These books tell the story of the rise and fall of the nation of Israel: of how God’s chosen people went from a loose affiliation of tribes ruled by amateur “judges,” to a real nation with a king and everything. King Solomon would build God a massive temple, a sort of vacation home he could live in when he came down from Heaven to check in on his Chosen People. It would at once serve as a testament to their commitment to God, and proof to the world that theirs was not just a country of shepherds and hillbillies, but a legitimate civilization.
To make God’s commute easier, they built the temple at the exact spot where they believed Heaven and Earth to meet. Then, once a year, everyone would come to the temple, sacrifice animals to God, and their best priest would enter God’s private chamber, shake his hand, and apologize for anything the people might have done to offend him.
They had never been so close, God and his people, and yet the very thing that brought them together would tear them apart. The temple was so expensive and labor-intensive that Solomon was forced to place a crushing bill on his people to pay for it. To make matters worse, he didn’t split the tab evenly, dumping most of it on the northern tribes.
Not having the money or manpower to pay their bill, they decided instead to dine and dash. The northern tribes would split off into their own kingdom, dividing Israel into two weak kingdoms. And everything would go downhill from there.
Joshua
With Moses dead, Joshua became the new leader of the Israelites. He knew that if he was going to conquer Canaan with an army of hikers, he was going to need a fair amount of divine intervention. When the time came to ask for God’s help, the last thing he needed was for God to be turned off by the sight of uncircumcised dongs. So Joshua gathered all the men who’d made it through the desert au naturel at the “Hill of Foreskins” and ordered a fresh round of circumcisions.
They sent spies ahead to see what awaited them. The spies soon came to a town called Jericho, the oldest city in the world.
The fortifications of Jericho were so high and thick that whole shops, apartments, and brothels fit inside the wall. When the spies got inside Jericho’s wall, they made a beeline past the apartments and the wall-marts to the whorehouse, where they were taken in by a prostitute named Rahab, who agreed to hide the spies if the Israelites would take care of her when they conquered the city.
Not long after, the cops showed up at Rahab’s door and asked if they could look around. “We got a report of some suspicious characters lurking around here.”
“This is a brothel,” she said, “we only get suspicious characters around here.”
“These guys were foreigners. They wore tassels and smelled like sheep. They were missing a piece off their dicks. You notice anyone like that?”
“Oh yeah, those guys were here, all right. They already left, though.”
“Are you sure? They were seen here only about an hour ago.”
“Most of my guests don’t stay more than ten minutes,” Rahab said.
This story seemed to capture the cops’ imagination, so they left Rahab alone.
The spies returned to tell Joshua how high and thick the city walls were, and how cool Rahab the prostitute had been to them.
God surveyed the situation from his perch atop the Ark of the Covenant. Rather than attack Jericho’s walls in a frontal assault, God ordered Joshua to take advantage of his people’s natural hiking ability, marching them in circles around the city once a day for six days in a row. On the seventh day, they had to march around the city seven times. After completing all their laps around Jericho, the priests blew their trumpets, and all the soldiers screamed as hard as they could, which caused the city’s walls to collapse. Only the wall brothel was left standing. Joshua and his soldiers rushed in and killed every man, woman, and child in the city.
Jericho was destroyed, and just like that, six thousand years of civilization had come to an end.
As if it weren’t enough that the city had been obliterated, Joshua ordered his army to hand the spoils over to the priests and bury the ruins. He left no trace of the city’s existence, and threatened to kill the children of anyone who attempted to rebuild the city. Some people are just sore winners.
Rahab and her family were spared. In exchange for her treason, she was absorbed into the nation of Israel, and would go on to become the matriarch of quite an impressive family tree. King David, King Solomon and Jesus Christ would all someday be the descendants of Rahab, the helpful hooker.
Next they attacked the diminutive town of Ai. Joshua figured that after taking down the oldest city in the world, Ai would be easy pickings. But the army of Ai led Joshua’s soldiers into an ambush and routed them. Joshua concluded that the loss could not possibly be because of any failure of leadership on his part, but rather that someone must have kept some cups or plates from the Battle of Jericho.
A man named Achen was eventually singled out, and he admitted to having taken some silver coins, a slab of gold and a fetching robe out of Jericho. Joshua had Achen, his belongings, his children, his cattle, and even the stuff he’d looted dumped into a big pile at the bottom of a valley. There, they were all stoned to death and their remains were burned. Joshua didn’t have any problems with looters after that.
Under Joshua’s no-nonsense style of leadership, the Israelites went on to conquer the Promised Land, city by city. Having an Ark of the Covenant to shoot death rays everywhere didn’t hurt, either.
Joshua then split up the new land among the twelve tribes. The Israelites finally had a land they could call Israel. As he lay on his deathbed, Joshua summoned the whole nation before him.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he said. “From the time God told Abraham to build a nation,
and that whole enslavement thing in Egypt, to the forty years we spent wandering through the wilderness. But now, at last, we’ve done it. We’ve built ourselves a new home. Try not to blow it after I’m gone.”
Having given his farewell address, Joshua died.
Judges
Apparently, Joshua’s “mission accomplished” speech was a tad premature.
