One day, the landlord was out supervising the harvest when he saw this young beauty in the fields, picking leftovers along with the cripples, drunks and other castoffs from Hebrew society. Intrigued, the landlord did a little snooping, and when he heard how Ruth had heroically chosen to care for her mother-in-law, he was so moved that he called her over to him.
“My name is Boaz,” he said. “Look, I don’t want you working out there in the fields with all the snakes and weeds,” he said, “why don’t you stay here by the tents and work with my other female employees? There’s plenty of water for when you get thirsty and this way the farmhands won’t hit on you.”
After work, when Ruth told her about this fortuitous development, Naomi’s eyes lit up. Naomi smelled a golden opportunity for Ruth to snag a new husband. And having been around the block a few times, Naomi knew just how to seal the deal.
“The first thing you got to do,” she told Ruth, “is to take a bath. Do you have any perfume? Can you make some out of these beets and cauliflower you brought home? Men like a sweet-smelling woman. Okay, when you go to work tomorrow, be sure to wear something flattering.”
“I can’t work in a tight fitting dress,” Ruth protested.
“I don’t care if you can work in it or not. You’re trying to win a man here, not ‘Beet-Picker of the Year.’ After work, find out where he’s sleeping. Go in there, reach under his blanket and dig around with your hand until you find the buried treasure. It’s that simple. He’ll take it from there.”
“I don’t know…”
“Oh, come on!” Naomi reassured her. “A little trouser fishing never hurt anyone! Like it or not, this is how the game is played.
Do you want to eat secondhand cauliflower for the rest of your life?”
The next day, Ruth reluctantly took her mother-in-law’s advice. Ruth found Boaz alone in the threshing room. She hid in there, secretly watching Boaz threshing barley and dripping with sweat, his shirt off and arms glistening. Then, after finishing his work, Boaz enjoyed a little nightcap and laid down to rest. This was her cue. Once he was asleep, Ruth crept in and peeled the blanket back. Boaz woke with a jolt to find himself naked, and there, among the sweaty barley and perfume, Ruth kneeling down beside him.
“Ruth, I’ve wanted you since the moment I first saw you in the fields,” Boaz said. “I think you’re the greatest woman I’ve ever met. And I want you to be my wife. But there’s rules for this sort of thing. My people live according to the Laws of Moses, and holy shit, did that guy have a lot of laws.
One of his laws being that when a woman is widowed, her dead husband’s closest male relative gets first crack at marrying her. According to the law, before I can marry you, I have to find this guy and offer you to him. I don’t want to, but I have to.”
“So, do you want me to leave?” Ruth asked.
“Now, I didn’t say THAT,” Boaz replied.
The two spent the night together on the threshing floor. The next morning, Ruth got up really early because she didn’t want anyone to see her scurrying away with her hair matted and dress askew.
Now, Boaz wanted to marry Ruth, but he knew that she was so beautiful that if he simply offered her to another man, there was a good chance he’d take him up on it. So Boaz hatched a little plan: he put Naomi’s small piece of land up for sale. Boaz then summoned the relative, telling him that he had some land to sell him. Boaz told the man how lush and fertile the land was, and then, to really sweeten the pot, he offered him a rock bottom price. The guy jumped at the offer.
Now, in ancient Israel, no deal was final until the buyer and seller swapped sandals. That way if someone tried to back out of it later, the other guy could produce his sandal in court and the judge would say, “If you didn’t have an agreement, how did he get your sandal?” at which point you’d either have to admit that you made a deal or that you were too much of a marshmallow to keep someone from knocking you over and taking your shoes. In either case, the law was not on your side.
Anyway, just before the two men were about to swap sandals, Boaz nonchalantly added, “Oh, by the way, I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, but whoever buys this old lady’s land also has to marry her widowed daughter-in-law.”
This shady fine print immediately sent the buyer into red alert.
“Wait, what was that last bit?”
