by God
6 What, thou’rt telling me Jacob is a patriarch? Thou’rt gonna look me in the eye and tell me Jacob is more suitable patriarch material than me?
7 Guy’s a putz!
8 Lo, I say that with all due respect; kid’s my son-in-law twice over; but he’s out of control.
9 Verily, thou wantest a loose cannon running your Promised Land?
10 Fuhgetthaboutit.
11 Listen: ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Laban.’ That soundeth good to thee? ’Cause it sure soundeth good to me, I can fucking tell thee that.”
12 These speeches amused, not angered me, for I understood their motivation; it is difficult to live in such close contact with one who regularly talks to and is personally protected by God, and not to harbor such feelings of resentment.
13 (Pat Robertson gets this all the time.
14 Even his most pious friends experience jealousy toward him; for they commune not directly with their heavenly Father, whereas Pat and I talk three times a week; four, during hurricane season.)
15 Of one more event in Jacob’s life will I speak, for it has been a matter of some theological dispute.
16 Jacob and his family were fleeing from Laban, after Jacob had fooled him out of most of his cattle; meanwhile Esau had heard that his wayward brother was nearby, and sent a message that he was coming to meet him, with 400 armed men.
17 Thus hard beset on two sides, Jacob sent his family away for their protection, and left himself alone beside a stream at sunset; whereupon “there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”
18 Herein lies the dispute; for Genesis saith “a man,” but many have assumed it must have been an angel; and many beautiful pictures of Jacob wrestling this “angel” have been painted by artists like Rembrandt, Gauguin, and Chagall.
19 But verily I say unto thee, that it was no angel, but, as written, a man; a man sent by Laban and Esau to beat the living crap out of Jacob.
20 It had nothing to do with me; though I admit I did not lift a finger to stop it; for by any measure of divine justice, Jacob had it coming.
21 And lo, that nameless goon broke just about every bone in Jacob’s body; Esau and Laban did get their forty shekels’ worth.
22 But Jacob gave as good as he “gotst”; for though of only average build, he was nimble with a good reach, and knew a little krav maga; he refused to concede, and on and on they battled unto daybreak.
23 It was endless; the only clash I have ever seen even comparable to it, was the fight scene between Frank Armitage (Keith David) and George Nada (“Rowdy” Roddy Piper) in the film They Live; and even that was done only in a spirit of post-ironic kitsch.
24 When the sun rose, Jacob and the unknown enforcer both lay bruised, battered, and half-dead on the sandy ground.
25 Out of respect, the enforcer called Jacob “Israel,” meaning “he who struggles with God”; for he assumed I had been fighting by Jacob’s side all night; I did no such thing; I just sat on a cloud with the angels and took in the show.
26 And so Jacob became Israel; and in time, Israel became the name of the land I had promised him.
27 An apt name it was too; for verily, what nation has struggled with God more than Israel?
CHAPTER 21
1After that near-fatal encounter Jacob saw the wisdom of appeasing his kinsmen, so he reconciled with his uncle and his brother; though when they first saw him limping toward them in a full-body clay-cast, they chuckled uproariously.
2 Then, having made peace with—wait; I should mention here that Isaac died.
3 Yea; just to catch thee up, this whole time he had been getting older and older, and so had his wife; and then she died; and then he died.
4 I do not mean to make his death sound unimportant; Isaac was a great man, pure of heart, strong of soul, etc.; but his life was unblemished by a single moment of interest;
5 And I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe; I need to maintain narrative thrust.
6 To resume: having made peace with his family, Jacob now settled down to raise his twelve sons, who were born of four different mothers: for he lived in an arrangement whereby he was not only married to his two first cousins—who were sisters—but was sleeping with both of their hand-maidens.
7 Yea; Jacob was smoooooth.
8 These sons would one day found the Twelve Tribes of Israel; the tribes took their names, and for centuries thereafter the relative popularity of these tribes depended solely on the relative popularity of their names.
9 (This was evident from their yearly gatherings, where the delegates from Dan and Joseph were held in esteem, yet everyone giggled whenever a Zebulun entered the room.)
10 But I am getting ahead of myself; for we have now arrived at the story of Joseph: of his betrayal at the hands of his other brothers; of his slavery in Egypt; of his imprisonment, release, and rise to power as Pharaoh’s chief advisor; and of his final reconciliation with his siblings and reunion with Jacob.
11 It is a long, intricate, and subtle tale, taking up the last 14 chapters of Genesis; easily the most compelling, psychologically nuanced narrative to be found anywhere in the Old Testament.