The Promised Land was still rotten with heathens, and without a strong leader like Joshua running the army, it wasn’t long before bigger nations started carving off pieces of the fledgling nation for themselves.
Eglon, the morbidly obese King of the Moabites, began extorting the nation of Israel for tribute. The Israelites sent a messenger named Ehud to take Eglon his protection money. Ehud asked if he could speak to the king privately. When the two ducked into a side room, instead of giving him the money, Ehud unsheathed a sword and sunk the blade into the abundant gut of the king. The servants, assuming that the Eglon had slipped out to take one of his notoriously huge shits, didn’t bother checking up on him. When they finally found his dead body, they couldn’t pull the sword out because it was stuck in all his gut-fat.
By the time Ehud returned to Israel, he had become a national hero. They made Ehud their “judge,” or the person who would rule them on God’s behalf.
But Israel’s respite from foreign domination was short-lived. After Ehud died, the Hazorites started squeezing Israel. The new judge, Deborah, the only woman to ever be a Judge of Israel, raised an army to fight them off. But Deborah’s army were armed with nothing but a bunch of ramshackle bronze swords and spears. The Hazorites, on the other hand, were heavily armed with the latest, state-of-the-art war technology, including helmets, heavy body armor, and chariots. The night before their battle, Deborah led her army to the top of a mountain. It seemed like a simple matter of time before the Hazorites found Deborah’s army and destroyed them. But the next morning, the Israelite army launched a surprise attack, pouring down the east face of the mountain at sunrise. When the Hazorites looked up to defend themselves, they were blinded by the sun. Sunglasses hadn’t been invented yet.
It didn’t help matters that their chariots were useless in the soft, dewy morning mud. In this mud
dy, chaotic combat, their heavy expensive armor just weighed them down, while the light, dollar-store weaponry of the Israelites allowed them to maneuver nimbly, hacking off the arms and heads of their mud-bound enemies.
In the upset of the year, the Israelites routed the Hazorites. The general in charge of the Hazorite army fled the battle, and holed up in a nearby farmer’s tent. While hiding, he asked the farmer’s wife to bring him something to drink. She served her guest a glass of warm milk, which was highly approved as an act of hospitality in those days. But then, after he fell asleep, she drove a tent peg through his skull, which was generally frowned upon.
After Deborah’s victory, there was peace for forty years, until Israel was invaded by the Midianites, whose inherent sluttiness apparently helped them rebound nicely from the genocide Moses tried on them.
“I suppose this means they’ll be needing my help again,” God sighed. God approached a man named Gideon and asked him to raise an army to defend Israel. “Don’t worry,” God told him, “You’ll be marvelous. I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”
So Gideon set up a recruiting station and started visiting local high schools. Before long, he’d talked thirty thousand guys into joining his army. “You did a good job recruiting,” God told him, “but if you go into battle with that army, you’re going to get slaughtered.”
“Why? What’s wrong with my army?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s way too big. What’s more, it’s filled goose-bumpy farmers who’ll shit their loincloth the second things get real. Here’s what I want you to do: tell everyone who’s afraid that they can go home.”
Two-thirds of his men took Gideon up on his offer and ran home to their tents. Now he was down to having only ten thousand men.
“But that’s everybody!” Gideon complained. Nevertheless, Gideon agreed to release anyone who’d been taken in by the recruiting posters and cool uniforms and two-thirds of them left.
“Hey. Hey, Gideon,” God said.
“What?” Gideon replied.
“You’re totally going to hate me, but your army’s still too big.”
As Gideon sat there wondering what he’d got himself into, God told him to pick his army by watching how his men drank water from a stream.
“Send anyone home who doesn’t lap the water like a dog. Trust me, you want those dog-lappers.
You can sneak up on guys who stick their whole head into the water. But you ever sneak up on a dog?”
Gideon nervously watched his men drink from the stream and just about fainted when only a few hundred guys turned out to be lappers.
Gideon was left with more of a Boy Scout troop than an army. With only three hundred men, fighting a traditional battle was out of the question. But the advantage of having so few men was that they could move around quickly and quietly. He could maneuver them undetected at night and take them on field trips. Gideon discovered that he could sneak his entire force right up to the Midianite camp without anyone noticing.
The Midianites were all fast asleep or jerking off in their tents when they were woken up by a loud trumpet blast. They got out of bed to find themselves being ambushed. The Midianites fumbled for their weapons.
They panicked, stabbed each other in the dark, and ran away half-dressed into the night, assuming they’d been attacked by a huge army.
The people offered to make Gideon a judge, but he decided that he didn’t really like this kind of work. He asked for one gold earring from every man in Israel as payment for his services, and retired.
Also among the judges was Jephtah, son of Gilead. Jephtah was born poor tent park trash and was tough as nails. In a barroom brawl, he was unstoppable. But because his mother was a prostitute, the rest of his family kept him out of sight like an old pair of acid-washed jeans, until they became embroiled in a nasty land dispute with some foreigners. Knowing there was a fight coming, they turned to Jephtah and made him their leader.
