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

doesn’t stop there. She becomes a cursed woman til the day she dies, finding redemption in the after-life, if she got ansy pansy with one of the Levites in charge of putting up the Tabernacle curtains. And if that’s not enough, if a man so much as thinks she has strayed from his loins, then the priest gets to make her drink some kind of stanky water. If she’s innocent, then she just has the farts for a few hours. If guilty, then her womb shrivels up “in real time” and she’s cursed forever.

I didn’t see anything in there about men’s testicles getting shrivelled up if they were guilty but that’s probably in a later book I haven’t gotten to yet.

And I bet you, much like myself as I read this entire book, am wondering…

“Why, under heaven, would God put these people through all this horseshit?”

Well, it seems that our little friends the Israelites were on the verge of taking that which God has promised them, the blessed Promised Land. This has been the central theme for a long time. God does miraculous, and down-right mean, things in order to get this bunch of people into some kind of special subdivision where life is full of milk, honey, steaks, beer, and naked titties catching a tan.

The Israelites were right on the border. They could smell the hotdogs on the grill. The fish in the pond were jumping. The deer were rutting. Man, does it get any better than this? God had led them through all kinds of shit to get them to this place. Moses and a few others were ready to fire up the troops and take that which God had promised.

The problem is the Israelites were a bit scathed by this point. It’s sort of like having someone break you out of jail where you got 3 square meals a day and a butt doodling once a week only to find out that you’ve got to walk across the United States, eat food that falls out of the sky at random times, and live by a bunch of rules or else have God strike you down into a pile of 3-day old dog shit while your butt is doodled daily in the everlasting fires of Hell.

Jail and a weekly butt-doodling doesn’t seem like such a bad place under those circumstances.

Their previous misfortuned combined with the fact that God has been killing everyone for them along the way, is that God had in-advertantly created a bunch of scared people who don’t know shit about taking over a land full of scary looking people. This what happens to most people when an authority figure keeps lording over the details of your life for too long promising one thing, such as land free and clear, while giving you land that is already occupied by women who don’t shave and men who don’t wipe.

I can hear you now.

“What? You mean the Promised Land already has tenants? I thought God owned the mortgage note?”

Apparently, the Israelites were banking on the same thing. God gives them the Promised Land, free and clear. They inhabit it. Perhaps even run naked with the wind on Saturdays. All is grand!

Not so fast Tribe of Benjamin.

Given the Israelites were not too keen to trust God with the kind of blind faith seen today in the lives of missionaries getting killed in the Congo, they sent some spies to see what this Promised Land was like. Oh, they found the milk. They found the honey. They even found some grapes. However, they also found, and I quote,

“Shit! There are already some people there. Mean looking ones too. They look like some strong sons of bitches. We saw the Anaks there, the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, and the Canaanites. We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.”

I really cannot say I blame them. Who would want to fuck with people who go by names such as Hittites, Jebusites, and other such scary shit? Although, I wouldn’t exactly feel like a grasshopper. I think maybe I’d just pee in my pants, call it a day, and head on back to the jail long before anyone saw me. Perhaps I would even get off a running 1,000 yard shot at a Hittite?

But, here they are, on the verge of milk and honey and they fuck it up royally, at least in God’s eyes. Think of it like this. Remember how you prepared for drivers license test and when it came time to take it, you ended up barking a 2’nd gear at the stop sign because you were too scared to stop? And then you had to go another 6 months without the ability to drive even though your Dad had bought you a brand new 4x4 Ford pick up truck and stuck it in the garage for this wonderous day of passing your driving test?

Well, that’s what these little sons of bitches did. They got scared, cried like little babies all night, and then decided it was better to head on back to Egypt, as apparently the Pharoah didn’t see like such a bad man against the enemy. Plus, they were royally pissed at God for promising X and delivering X/1,000,000.
Sort of like your job. Here’s a bonus! Fuck, taxes ate one half of it and the wife spent the other half. Where is my share?

And so the Lord got severely pissed about their lack of love and support for the battle confronting them and as a sign of His Holy Pissed-Off-Ness, sent them a bunch of fried quail that they could eat. But not just any kind of fried quail. No, eating this quail was like pulling the pin on a hand grenade.