Boaz mumbled the part about marrying Ruth again. The man said. “Oh, I see what’s going on here, you’re trying to unload some old maid on me. I was wondering why the price was so low. Thanks, but no thanks. Tell you what, if it’s such a great deal, then why don’t YOU buy the land and marry the widow?”
Which is precisely what Boaz had in mind. Boaz and Ruth were married, Naomi moved in and soon the happy newlyweds had a baby, named Obed. Little Obed would go on to be the grandpa of King David. Like Rahab before her, Ruth would go on to become the maternal ancestor of the most famous family line in history. King David, King Solomon and Jesus Christ would be the descendants of a prostitute and a homeless woman.
The 1st Book of Samuel
The whole ancient world was a bag of dicks. Even God was a bit of a dick. Life was so cheap that nobody really held it against you if you killed a person or two. How could you avoid it? So mercy was pretty much out of the question. The best you could hope for was that people would honor their deals.
And people were always trying to make a deal with God.
A woman named Hannah stumbled into the tabernacle one evening, weeping. Having no children, she begged God to give her a son. In exchange, she promised to dedicate her son to the priesthood. The high priest, Eli, came out to see what all the commotion was, assuming she was drunk, he shooed Hannah out of the tabernacle.
Her prayer worked, though. Hannah soon became pregnant. She named her child “Samuel,” which means “God heard me.” Honoring her end of the deal, Hannah took the boy to the tabernacle to make him a priest. Hannah went on to have many other babies. She just needed one to get the ball rolling.
Eli raised Samuel to be a priest. He had also trained his sons to be priests, but they weren’t exactly cut out for that line of work. They were always sleeping with the tent-greeters and embezzling meat. In those days, when people brought an ox or a cow to sacrifice to God, the priests would burn it. They were allowed to stick a fork into the roasting beef, and whatever they pulled out was their tip. But Eli’s sons juiced the game by carving up tenderloins and pot roasts until they were barely hanging on, allowing them fork off the best cuts of meat for themselves. Basically, they were skimming from the till.
God is a picky eater, and the last thing you want to do is to steal his meat. God decided that Eli’s sons had to go.
Israel had many enemies, but the Philistines were sort of like Israel’s division rivalry. It wasn’t long before the Philistines attacked Israel. It was never long before the Philistines attacked Israel.
Just as they had countless times before, Eli’s sons hitched the Ark of the Covenant to its carrying poles and raced out to the battle so God could come shooting out and kill their enemies, popping their organs and burning off their faces, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style.
Instead, though, the Ark did nothing. As the battle raged on, the Ark sat there motionless, like a jammed pistol in a gunfight. Without their secret weapon, the Israelites were routed by the Philistines. The Ark of the Covenant was taken as a war trophy. When Eli heard that his sons dead and the Ark had been captured, he fell backwards out of his chair, broke his neck, and died.
At first, the Philistines gloated over having captured the Ark of the Covenant, on which rode the Israelites’ cranky God. They put the Ark in their temple, so their god, Dagon, would have some company. The two did not get along. God complained about his living situation by giving the Philistines cancer and plagues of rats. The Philistines took the hint. They hitched the Ark to a team of oxen and sent it wandering back towards Israel. As a token of respect for a God who could summon such awful c
urses, they sent along a bag of commemorative gold figurines in the shape of little rats and tumors.
When the Israelites saw the oxen pulling the Ark back into town, they got excited.
“Hey look, the Ark’s back!” they shouted. “Do you think it’s still broken?” As if checking under the hood of a car, they opened the lid of the Ark and it promptly killed seventy people. “Nope. Seems to be working just fine!”
God was now free to start the priesthood over from scratch, preferably with someone who wouldn’t tamper with his meat. Samuel succeeded Eli as the high priest of Israel. Samuel was a good man, but he made the mistake, so common to good men, of placing his trust in fools. In this case, his own sons, whom he’d appointed as judges in spite of their corruption and incompetence.
The people of Israel were sick of being ruled by amateurs. Now that they were a real nation, they wanted to be ruled by a professional king, just like everyone else.