Jephtah strapped on his headband and his leather vest. He mounted his low-rider camel and rode into battle. Jephtah beat the hell out of the foreigners and returned home a champion. Jephtah was feeling so good that he swore to take the first thing he saw and burn it as an offering to God. As he rolled up into the tent park, he looked around for a sheep or a goat that might be milling around in the front yard. Instead, his front door flung open and his only daughter came running out to give him a hug.
When he saw his only daughter running up to him, he burst into tears and tore his leather vest in grief. He told his daughter about the oath he’d made.
“Since you made a promise to God,” she told him, “you can’t back out, no matter how stupid it is. All I ask is that you give me two months to roam the hills and say goodbye to my friends.”
Two months later, his daughter returned and was burned as a human sacrifice to God. This started a tradition where every year the girls of Israel leave home for four days to mourn the daughter of Jephtah. Perhaps the most famous judge of all was Samson. He was sort of like the Jewish Hercules. God granted Samson supernatural strength on the condition that he never cut his hair. By this time, a tribe of seafaring merchants called the Philistines had taken over and were ruling Israel. Despite their name, the Philistines were actually a cultured, cosmopolitan people. They loved art and imported wine.
Samson fought the Philistines, but not really as a freedom fighter. He was more like a seventeen-year-old in a letterman’s jacket, challenging the Philistines to a fight in the parking lot of a Burger King.
He’d wander into town, beat up a bunch of random Philistines, and later when their buddies cornered him at a whorehouse, he’d not only clobbered the guys who came to him, but he’d tear the city gates off their hinges and carry them off as a prank.
Samson also had a thing for hot Philistine women. He married a Philistine, then threw her out of the house after she cost him a bet. Nor was Samson a very gracious ex-husband. When she remarried, Samson’s wedding present to her was to take 300 foxes, light their tails on fire and set them loose in the wheat fields, destroying the Philistine’s crops. After that, about a thousand Philistines showed up at Samson’s house to kick his ass, but Samson killed them all with the jawbone of a donkey which was conveniently laying nearby.
Despite the flop that was his first marriage, Samson fell for another Philistine, named Delilah. Delilah was the kind of trouble that wears a name tag. Once married, she immediately started pestering Samson into telling her the secret behind his enormous strength.
He lied, telling her that if he was tied up with new rope that he would become as weak as a baby.
While he slept, Delilah tied him up with rope. Then she let the Philistines in to the house. They poured in to beat Samson into submission. But to Samson, their tiny little fists felt as if he were being pummeled by a declawed cat.
“Oh, isn’t that cute?” he said, rousing from his sleep. Then he tore through the ropes like cobwebs and demolished the Philistines with his bare hands.
Despite the obvious trust issues in their marriage, everything seemed to go back to normal for Samson and Delilah. And it wasn’t long before Delilah was again nagging him to tell her what made him so strong. Finally, Samson caved in and told her that his strength came from his long, beautiful, Michael Landon-esque hair.
That night, Delilah shaved Samson’s head while he slept. Apparently, Samson was a heavy sleeper. At last, the Philistines were able to storm the house and arrest bald Sampson without being killed by fists or animal parts. Not wanting to take any chances, the Philistines gouged out Samson’s eyes and threw him in a dungeon.
Many years later, the King of the Philistines was having a big celebration and thought it might be fun to trot Samson out as a party favor. They fished Samson out of the dungeon and stood between the center pillars of the palace so everyone could get a good look him. What they had failed to notice, however, was the fact that Samson’s hair had grown back.
Standing there, amongs
t the shrimp cocktails and mushroom appe-teasers, Samson regretted wasting so much of his youth on bros and hoes, and taking for granted the enormous power God had given him. Samson asked God to give him his strength back one more time so that he could finally do something useful with his life.
Blind and chained, Samson felt his biceps swell and the return of the old rush of adrenalin he felt as a young man. He reached out, grasped the pillars, and pulled them down with all his might, killing himself, the Philistine king, the cocktail servers, and everyone at the party. His hair had toppled the Philistine government.
Ruth
Ruth begins with the marriage of an Israelite man to a foreign woman named Naomi. Naomi gave birth to two sons, who themselves married foreign girls, a pair of Moabites named Orpah and Ruth. Life was good for Naomi’s extended family until all three husbands died in quick succession, leaving the women in a precarious situation. In those days, a woman’s financial security depended completely on having a man around who could work the land, sell the crops and father loads of sons to do the same. Naomi inherited a tiny plot of land, but found herself without husband or sons and too old to get more of either. Things looked pretty grim for Naomi.
Realizing that her life had become a train wreck, Naomi told Orpah and Ruth to leave her and to return to their families in Moab. Orpah didn’t need to be told twice; without missing a beat, she caught the next camel back home. But Ruth couldn’t bring herself to leave her mother-in-law to starve or be eaten by coyotes or whatever became of old widows in those days.
So Ruth and Naomi braced themselves for the hardscrabble existence of a couple of homeless women. They got most of their food from the welfare system Moses had created. That is to say, she worked as a gleaner, one of the people who picked through a field after it had already been harvested in order to get whatever crops had been left behind. Whatever she could scrape together from the fields was what she and Naomi would have to live on.
God Is Disappointed In You Page 3
