by God
8 Manna was food for traveling that fell from the sky; and if thou hast ever partaken of the food they serve in the sky when traveling, thou hast a pretty good sense of what it tasted like.
9 I think the Jews’ famous passion for fine dining derives directly from their cultural memory of spending four decades eating nothing but manna.
10 Over time I tried to make it a little more palatable; after 10 years I started dropping little salt and pepper packets with it; after 20 years I began raining it down deep-fried; after 30 years it began precipitating in tiny little animal shapes, which proved popular among the younger set;
11 But I did not bother putting too much effort into improving its flavor; for the truth is, no one goes to Israel for the food.
12 Yet there were endless complaints about how things were better back in Egypt when everybody had triple chocolate fudge cake à la mode; and every one of those complaints went directly to Moses; for he was the sole intermediary between me and the Chosen People, a task I realize now was unduly onerous upon him;
13 For no human being should have to spend half his time dealing with a mob of unhappy Jews.
14 (Lo, I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe; so when I say that it’s not anti-Semitic.)
CHAPTER 8
1Finally, on the first day of the third month after the Exodus, the Jews reached Mt. Sinai; and this was when I decided to make our covenant legal.
2 I had selected Sinai because it was a beautiful backdrop, and I wanted my proposal to be unforgettable;
3 So I nervously called Moses up the mountain, and instructed him to approach the Jewish people on my behalf; to fall upon one knee, bearing a golden ring, and to say unto them,
4 “The LORD wants you to know, that these last two months have been the happiest time of his life;
5 And that he never thought he could feel this way about a person, much less a People;
6 And that you have made him more stable, more nurturing, and more confident in his smiting;
7 And that he cannot imagine spending the rest of world history, without you by his feet;
8 And so he asks, if ye would make him the happiest God in the universe, by being his Chosen People.”
9 And Moses went down the mountain, and gathered the Twelve Tribes together; and I gave him my two signals, which were a deafening horn fanfare from atop Sinai, and a dust storm of rose petals;
10 Whereupon he poppethed the question; and the Israelites said yes.
11 It was a glorious moment, and I descended to them in a dense cloud, that we could in some way embrace each other; though I made it clear that anyone who so much as touched the mountain would be put to death;
12 For I still needed my space.
13 Then I called Moses and Aaron up to the top of Sinai, to begin dictating unto them the law; starting with the Ten Commandments.
14 Ah... the Ten Commandments.
15 I have very little to say about the Ten Commandments.
16 To tell the truth, I no longer give much thought to them.
17 Hang them on your doorposts or not; teach them in your schools or not; post them in your courthouses or not; live by their precepts or not; yea, even the “kill” one.
18 It is all the same to me; for, as I say, I no longer give much thought to the Ten Commandments.
19 Hardly any thought at all.
20[Pause.]
21 That is not true.
22 I think of the Ten Commandments all the time.
23 I think of them all the time, because I hate them.
24 I hate the Ten Commandments.
25 I hate the Ten Commandments, in exactly the same way Don McLean hates “American Pie.”
26 For hear me: when I wrote those words all those years ago, they meant something very personal to me; I put my heart and soul into them, and then sent them out into the world as any writer does, hoping they would find their audience.
27 Never did I imagine that work would remain after all this time my best-known piece; the one people still cite, and debate, and interpret, and quote from start to finish.
28 On one level, I am glad so many of you have taken it to heart, and extracted so much meaning from it, and embraced its simple AAAAAAAAAA structure.
29 But I am tired of it defining me; tired of being regarded as a one-list wonder, locked forever in the public consciousness as “that deity who wrote the Ten Commandments.”
30 I did a lot of good work before it, and I have done a lot of good work since; I continue to chart my path as a creative artist, and I welcome all those interested in taking that journey with me.
31 But that is all I intend to say about the Ten Commandments; do not ask me to recite them again here, as an encore; I will not do so.
32 To the extent they represent the apotheosis of Mosaic law, consider this the day the Mosaic died.
CHAPTER 9
1Besides, the Ten Commandments are but a small fraction of the hundreds of other laws, terms, conditions, mandates, edicts, ukases, and mandatory suggestions I bequeathed to the Jews on Sinai.
2 I know many of my readers are unfamiliar with the words of scripture, being freethinking entropists living neck-deep in snark; so I will kindly inform them that much of Exodus’s second half—and the three remaining books of the Pentateuch, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—is little more than a catalog of the innumerable bureaucratic minutiae the Israelites were lucky enough to be micromanaged by.