Samuel gave in to their demands and agreed to find the people of Israel a king. Unfortunately, Samuel conducted his talent search for a king in much the same way that one would put together a boy band. Samuel came across a handsome teenager named Saul, who was out looking for some lost donkeys. Thinking this was some sort of sign, Samuel made Saul king.
It turns out that donkey-catching is not the best qualification for being a head of state, and Saul was something of a disaster.
It wasn’t long before the Philistines attacked again. In what has to be one of the most brilliant military maneuvers in ancient history, the Philistines began raiding Israel for the sole purpose of killing blacksmiths. After losing a few blacksmiths here, a few blacksmiths there, pretty soon hardly anyone was left who knew how to make weapons. Israel’s soldiers now went screaming into battle armed with plows, head-shears, and wheelbarrows. Despite the fact that the army was fighting with agricultural implements, Israel still managed to win battles, thanks mostly to divine intervention.
Samuel realized he’d made a mistake. Saul was becoming increasingly paranoid and weird. He was breaking his deals with God and, what’s worse, stealing God’s sheep.
God told Samuel to find his people another king. So Samuel went out looking for another talented young man to become king of Israel. The next guy to join Menudo was a twelve-year-old named David, whom Samuel discovered while the young man was watching his sheep and jamming on his harp.
“Here’s the deal,” Samuel explained. “God is going to ask things of you. Sometimes he’ll ask you to show mercy. Sometimes he’ll ask you to kill. God doesn’t care if you are sweet or good. He cares that you are his. God is going to make you King of Israel someday and all he asks in exchange is that you do what he asks of you.”
Knowing that he’d lost God’s confidence made Saul even more moody and unpredictable. The palace hired a harpist in hopes of soothing his nerves. And for a while, his relaxing new age compositions seemed to do the trick. In the long run, however, this was the worst thing they could have done for Saul’s sanity, because the harpist they hired was David, the boy Samuel had appointed to replace Saul.
Saul’s army was locked in a stalemate with the Philistines. They sent the new harp player out to the battlefield to take sandwiches and milk to the soldiers. While he was there, David saw this enormous Philistine, an eight foot-tall giant named Goliath, taunting the army of Israel, begging anyone who had the nerve to come down and fight him.
The torrent of abuse and obscenities got to David and he accepted the challenge. Amused, Goliath walked up to kill David as if he were going out to rake the leaves. The boy reacted impulsively by whipping out his slingshot and firing a racquetball-sized rock directly into Goliath’s skull, killing him instantly. Then he lifted the giant’s heavy sword into the air, and brought it down with a thud, decapitating Goliath.
The Philistines ran away, terrified by what the sandwich boy had just done to their best soldier.
Everybody loved David. He slew giants, won battles, and he was a terrific dancer. All this attention to David left Saul feeling like old cheese. When David asked to marry the princess, Michal, Saul tried to get rid of him by demanding the unhygienic dowry of two hundred Philistine foreskins. But this just added to his legend. David killed two hundred Philistines, and cut off their foreskins, without even getting a rash.
Tired of subtlety, Saul simply sent a platoon of soldiers to go kill David in his sleep. But David’s fast-thinking wife stuffed a mannequin into his bed to fool the assassins while David escaped, which is, quite literally, the oldest trick in the book.
Now on the lam, David went to the town of Nob, where some sympathetic priests gave him a few loaves of holy bread which was reserved for men who weren’t sexually active. They also gave him Goliath’s sword, which was being kept as a museum piece. When Saul heard about this, he was so peeved that he had everyone in the town of Nob put to death, including the priests.
Armed with Goliath’s sword and his abstinence bread, David rallied together six hundred drinking buddies, whom he called his “Mighty Men.” Saul and his army pursued David and the Mighty Men all over Israel. He was so hot on their trail that he almost stumbled upon them by accident at the Crag of Wild Goats. Saul walked into a cave to take a piss, unaware that David and his men were hiding inside. The Mighty Men kept chuckling and nudging David, daring him to chop Saul’s head off while he was peeing. Instead, David quietly cut off a small sliver of the king’s robe. When Saul returned to his camp, David emerged from the cave and called out to him. The king turned to see David holding a piece of his robe, proving that he could have killed Saul if he’d wanted to.