In a twisted display of everloving wrath never before seen anywhere before except when Nothing Fancy Catfish House accidently gave me a rotten catfish for dinner while on a date with a woman who was sure to give me some loving later that night, the Lord sent a plague that wiped out a whole shit-ton of those scared ass Israelites just as they started eating those quail.

As if death and plagued quail isn’t enough, then the Lord then made them wander around that wilderness for 40 years, in a circle no less, in order to shape them up into the kind of men, women, and children that would take over that Promised Land.

Hence, why we have all those rules. They are a ratchet in the hands of God as he twists them into submission and make them love Him.

I don’t know about you, but this story sort of made me sick. While I can see the under pinnings of a sermon here, one titled “Trust God or You’re Fucked!” I didn’t get the desire to put on any kind of slow moving Willie Nelson song. Honestly, I figured God would have done cleared the Promised Land out for them well in advance, complete with a Piggly Wiggly, Walmart, and a Hooters. I guess, God wanted these crackers to work for everything, even though it was “promised” to them.

If only the Israelites had a CD player back in those days with R. Kelly singing “I Believe I Can Fly”. Maybe they could have girded up their loin clothes and taken over the Promised Land and slained the Shit-tites and whatever else showed up to take their milk and honey. I don’t know about you but that song certainly makes me think I can jump off a roof and skim over the pond looking for an alligator to wrestle.
Imagine what it would have done for them?


Book 5 – Deuteronomy and the Most Boring Set of Sermons Ever Delivered

Sermons were the last thing I went to church for. I usually wanted to just sit behind Sultry Sally and be the first one standing up for the hymns so I could look down her blouse and tell her boobies that I’ll be seeing them soon one day. But, at least during the first half of the service, churches do their best to get you all happy songs and hand shaking and various people telling you

“What a great day the Lord has made!”

It’s good for the soul I suppose, even if your truck got vandalized the Saturday night before and you’re missing your wedding band.
Soon, though, you realize what this is really about. The first half of church is what we call “fluffing” in the porn business.

It means people who keep things “up and moving” in between sets. Churches are good on fluff, until you meet the words of the preacher. A preacher is supposedly employed to deliver wonderful benedictions, swaying words of changing your life and being a better person. The preacher is supposed to talk of the great future, the wonderful after-life, and a peaceful existence full of love and everything you could hope for and desire.

However, they usually end up rehashing some story from the Bible and turning it into a lesson about how we need to ask forgiveness or a warning of what happens if we just be our natural selves. Who wants to catch the ass end how things are while looking for how good the future is? I usually make it to “Now let us turn to Chapter 4, Verse 7 of the book of…”

before I nod out and forget about a my wretched self, a better future, and boobies.

Deuteronomy is written with the same concept in mind. It’s basically a very long sermon, which meant I plowed through an entire pot of coffee and was tempted to call up a meth dealer in order to get through it. Aren’t you glad you have me to explain this shit to you?

The real meaning of Deuteronomy is “words” and this book shares the long outstretched and tumultuous words delivered by none other than Moses himself. God, from what scholars say, dictated to Moses what was to be said which leads me to believe that both God and Moses talk too much, at least when they want to recount the areas in your life where they are extremely pissed off about your behavior.

This book has ample story lines in it that form the underpinnings of a several sermons that probably lasted for days. Imagine being in Church and the clock strikes 3 PM and the preacher is still talking? That’s the kind of sermons I’m talking about.

The funny part about this book is that Moses, just like every good preacher, pulls from past events in order to make a point. Today, a preacher has the entire bible to pull from. But, at this point in time, Moses only has Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to craft his masterpiece. Someone totally forgot about Genesis apparently as he mentions nothing about what a bad bad girl Eve had been for eating that apple. I’m so thankful Moses died off before anyone had a chance to write any more books for this man to talk about.

So, what the hell is Moses is going to tell us about? Well, as you know, there is this lingering carrot in front of the donkey Israelites, called the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey. There is also a shit-ton of rules and regulations picked up as they were rescued from the Pharoah in Egypt. There is that God forsaken tabernacle that everyone has to take care of and follow the smoke around. And then there is the 40 years of camping out in the wilderness just outside the