12 I will not be discussing it.
13 Yea, this is one section of the Old Testament that I refuse to enhance with any additional anecdote or commentary; and the reason is simple:
14 No anecdote or commentary I provide, could ever improve upon Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Messrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
15 Heed me, for on this point I would have absolute clarity:
16 I do not usually like musical theater.
17 My son does; but not I.
18 Yet I forget this fact when I watch Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so thoroughly doth it transcend the genre.
19 I love Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; I love it far more than I loved either Joseph or his amazing Technicolor dreamcoat.
20 In fact, one of the principal uses to which I have brought my power of omnipresence to bear over the last few years, is the viewing of no less than 35 international productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
21 I notice something new every time.
22 I will move on; I will say only that, if thou ever gettest a chance, I urge thee to take in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
23 Let me rephrase that: I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe; and thou shalt run, not walk, to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
SMITUS
(“On Natural Disasters”)
CHAPTER 1
1We have reached the first of the many small “interludes” that will be sprinkled throughout the present narrative, to lend it a breezy, reader-friendly, David Sedaris–esque feel.
2 And having just finished recounting the Book of Genesis, it seems fitting here to essay my views on natural disasters; which are in truth about as “natural” as Cheez Whiz.
3 Yea: to the retro-soothsayers who proclaim every cataclysm the result of divine justice, and who then themselves must suffer through the infuriating rationalism of the liberal, touchy-feely, everything-that-happens-on-earth-can-be-explained-by-natural-phenomena crowd,
4 Consider thyselves vindicated.
5 For natural disasters are indeed “acts of God”; usually one-acts, but once in a while I will join two of them together and give thee a full night at the theater.
6 Volcanoes? Mine.
7 Tsunamis? Tsuna-Mes.
8 Mudslides? Lo, that’s how I roll.
9 Now verily, after the Great Flood I made a covenant with Noah never again to kill all of mankind; and I have kept my word.
10 I have never again killed all of you at the same time; but I have killed lots of you, often.
11 I have always had wrath-management issues; I am prone to lose my temper at the drop of a yarmulke, and in the heat of the moment tend to unleash my full fury upon an entire region, nation, or even continent;
1
2 When the healthier course of action—at least from the point of view of, say, Africa—would be to spend an hour in the absolute zero of the interstellar vacuum, cooling off.
13 But though my rage may be spontaneous, the means I use to express it are quite deliberate; for I was very careful when constructing the earth to incorporate in its architecture large-scale geological and meteorological mechanisms that, while helpful to life, could also, when necessary, double as killing machines.
14 Consider the tectonic plates; how, as with many marriages, a pair of them will grind up against each other decade after decade, neither side budging, the tension building beneath the surface, until suddenly a breaking point is reached and they move violently apart, leaving behind them a trail of chaos, destruction, and sad children.
15 Yet there is no inherent reason why this could not have been otherwise; why I could not have fashioned the plates such that they would be perpetually gliding in very slow motion, their friction never accumulating.
16 And indeed, I strongly considered this possibility during Creation; going so far as to prepare a special high-viscosity liquid that would have oozed upward from the planet’s mantle, providing its crust with a never-ending source of lubricant.
17 “Land butter,” I called it.
18 Or consider the sky, whose winds and rains and snows will betimes turn on thee; it, too, could have been designed so as to avoid such occurrences; yea, it could have been designed in any way I saw fit.
19 Those five or six days a year when thou steppest outside and think, “Oh, this weather is just perfect!”?
20 I could have made it like that every day.
21 But I did not; for a) I like the seasons, and b) I wanted to retain the option of burying and blowing and deluging and tossing thee about like a matchstick on a moment’s notice.
22 Still: how great are those five or six days a year!
CHAPTER 2
1In the good olden days I, as a matter of policy, personally took the lead in the planning, implementation, and in a few cases even choreography of every disaster designed to cause over 500 deaths and/or destroy an area of over 100,000 square cubits;
2 Following the precept, that if thou wantest something horribly wrong done right, do it thyself.
3 Take as an instance Pompeii, which I destroyed in 79 A.D., just as Christianity was gaining a sandaled toehold in the Roman Empire.
4 I wanted to assist the rise of my son’s benevolent new religion by revealing the apocalyptic hellscape awaiting anyone who spurned it.
5 So I called my team together, everyone but Jesus; I did not think his presence there would benefit the discussion; for he and I have very different management styles when it comes to killing people.
6 I said, “Boys, the issue is not whether we have the capacity to make an example of a wicked Roman city; of course we have; no pep talk is needed on that score.
7 But I want to do it in such a way that its wickedness is somehow preserved for posterity; that even the sinners themselves remain frozen in time, permanent monuments to their own vice.
