're referred to as men) got all angsty over this drama.  They yanked Lot back inside and told him to GTFO along with his family because they were about to level the place.

Sorry, anybody notice that it was totally cool of Lot to offer his little virgin daughters to be gang raped by e-v-e-r-y man in town?

Anyway, so the angels (or men) grabbed Lot and his wife's hands and led them and his daughters out of the city and told them not to look back.  But his wife did as brimstone and fire was being rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and she "turned into a pillar of salt". (19:26)

Many would arguably say that this "metamorphosis" is to be taken literally, because turning into a pillar of salt couldn't possibly be a metaphor for something else.  Regardless of the meaning, when you really start looking at the minutia of this particular situation, you just start falling farther and farther down the rabbit hole (which is why I'm not even going to bother leaving a citation for different interpretations of this verse).  If you yearn to know more, go on a Google rampage.  I wish you the best of luck in those endeavors.

Some time later, Lot's daughters decided it would be a great idea to get him drunk to the point of passing out and rape him so they could have his babies.  And they did.  And nobody cared.  And yeah, that's literally the end of that story.  Seriously... WTF?

Abraham and Isaac, Jews vs. Muslims, Miscellaneous

Well, back to Abraham, did anybody know that he married his sister?  Yup.  Sarah is actually Abraham's sister.  (20:12).  Remember a while ago when Abraham aka Abram told his wife to lie to the Egyptians and say that she's his sister rather than his wife?  Well, turns out she's both.  She just lied about the wife part.  What's kind of funny is that Abraham rationalized with incest, for one, by stating that she's only his half sister, and two, for saying that it's because the town that they're staying in has no fear of God that they'll kill him for incest. 

Let's just make a little mental note of this here.  For now, God's A-okay with incest.  The rest of the heathen world is not.  Right.  Must've had my morality compass on backwards.

Then you get to chapter 22 where God tells Abraham to take his son Issac up to some mountain to kill him and sacrifice him as a burnt offering.  Abraham's like, "Sure thing, God."  No question's asked.  Then right as he was about to kill Isaac, God was like "Wait!  Just kidding.  I just wanted to make sure you still loved me."  Douche. 

Try getting away with this nowadays.  Just a funny thing to think about, that Abraham is idolized for the willingness to slaughter his only son for God.  You do that now because you think God told you to, and you're crazy.  I wonder what the difference is?

Okay, blah blah, boring boring boring... Just want to point out that in (24:67) it specifies the requirements for marriage.  Sex.  That's about it.  Isaac takes Rebekah into his tent and makes her his wife.  Happy ending.

*chuckles*  Oh yeah!  So, funny story!  Okay, okay.  So, in chapter 25 there are these twin brothers, who are the sons of Isaac and Rebekah (Abraham's grandchildren).  One of them is an awesome good-looking quiet little chef, and the other is like this furry ginger wookie-looking fellow (I'm not joking) who runs around and hunts all day.  One day, the wookie hunter brother comes home and is really hungry and smells the soup his quiet chef-brother is cooking.  He's like "Oh man!  I'm so hungry!  Please let me have some soup!"  But the quiet chef is like "Not until you give me your birth right."  The wookie hunter's like "Not cool, man.  I'm literally starving.  Come on, give me some soup!"  But the chef's like "Not until you give me your birth right."  The wookie's like "Look, I'm seriously about to die here.  Give me some fucking soup!"  But the chef's like "Not until you give me your birth right."  And thus the split between Jews and Muslims.  Makes sense, right?  (25:24-34)  Jacob and Esau [4]

Another mention of marriage: (29:18) Jacob labors for seven years to marry the two daughters of some guy.  Marriage is like a business proposition.  AND POLYGAMY IS TOTALLY COOL!

At some point God changes Jacob's name to Israel and Esau's name to Judah.  They go their separate ways and marry and multiply and do stuff and establish cities and so on.  And that's about it.

In Conclusion

Well, I've flipped through the rest of Genesis and there doesn't really seem to be much left worth mentioning.  Basically, to sum up the rest of this book, there's a bunch of genealogy and some relatively unimportant stories left.  As I look over my summary before I get ready to submit my post, I can't help but give a little snort and snicker.  Really, this is just laughable.  Words turning mud into people, people turning into pillars of salt...  Case in point, this is Genesis in a nutshell.  Are you inspired by the Word of God yet?

[1] http://www.participatorystudyseries.com/what_is_word.shtml

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Enoch
http://www.subboard.com/generation/articles/100455758625222.asp

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob#Jewish_tradition

Introduction

About six years ago, sometime after I had an idea that I was being conned by even the most passive and tolerant of churches, I decided to pick up my very own New International Version of the Holy Bible and read it cover to cover.  I - as I'm sure many others have - heard all the rumors flying around about how the Bible has all these contradictions, or the fact that the god of the Old Testament is a malicious vengeful murderous god, yet Christ appears in the New Testament to correct God's temper and bring peace to mankind.  This statement usually leads Christians to saying that there's no point in reading the Old Testament, although it made little sense to me.  Why ignore the absolute foundation of the entirety of the religion?  It has to be important somehow.  Alas, I, in no way, could defend or oppose such claims, since I hadn't seen these things in scripture for myself.  Any argument I made in defense of what I considered to be common sense (or lack thereof on their part) to a believer seemed to be refuted by something akin to either a spin or a crafty dodge of my position.  Either way, I felt that my questions or debates on such a manner weren't being dealt with honestly.  Things just weren't adding up, and that's all that I knew.  But I couldn't hold my own with just this tiny bit of reasoning.  I needed to be better equipped with verses and well armed with knowledge to accurately and efficiently address my position and to better understand theirs, which - I had hoped -.would lead me to the Truth.  Well, it most certainly did, but not exactly in the way I had expected it.

In the following posts, I am going to share with the world (well, with whoever feels like reading this anyway) my little findings on this nonsensical belief system.  I'm going to apologize in advance about my approach on the first 17 books of the Bible, being as I've already read through them diligently once before, and have skimmed over them numerous times since.  So I may not be as thorough as I am with the books proceeding.  But I'll try to be as precise in noting the more important aspects as I can.

So... let's get started, shall we?  ^_^