The Last Testament: A Memoir (7 page)

²¹
The fourth angel and chief of all is Gabriel, my messenger of good tidings; it is he who came to Daniel to interpret his visions, and foretold the births of John the Baptist and Jesus, and first revealed the Koran to Muhammad, and oversaw the Flutie-to-Phelan Hail Mary that beat Miami in 1984.

²²
(By the way, it is foolish to call such plays “Hail Marys,” for Mary has absolutely
no
interest in sports; indeed, if thou ever besought her aid on such a play on behalf of thy team, she would smile and say something like unto, “Okay, which color costume are they?”)

²³
Collectively I affectionately refer to Uriel, Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel as my “Kids in the Halo”; for they are quick-witted and nimble-minded, and have over the eons not only provided invaluable service on behalf of God and man, but written much of my strongest material.

²⁴
And the fifth and last angel I will mention is Lucifer.

²⁵
More on him later.

CHAPTER 12

¹
A
s I busied myself with expanding my business, I left earth well enough alone; hopeful that the mere memory of the Flood would suffice to keep its people on the straight and narrow path of ceaselessly expressing their gratitude to me through the regular incineration of large farm animals.

²
Yet in this I was disappointed, and most grievously.

³
It would have been one thing if humanity had simply started taking the sun and moon and seedtime and harvest for granted, failing to acknowledge who had given it to them.

⁴
This I might have chalked up to simple discourtesy, and dealt with through the usual array of etiquette lessons thou callest “natural disasters” (see Smitus 1–4).

⁵
But something far worse was transpiring: the people were inventing false gods in the form of stone idols, whom they would then praise, and worship, and sacrifice to, and “idolize.”

⁶
(Truly, I detest it when people verb a noun.)

⁷
I have been called a jealous God; the description is accurate, but misleading; for it evokes the image of a spurned lover or a rival tradesman, whereas my jealousy is of a far different nature.

⁸
Consider the toddler who scrawleth with a crayon upon a piece of parchment, and deems it a masterpiece;

⁹
How he runs to his mother, demanding that she behold his artistic creation and admire it.

¹⁰
It matters not if at that moment she is engaged in any of the numerous other activities that fill her busy life; nor that the drawing in truth resembles nothing so much as an epileptic’s doodle;

¹¹
The toddler must have praise, and soon; else will he become agitated and surly, and tears flow, and breath held.

¹²
And so all household activities cease while the mother heaps sufficient encomia upon the lad; and hails his talents, and shouts his greatness, and magnetizes his work upon the keeper of cold foods that very moment.

¹³
Now consider that I am that toddler; and thou art that mother; and the universe is the picture; and that very moment is every single moment, ever.

¹⁴
This will start to give thee a sense of my laudatory needs.

¹⁵
Lo, it is very easy to create idols and give them desirable attributes; to envision them as animals, or the sun, or whatever objects or creatures float thine ark; even to invent a pantheon of such idols who share many exciting adventures, and harebrained schemes, and wacky misunderstandings.

¹⁶
Such deities will always bear the yoke of godship more lightly than I, and prove suppler instruments for thy mythmaking; for they have at their disposal the one weapon in the universe I can never wield: nonexistence.

¹⁷
Take Ninurta, the Sumerian farming god: he had no problem metamorphosizing into a winged lion, or retrieving the Tablets of Destiny stolen by Anzû, or bearing the slain Bison-Beast on his chariot beam, or consorting with Ugallu, or being worshipped as a healer and feared as the bringer of winds.

¹⁸
He was happy to serve all these purposes for the Sumerians,
because he was not real;
and was thus what I will charitably call “mythologically flexible.”

¹⁹
But Ninurta never sent a single actual rain cloud; he never called forth one stalk of actual wheat; he had no sense of responsibility; like everyone else in his pantheon, he never worked a gods-damned day in his life.

²⁰
I may have my faults: impetuosity, jealousy, short-temperedness, and others I shall reveal; indeed, after this book is published, no longer will one of my faults be keeping things bottled up inside; I am coming clean, and it feels good; yea, I embrace the catharsis.

²¹
But unlike all other gods,
I am real;
I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; and thou art stuck with me.

