Country Boy's Guide To Understanding the Bible - CornFed (best book recommendations TXT) 📗

those Israelites are just a multiplying quicker than a bunch of caged up rabbits without birth control. So the Pharoah decides to just throw a bunch of the newborn boys into the river.

Well, the second most important character in this book just so happens to be one of those little midgets thrown into the river. But the meanie Pharoah has a daughter and she saves him because the little baby’s mama had the foresight to put the little shitter in a canoe made of bushes. Only in the Bible can you put an 8-pound kid on a stick, throw him into the river, and he doesn’t sink like a cat terd in a punch bowl at a New Years Eve party.

The baby’s name became Moses.

Somehow we manage to skip 15 or 20 years of Moses’ life and go straight to his marriage to this chick whose dad was a foreshadowing of one of the greatest names in one of the greatest television shows ever. His name was Jethro and he only missed stardom by 6,000 years or so.

As with my experience so far with the Bible, things get really strange real quick-like.

I suspect Moses had a fairly decent life going on before God started showing up and doing some really weird things. I’m betting he’s out there day in and day out, working along side Jethro, smacking them sheep on the fanny with a stick, cracking some good anti-Egyptian jokes, and eating some good ole kosher pickles alongside his wife…just being all he can be ya know?

Until one day, he wanders up on the mountain and this bush starts a burning. I remember how bent out of shape I became when I was a kid and I woke up to a campfire that had gotten out of control. But I think I’d done shot myself in the head if a damn bush turns on fire like the flames on one of them gas-injected grill systems. But, Moses, he just keeps his cool and says one of the most useful quotes in Exodus, something I used when I found dad’s porn collection in the closet:

“I will now turn aside and see this great sight…”

And this is where you start getting the feeling that this ain’t no regular burning bush. It starts talking to Moses, telling him that he better get naked and not move an inch because this here ground is some holy ground. At first, I thought the word “holy” meant Moses was gonna fall through some hole or something but I got to thinking about how silly that sounded so I consulted Webster’s again to figure out what in the hell this bush meant.

As with most words, they mean different things. Just ask your drunk grandpa how many different words exist for a “kitty-kat” and you’ll get the idea. As for the word holy, the best one I could find was “worthy of worship; sacred”. So, the bush was telling Moses he was standing on ground worthy of worship. For those who are not used to bowing down to anything, except to pick up a beer that fell out of the fridge, think of the word “holy” as something you really really revere as something that deserves your direct attention at certain moments of your life.

Something like a toilet after a long night of drinking would be a good analogy.

Well, to keep this simple, the bush said he was God and that Moses was gonna run back to Egypt and get all those 600,000+ thousand kin-folk out that silly ass country and drag their fannies back to some place called Canaan, a resort land that God Himself built up just for them, although it doesn’t really sound like that great of a place if you ask me. All the God Almighty can say about it is that it is “flowing with milk and honey.” Shit, I can get that at the Piggly Wiggly any day of the week.

And, just for the record, I have yet to figure out why God just didn’t build the great state of Georgia sooner but I guess the writers of the book don’t really have time to put any more words into God’s mouth.

So, apparently back in those days milk and honey was a high commodity and the Burning Bush selected Moses himself to fetch them kids. Now if that ain’t a plot, I don’t know what is.

Just picture this…..we have a man who up until a few weeks ago, was busy smacking sheep on the fanny. He was up on the mountain, probably taking a piss, when a bush tells him he’s gotta go and man up to the Pharoah and get the kids out of that shithole. Shit, he had just turned 40, already busy putting up coins into his 401k for the golden years and now this!

Armed with nothing but a walking stick and the memory of a talking bush with fire for a tongue, Moses makes his way to Egypt to have a one-on-one with the Pharoah. God talks to Moses on the way a little bit more, sort of helping him remember his lines and where on the stage he is supposed to be.

Now, the Pharoah, well, like most tyrants, he wasn’t going to let up too soon. I can see him now, sitting on his throne, with all those funky looking cats roaming around him, a slew of half naked women wearing more gold than the Federal Reserve…all the while busy clapping their little silver hand clappers while some really cool slinky-dancing music blasts over the speakers in the Pharoah’s pyramid house. I can see Moses, who enlisted the help of his brother, say to the Pharoah (paraphrased):

“Look, God said we gotta take the shit heads to another land. So, that’s pretty much it.”

The Pharoah said something along the lines of…

“You gotta be shittin’ me cracker.”