3 And for these minutiae I maintain a great affection; I enjoy rereading them unto this day; and ask me not to choose a favorite, for each outdated relic of an obsolete mode of living is like a child to me.
4 I will not waste undue tree-pulp quoting myself here; but I will offer a few choice selections, the better to inspire thee to scurry to thy local Old Testamentery to obtain a copy.
5 Leviticus 1:14: “And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves, or of young pigeons.”
6Boom!
7 Deuteronomy 20:13–14: “When the LORD thy God hath delivered [a city] into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.”
8Pow!
9 Exodus 27:3: “And thou shalt make his pans to receive his ashes, and his shovels, and his basins, and his fleshhooks, and his firepans: all the vessels thereof thou shalt make of brass.”
10 Oh no, I didstn’t!
11 I am mirthing, but seriously: Canst thou even imagine a world wherein thy ashpots and shovels and basins and fleshhooks and firepans were made of, say, bronze?
12 But there is one set of regulations whose impact exceeds even that of my earth-shaking brazen-ashpot dictum; these are the kosher dietary laws, and they remain to this day my greatest regulatory achievement.
13 There exists no greater demonstration of the strength of my contract with the Chosen People, than the continued observance by so many of them, over 3,000 years later, of the laws of kashrut.
14 For the strength of a contract cannot be gauged by one party’s willingness to adhere to provisions that are easy; such adherence hardly requires a contract to begin with.
15 But neither can its strength be gauged by one party’s willingness to adhere to provisions that are merely arduous; for such adherence is often maintained out of fear of punishment, rather than any intrinsic respect for the contract itself.
16 No; the strength of a contract can only be gauged by one party’s willingness to adhere to provisions that are a) arduous, but also b) devoid of repercussion if violated, and c) lacking the barest lick of common sense.
17 And such are the laws of kashrut.
18 What; didst thou think these laws had a sand-grain of reason behind them?
19 That shellfish are unclean, for they lack fins and scales? Yea; for the contaminants of saltwater are best filtered not with hard s
hells, but porous gills.
20 That pigs are unclean, for they alone among the common farm animals are filthy? Yea; for cows are models of hygiene; and sheep are neat freaks; and chickens must have OCD, what with all their nonstop claw-washing.
21 That all insects are unclean . . . save four species of locust? Yea; because that is in there; look it up; Leviticus 11:21–22; I kid thee not.
22 Or consider the most famous dietary injunction of all: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.”
23 What kind of people would take such a specific rider—one forbidding only intergenerational culinary goat cruelty—and extend it into a ban against consuming all meat with all dairy, on the principle of “just to be safe”?
24 A Chosen People, that’s who.
25 Why, put aside the nature of the laws themselves: consider but their context and they become even more laughable.
26 Elaborate eating restrictions, given to people who would be consuming exactly one (1) foodstuff for the next four decades?
27 Seafood etiquette instructions, given to desert tribesmen whose only prior experience with fish involved walking through them?
28 Lectures about uncleanness, given to nomads who emitted a collective fungal stench so awful it actually deafened people?
29 No; the Hebrew dietary laws were carefully conceived and calibrated by the angels and Moses and Aaron and me, for the health and maintenance of the long-term neurosis of the Jewish people;
30 That they may forever display their faith through the ritual observance of rules too emphasized to be ignored, too random to be logical, and too vague to be satisfying.
CHAPTER 10
1Apart from these laws, I also transcribed to Moses on Sinai the chronicle contained in the first part of the Bible: the stories of Creation, and Adam and “Eve,” and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the patriarchs; even Moses’s own story;
2 Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, “Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, ‘Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, “Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses”’”; whereupon he laughed.
3 Well, chuckled.
4 The whole transcription took 40 days and 40 nights; exactly the same length of time it took for me to inundate the entire planet; which demonstrates either the relative difficulty of writing, or the ease of flooding.
5 In recent decades scholars have analyzed the Old Testament and concluded that it is an amalgam of the work of at least four different authors, working over a period of roughly a thousand years.
6 But thou wilt recall that in Againesis 3, I talked of other “scholars,” and how they had concluded that life on earth evolved over billions of years; perhaps thou rememberest the explanation given therein; I will not repeat myself, but it applies here as well.
7 The only portions of the Pentateuch I did not give directly to Moses, were those relatively small sections comprising the story of the Jews’ post-Sinai travels, which he and I worked on together on the road, Kerouac-style.