²²
Thus it is wicked and foolish for people to seek to escape this truth by carving ridiculous “divinities” out of stone, rather than follow the course of action dictated by both obedience and logic:

²³
Burning beasts of burden on ceremonial altars until the smoky aroma of ox-fat is thick enough to appease thine invisible, B-B-Q–lovin’ sky-god.

²⁴
(And for the record, if thy meat is smothered in Sticky Fingers Smoke-house’s Tennessee Whiskey Sauce, consider thyself entitled to ten sin-free masturbations.)

CHAPTER 13

¹
B
ut I was out of the end-of-the-world business; true, I had left myself a loophole whereby I could smite mankind by any means
other
than a flood; but had I done so, everyone’s last thought would have been, “Wow, another apocalypse . . . guess
Someone’s
out of ideas.”

²
So I decided to take a different approach; to focus on a handful of Chosen People, already rich in righteousness, and, through a generous real-estate offer, incentivize them to spread their moral wealth, that it might trickle down to the less piously fortunate.

³
The quest to find these People became one of the first tasks of my new support team, and their solution was ingenious: they constructed, alongside a well-traveled trade route in Chaldea, a single wooden stall, like unto a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert;

⁴
And its top part bore a sign reading, “Wouldst thou be Chosen? Inquire within!”

⁵
And lo, on the very first day, who should stumble across the stand but a spry young man, no more than 75; with fire in his eyes, and dreams in his heart, and foot rot in his sheep;

⁶
That is why he was in the area, actually, to let his flock walk on the dry dirt, that they might obtain hoof relief.

⁷
He was, of course, Abraham; the patriarch of monotheism; the progenitor of my three great religions; the father of the Israelites, the Ishmaelites, the Edomites, the Midianites, and the Parasites;

⁸
Though he hated that last group; all they ever did was sleep in his tent and ask for money.

⁹
Abraham had already shown himself a literal iconoclast; for months earlier he had broken into his father’s idol shop in the town of Haran, and smashed all the idols to demonstrate the folly of ascribing divine power to manmade artifacts.

¹⁰
(He had also shown himself wise, by having previously purchased small-business theft insurance on his father’s behalf; and staging the crime scene so that it appeared to be the work of the Haran-sackers, a notorious gang of local cat burglars.)

¹¹
I was anxious to begin; so I told Abraham that if he would move from his father’s house I would take him to a land where I would make of him a great nation, and make his name immortal, and bless those that bless him, and curse those that curse him; but that I needed an answer quickly, as I was kind of in a rush.

¹²
And Abraham agreed; so he left the land of Haran and set forth for Canaan, along with his slaves, and his considerable possessions, and his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot; or, as the angels and I used to call him, “Vacant Lot”; for truly, he was not the sharpest spear-point in the desert.

¹³
I say not that Lot was dumb; merely, that his tent had a couple of poles loose.

¹⁴
[Rimshot on the tabor.]

¹⁵
Truly; I say not that Lot was dumb; merely that he was a few camels short of a caravan.

¹⁶
[Rimshot on the tabor.]

¹⁷
Verily; I say not that Lot was dumb; merely that his flocks tended
him.

¹⁸
[Rimshot on the tabor.]

¹⁹
No, for the last time I plead with thee, do not misapprehend my meaning; by no means am I declaring Lot lacking in wisdom;

²⁰
Merely, that they recently unearthed a book about him from a cave, called
The Braindead Sea Scrolls.

²¹
[Large rimshot on the tabor.]

²²
Yea, Lot was not very bright; nonetheless he was virtuous, and that is why he and his family (with one exception) were the sole survivors of the most famous strategic bombing campaign in all of scripture.

²³
I speak, of course, of Sodom and Gomorrah; but I cannot speak of them without first addressing, in greater depth, a topic that has already been broached in this memoir.

CHAPTER 14

¹
T
he Bible’s verses on homosexuality have been the focus of more debate and rancor than any others; a fact I confess I did not foresee.

²
For when I transcribed the Torah to Moses, I anticipated the most controversy would surround the verses in Leviticus 27 mandating that those dedicating part of their family estate to me must value it according to the amount of seed required for its planting, at the rate of fifty shekels of silver per bushel of barley seed.

³
I remember dictating these lines to Moses; and afterward looking up to find him staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, and saying, “Thou do knowest that when the Israelites read this, they’re going to lose their fucking shit, right?”