8 And I also want it done so that survivors could reasonably view it as a purely natural phenomenon; so that only the bright, perceptive Romans will convert, while the morons stay heathen.
9 So nothing supernatural; nothing deus ex machina–ish; nothing so clearly the work of divine reckoning that we lose all leeway for plausible deniability.
10 From the earth’s perspective, this needs to look like an inside job.”
11 As soon as I uttered these last words, Uriel’s entire face began to light up with inspiration, as if he had stars in his eyes.
12 It turned out he did have stars in his eyes; they’d somehow gotten in there on his way back from Cassiopeia; we got them out with holy water and tweezers.
13 But afterward he told us of the town of Pompeii: how it was not only a cesspit of immorality even by Roman standards, but was conveniently located next to a roiling volcano that could spew lava . . . and ash.
14 Quick-suffocating, slow-entombing, moment-of-death-freezing ash.
15 It was a brilliant plan, but for form’s sake I had everyone else work up a couple of pitches; the only other semi-interesting proposal was pickling Rome in a brinestorm; creative, but forced.
16 And everything went beautifully; Vesuvius exploded; Pompeii was utterly destroyed and preserved; and hundreds of wiser Romans discerned the true cause, and converted to Christianity, providing it with a much-needed injection of brainpower, not to mention lion food.
17 Pompeii was sudden, spectacular, terrifying, unique, and well-targeted.
18 At the risk of sounding immodest, it was a perfect disaster.
CHAPTER 3
1But it was not the most perfect disaster; that would be the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the only major calamity in history with a 100 percent justice rate.
2 For there were 3,425 people in the greater San Francisco area whom I wanted dead; and those were exactly the 3,425 people who died.
3 So that worked out well.
4 Yet it was right around that time that, for reasons that will become clear later in this testament, I stopped playing any part in the organization or scheduling of major catastrophes, or even minor tragedies; and as a result, the connection between moral cause and geophysical effect has grown increasingly tenuous in recent decades.
5 AIDS, for example; in no way was that virus intended as a punishment for homosexuals, whose overall fabulousness I have already celebrated in these pages.
6 No; AIDS began as a virus in chimpanzees, which then jumped to the humans who hunted and butchered them; and people who hunt and butcher chimps deserve to get AIDS, and I have no problem saying that.
7 Or Hurricane Katrina; many thought it was sent to chastise the people of New Orleans for the shameful immorality of their city.
8 No; it was sent to chastise the people of Biloxi for the shameful overdevelopment of their beachfront.
9 Or the recent series of catastrophes in Japan, which within three days were ascribed by the mayor of Tokyo himself to “divine retribution” for the Japanese people’s greed.
10 No; it was divine retribution for the Japanese people’s habit of selling girls’ panties in vending machines.
11 Yea, there is no question that the woes have grown sloppy of late; the unfortunate by-product of the loosening of my heavenly reins.
12 Take the three cases above: the spiraling out of control of AIDS was the unforeseen result of insufficient testing by the lead research angel at the time.
13 He has since been removed from his post and sent to hell, with no pay.
14 Hurricane Katrina was supposed to be a localized Category 1; but one of our older underseraphs did not receive the memo, and lost track of the time while operating our Howl ’n’ Blo Hurricane Generator 9000® machine.
15 He has since voluntarily retired and gone to hell, with half-pay.
16 As for Japan, that investigation is ongoing, but I must shoulder part of the blame for choosing to get involved in that part of the world to begin with; I should know better; for, the Mideast aside, Asia is historically not a good continent for me.
17 As I have said many times, I am not perfect, and neither is my staff; but we are constantly striving to improve our service, and we certainly apologize for any inconvenience to the wrongly killed.
18 And on that subject, there is one misfortune about which I would like to express my particular regret: the Irish potato famine.
19 I apologize to thee, Ireland; I love thy nation, and thy people; thou wert a steady source of religious fanaticism before the great scarcity, and remained so afterward; yea, thou even kickedst it up a notch.
20 So I am sorry for the potato famine, and for its awful collateral damage; for I was not mad at the Irish.
21 I was mad at the potatoes.
22 Why?
23They know why.
CHAPTER 4
1But as for the latest and greatest catastrophe of
them all, mankind, that is entirely your achievement.
2 For thousands of years humanity hath endured my droughts and pestilences, and weathered all manner of ill treatment from the ground and sea and sky;
3 But whatever might be said about earth’s food and service, everyone agreed it had a nice atmosphere.
4 Yet increasingly that is no longer the case; and I am not the one raising the sea levels; I am not the one destroying the ozone; I am not the one with the CO2-dependency issues.