![]() Genesis 11:10 to 15:1 11:10 Many men were born, lived, and died before someone finally came along that Yahweh liked. The man’s name was Abram and Yahweh liked Abram more than anyone born before him or ever since. Yahweh said to Abram “Pack up and leave your country and leave most of your family too. Don’t worry; I will give you a whole country of your own. Don’t worry; I will protect you from all the bad guys and I will make lots of good things happen to you.” So Abram took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot and moved to a place called Canaan. Then Abram discovered, as it turned out, Canaan just happened to be full of Canaanites. One day Yahweh made himself visible to Abram and said “I hereby officially one hundred percent henceforth totally award ownership of this piece of real estate to only Abram and all of his descendants.” Well that sounded pretty nice. But unfortunately for Abram, there were thousands of Canaanites of various tribes who lived and worked and built up and loved this land, and who had called this land their home sweet home for a very very long time. They didn’t know about this deal at all, hadn’t even heard a thing about it. They probably weren’t going to be too understanding or keen on suddenly giving it up. Besides, there wasn’t nearly enough food to go around in Canaan already so Abram and his hungry little entourage said “screw it” and moseyed on down to Egypt instead.
Yahweh doesn’t like men boinking another man’s wife. Doing the nasty with some cheap whore is one thing, but these Egyptians needed to be taught a lesson about respect for the sanctity of the institution of marriage, even though they had no idea about the lucrative little scam Abram was running on the side. In retaliation for Abram’s customers banging Sarai, Yahweh began punishing their boss; making Pharaoh’s life miserable with various problems. Pharaoh was confused at first but when he finally figured out that his luck was downturned because of all the bumping uglies that his officers were having with a married woman, he moved quickly to solve the problem. He ordered Sarai returned to Abram at once and then had them both thrown out of his country for fraud. Leaving the luscious green banks of the Nile Valley with Abram and Sarai were the massively huge herd of cows and all the slaves that had been earned for naughty services rendered. Abram’s nephew Lot and his family were also in the business of cattle and slavery. They all wandered around for awhile herding cows on the edge of nowhere, you know, hunting down strays, chasing rustlers, breeding slaves and what not, and Abram would sometimes go to holy places for intimate little one-on-one talks with his good buddy, the almighty Yahweh. 13:6 There just wasn’t enough good range land in this desert for so many cows so Abram’s cowboys wound up in a big gnarly fight with Lot’s cowboys over grazing rights and something had to be done to make peace. “OK Lot take your pick” conceded Abram. “Choose which side of the range land you like the best and I’ll take the other half.” Lot looked over all the available real estate, which of course had already been thoroughly picked over by the Canaanites so there wasn’t too much good range land left. Nevertheless, the area around Sodom wasn’t too bad. It even somewhat reminded Lot of good old Egypt. “Head ’em up, move ’em out!” Lot had his ranch hands round up the little doggies and they hit the trail for Sodom. Yahweh absolutely hated Sodom; absolutely hated it. After Lot had departed, Yahweh had another one of his famous little chats with Abram, his best friend forever, and said “This land is your land. For keepsies, I really mean it.” So Abram went on free ranging his big herd of cows while repeatedly making a dedicated effort to get Sarai pregnant.
15:1 One day Yahweh was conversing with Abram in person again and as usual he was just going on and on about how rich and invulnerable he was going to make him someday, when Abram suddenly said “But sir, you haven’t even let my wife become pregnant, and I have no heir to all this alleged wealth you keep promising me.” Yahweh ignored that and just kept right on with the promising and told Abram that not only would he have children, but as many descendants as there are stars up in the sky; minimum of a couple hundred billion in our galaxy alone. Again Yahweh promised that some day Abram would own all of the real estate in Canaan. To this Abram asked “How will I know when Canaan is officially and legally mine?” Yahweh replied “Oh it’s super easy, just take a cow, a goat, a sheep, a dove and a pigeon and cut open all of their stomachs, except for the birds of course.” Abram gathered up the array of livestock as Yahweh had described and did all of the hideous bloody stomach cutting as instructed, and then sat there amongst the ugly mess until sunset, dutifully keeping the buzzards away from the bloody rotting carcasses. He eventually grew too tired to keep watching for buzzards and dozed off to dreamland. In the dream Yahweh came to Abram and said “Rest assured my most excellent friend, your descendants will see some hard times oh yes, and long will they be bossed around by other peoples, but eventually your children will see their full day of glory and get to be the boss of the Canaanites!” 16:1 And still, Sarai did not get pregnant. She was getting pretty damn old and biologically unable to become in the mommy way so one day she said “The Lord has obviously prevented me from getting knocked up. So I beg you my dear kind wonderful loving devoted husband, go do the bedspring boogie with my Egyptian maid-slave Hagar, and get her pregnant instead.” “Well alrighty then” says Abram and he began doing the mattress mambo on a regular basis with Hagar. Penniless, pregnant, and alone, Hagar took off wandering across the desolate desert wasteland. Exhausted and desperate she eventually she made it to the next watering hole. That’s where Yahweh sent one of his many winged couriers to her with an important message, “WAIT just a minute, just hold on right there Hagar. I want you to turn around and go back to Sarai right now. You are going to have a baby boy named Ishmael who will be sort of a half crazy little monster and try to kill everyone once in awhile and everyone will try to kill him back of course, but don’t worry about that right now. He will eventually grow up and have more descendants than you can imagine.” Hagar hiked back and soon gave birth to Ishmael. This was all about the time of Abram’s 86th birthday. 17:1 When Abram was 99 years old Yahweh appeared to him in person again and invited him to go for a little walk. Yahweh began repeating the same tired old promises again, “You will have many descendants blah blah blah…” Abram fell down on his face while Yahweh continued. “And your offspring will boss many countries blah blah blah…” Then Yahweh officially changed Abram and Sarai’s names to Abraham and Sarah which sounded pretty much the same so they probably didn’t have to buy new towels or anything.
Abraham proceeded with the bizarre, bloody, dangerous, completely unnecessary ridiculous practice of taking a sharp knife and lopping off the foreskin of his tallywhacker. Then he proceeded with tip-snipping all of his hired cowboys, and of his first born son Ishmael, Hagar’s child. As Yahweh had also instructed, he mutilated the pee-pees of all of his man slaves. Next: If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake. Illustrations |
She works hard for the money.
February 1, 2012
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February 5, 2012 at 13:26
Oh, this is good. Yea verily, like Key-lime Canaanite pie!