This act of mercy filled Saul with shame, but not enough shame to stop him from his quest to kill David. Unable to live safely in Israel, David and his friends went to live with the Philistines. They spent their days drinking and robbing nearby towns. Whenever the king of the Philistines asked David to go raiding for them, he would. Only instead of attacking a town in Israel, he’d attack a Philistine town.
He’d kill every man, woman and child, so no one could tattle on him. The king got his plunder and he got to kill Philistines. It was a win-win situation.
“I guess this is my life now,” David said, resigning himself to the fate of an armed burglar. But then, one day after coming back from work, David found the Philistines celebrating. They had just won a huge battle against Israel.
Saul had committed suicide to avoid capture. True to his word, God had cleared the way to make David the new king of Israel.
A deal is a deal.
The 2nd Book of Samuel
After a bit of persuading, most of which consisted of stabbing people in the gut, David was named King of Israel. David realized that there was more to becoming king than stabbing people in the gut, though. You’re never really king until people think of you as king. But ruling your kingdom from a goat farm doesn’t convince people. That’s what conspicuous consumption is for. David realized that he needed a capital city, a palace, and a harem. The hallmarks of a legitimate ruler.
There was a city named Jebus on the border of Israel, which would make a perfectly nice capital city. So as his first official act in office, David conquered the city and killed off the locals. After mopping up all the blood and burning the corpses, David named his new capital Jerusalem, meaning “City of Peace.”
Then David built himself a palace. Once he felt cozy in his new throne, David ordered the Ark of the Covenant to be brought to Jerusalem, where it would be welcomed with a big parade. Samuel had long since died, but luckily, the prophet Nathan was on hand to arrange the rituals and make sure that the parade went off okay and the Ark didn’t kill anybody.
Now, there are basically two kinds of people in the world: those who hate parades and morons. On this particular day, David was one of the latter. He got so into the parade that he stood up inside the royal box and started dancing.
As the crowd cheered, his dancing got wilder and wilder. He threw his legs into the air. He flai
led around so hard that he accidentally flashed his dick to the nation, which really upset his wife Michal.
“Nice, David, really nice,” Michal said, scolding him. “It’s bad enough that you did that God-awful dance, but then to expose yourself? To the slaves and everyone?”
David mumbled defensively.
“What did you say?” Michal growled.
“I said it was just a tip slip.”
“It was a humiliation, is what it was! What, were you raised by farm animals?”
“Sort of.”
David did not like being reminded of his redneck past. He went to bed without even giving Michal a goodnight kiss. Apparently God apparently took David’s side, because he cursed Michal with infertility, which may or may not be a nice way of saying that David stopped sleeping with her.
Though he had soured on Michal, David was still hot into women. He soon began collecting wives and concubines like they were matchbox cars.
When David heard that the king of the neighboring Ammonites had died, David sent ambassadors to extend his condolences, one king to another. But the new king thought David’s ambassadors to be spies, so he thought it would be funny to square off the ends of their beards and cut their robes so short that they barely covered their testicles. Then he forced them to walk all the way back to Israel in this hilarious get-up.
“They don’t respect me, do they?” David asked. The ambassadors in their mini-skirts shook their heads. “They don’t think of me as a real king. So I need to respond the way a real king should.” While the ambassadors changed their clothes, David declared war.
Needing to take a break from planning the war, David walked out onto his balcony, where he saw a woman named Bathsheba bathing outside his palace. He immediately became infatuated with her. When he found out that she was married, he sent her husband, a soldier named Uriah, on a suicide mission against the Ammonites. Once he was out of the way, David married Bathsheba and she soon became his favorite wife.
God Is Disappointed In You Page 4