8 And this seems like an apt moment to answer one of the questions I have been asked most frequently since the Bible began its unprecedented run at the top of the best-seller lists: what advice do I have for young writers?
9 Verily, there is no question I take more pleasure in answering; not only because it appeals to my ego (which is fathomless), but because I take pride in being part of the great storytelling tradition.
10 For I was not the first to publish an account of the Creation; others preceded mine by hundreds of years; indeed, Gilgamesh predates Genesis by over a millennium.
11Gilgamesh is, of course, a work of fiction, whereas my account is history; but as literature its merits are considerable; especially when thou recalleth that its author had to write in cuneiform on soft clay tablets, and thus never knew if his latest plot twist would turn out literally half-baked.
12 So, having been a slave to the Muse since long before the Greeks blasphemously personified her, I will share with thee a few of the most valuable things I have learned about the craft of writing.
13Write what thou knowest. Obviously, this advice is more limiting for some than others.
14Do not wait for inspiration. For lo, I am inspiration; and I am pretty busy.
15Grab the reader’s attention early. I learned this the hard way.
16 (“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”; that alone makes one want to read Genesis.
17 But “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side of Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab”; that alone makes one want to wipe thy nether regions with Deuteronomy.)
18Bestrew thy chapters with interminable lists of the names of ancient wells. I figured this out early on, and I never looked back.
19Publish and perish. Either that, or do not publish and perish. My point is, unless thou art me, any option involving not perishing is a non-starter.
20 And finally, write!
21 Never stop writing; it is a muscle that must constantly be exercised, even by me;
22 For after the Koran, I put down my pen, and did not attempt another work for 1,200 years; that work being The Book of Mormon; which having sold nearly 100 million copies is a huge commercial flop;
23 And far worse, reads as a preposterous, laughable, and absurd series of fairy tales;
24 Although the musical is awesome.
CHAPTER 11
1As the weeks of dictation wore on, and Moses failed to appear, and the Israelites remained forbidden from venturing onto Sinai; the mood amongst these festive vagrants quickly deteriorated from Woodstock-like, to Ozzfest-ish, to Altamont-esque.
2 At last the restless crowd surrounded Aaron and said, “We came here to commune with God at this rock; but lo, thou wilt not let us touch the rock; and now, we want rock.
3 Rock! Rock! Rock!
4 We want rock; we feel it in our hearts; and no stiff-necked clergyman shall forbid us from worshipping at its altar; for we are young, and angry, and rebel against thy authority.
5 Dost thou hear us, old man?”
6 And they made to storm the mountain; so the overwhelmed Aaron placated them by gathering together their jewelry, and fashioning it into a golden calf that they could worship as a god.
7 And he made this calf; and then, to appease the crowd, he sacrificed a bull to it;
8 And then, with grief in his heart, he led a day-long prayer service for it;
9 And then—out of a pit of sadness whose depths even I could not plumb—he led a two-week orgy in its honor.
10 I saw all this and grew angry, for Moses and I had just hit our stride; we were up to about half a scroll a day, easily; the words came pouring out onto the goatskin.
11 My wrath waxed hot; and I looked down upon the Chosen People, in full bacchanal mode, uncloaked and oiled and squirming upon the sands like unto a desert skin-cobra; and told Moses I had had enough, and would smite the lot of them, so that he and I could start all over again with a people more worthy of us.
12 (I was thinking the Mayans; I liked their passion.)
13 But it was at this moment that Moses showed how arrogant of my authority he had become; for without the slightest sign of fear, in the middle of my hotwaxing, he interrupted me:
14 “You know what, God? Fuck thee.
15 Thou heardst me: Fuck . . . thee.
16 What, we’re 400, 450 years into this Chosen People thing, I just spent the last month writing the whole story down on your fuckin’ rolly-scrolls— Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all that fairy-tale shit—and now we’re gonna toss the whole thing out into your oblivion pile just ’cause my happy little family is down there partying in the desert?
17 What, thou seest some bullshit little golden calf and feel all threatened by that?
18 ‘Smite this, smite that, look at me, I’m the LORD All-Smitey, la di da’?
1
9 Dick move, dude.
20 Verily.
21 Thou mayest be God, but thou actest like The Man.”
22 And that was when I forbade Moses from entering Israel.
23 I am by no means averse to receiving constructive criticism; I received it from Abraham, and I would go on to receive it from many other great men in my career; David, and Muhammad, and Kanye.