Well, the next little bit of the book is where we learn about just how schizo the leading character in this book is. God, apparently realizing that he didn’t do things quite so well when he created the Egyptians, decided he was gonna give them hell. And boy did the big man do it.

There comes a time in every man’s life where you find yourself up against some shit you ain’t never seen. For some, it’s cancer. For others, your wife gets pregnant even though you’ve been off in the Navy for a year. And, if you happened to be living in Egypt around this time, you got yourself a nice view of what scholars like to call The Ten Plagues.

And now, in order of appearance, I present to you the top 10 things God did to Egypt to convince them to let those Israelites free. I like to call it the “Top 10 Reasons Why You Don’t Mess Around With God When You Are Harboring Israelites in Egypt”..

“Number 10…your water supply might turn to blood!”
“Number 9..... you might wake up and find yourself in bed with a frog!”
“Number 8…...you might find more than your hair is full of lice!”
“Number 7…you will understand the meaning of Lord of the Flies intimately!”
“Number 6….you’ll find out God doesn’t really care much for livestock!”
“Number 5….you thought pimples were bad…wait til you see these boils!”
“Number 4….hail hath no fury like a God’s scorn!
“Number 3…..locusts aren’t just for putting down little girls’ skirts anymore!”
“Number 2…..don’t you wish you had electricity to eat lunch in the dark!”

And the Number 1 Reason Why You Don’t Mess Around with God When You Are Harboring Israelites in Egypt is….

“You might find out God loves killing kids as much as you!”

Thank you! Thank you!

Seriously, after making my way through the plagues, I had to put this book down, walk out in my backyard, look up at the sky, and wonder to myself:

“Maybe I’d better untie my girlfriend from the bed before this kind of shit happens to me.”

Recovery from bible reading was fairly swift for a brazen redneck like me, although it wasn’t easy. After about a week of jumping a foot high every time I heard a locust or popping a Xanax whenever I saw a pimple that was a bit bigger than normal, I decided it was time to pick my reading back up and see what happened to Moses and all those Israelites after the Pharoah decided he’d done seen enough and let them go to that land of milk and honey.

But before I get any further into this here story, I gotta tell you one little caveat to the 10 Plagues I didn’t mention before. I’m sure we’ve all heard the term “Passover”. I don’t mean it like the way we use it back home.

“Ma! Pass-over that there gravy before my biscuits get cold!”

I mean it in more of a “Thank God that cop done passed-over me on the highway last night. I was stone-cold drunk!” I think that’s more what the writers of Exodus were thinking about…something celebratory in the face of death.

Now, if you’ll remember that 10’Th plague, the one where all the first-born got their fannies skewered like a bunch of sirloin tips on the Fourth of July. What I failed to mention is that God told Moses to tell the Israelites that if they would leave some blood from a goat on their doorstep, they wouldn’t have anything killed, that God would “pass-over” their babies.

The only reason I bring this up is that some things in the Bible tend to stick around for thousands of years. To this day, this celebration is still a part of a large part of our American culture. I’m not sure why though. In my neck of the woods, the only thing that turns up dead in the morning are the possums. But I digress.

So, since the rest of this book reads more like a community newspaper gossip column than a great story line in lots of place, I’m gonna give you the skinny version of what happens until the climax. It’s numbered so you can keep up.

1. The Egyptians, still undeterred by the 10 plagues, decided they wanted those red-head step children back, so they packed up their camels and Range Rovers and started across the desert after them.

2. When the Israelites, with the Egyptions in hot pursuit, got to the Red Sea, which was actually Blue like most seas but named Red for reasons no one knows, they were sort of stuck and were counting on the God to do something.

3. God did something. He parted the Red Sea.

4. The Israelites walked through it.

5. The Egyptians were not so lucky. They didn’t bring enough life vests and they drowned when God Almighty Himself decided He’d had enough of their shit. He shut the Red Sea on top of them like Grannny would top a strawberry shortcake with whipping. It was a Big Can of Whipping Ass straight from the hand of the Lord!

6. The Israelits wrote God a song and formed the first Jubilee Choir in the history of the world. However, the song didn’t make the Top 100 until some 3,000 years later

7. Moses got 50% of all recording sales and a new staff.

8. God tested the Israelites. He sort of said something like “Do what I say or you will get all sorts of bad shit fall upon you.”

9. They obeyed God

10. They got hungry and thought about disobeying God.

11. God went quail hunting and brought