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CHAPTER
NINETEEN
If you're squeamish, you might want to skip this Chapter altogether. When Abram is 99 years old, God appears before him. God tells Abram to walk perfectly. God reminds Abram again about the whole covenant business with the exceeding seeds and multitudinous nations. Abram falls on his face. Abram is renamed Abraham which means 'Father of a great multitude'. God explains the rewards of the covenant again, pointing out the great nations and kings and seeds that will come from Abraham and how Abraham and his seeds will get Canaan, eventually, and how God will be their God and how it is a win/win covenant. Abraham is given the small print: he and all his ancestors will circumcise their flesh of their foreskin as a token of the covenant. That's no rainbow! When a son is eight days old, he shall be circumcised. Snip! All men children of Abraham's generation shall be circumcised. Snip! Any purchased male brought into the house shall be circumcised. Surprise! Snip! The uncircumcised man has broken the covenant and is cut off from his people. God makes a pun! God changes Sarai's name to Sarah. Her name means 'princess' now whereas it meant something else before. Barren nag, possibly. God blesses Sarah so that she'll have post-menopausal children and can now help Abraham create his nations. Abraham falls on his face again. Abraham doesn't believe a man of 100 years and an old maid of 90 can concieve. Abraham points to Ishmael and says, "Be lucky You have him!" God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a child and they'll name him Isaac and he'll lose his foreskin as will every descendant of his ever after everlasting. God points out that He has not forgotten Ishmael and has blessed him so that he shall beshat twelve princes. But he shall have no covenant with Ishmael. God tells Abraham to start painting the guest room Baby Blue and leaves. Abraham circumcises Ishmael and every male in the household that very day. Somebody call Guinness! The book, not the beer. Although I'm sure all those guys could have used a beer by that point! Abraham is 99 years old when he circumcises himself. Ishmael is 13 years old. And all the other men of various ages born in the house or bought by Abraham who were tricked into dropping their pants were also circumcised.
STUDY QUESTIONS! Why does God wait 99 years to let Abram know that not only will he have the countless seeds he's been speaking of all this time but he'll definitely have them with his barren wife, Sarai? Is it because God might as well tell Abram how it's all going to go down seeing as how Abram failed the whole have faith in God's word thing and decided to do it to Hagar? I'm pretty sure that was a bad decision, especially since we find out that Ishmael is going to be a wild thorn in a lot of brother's sides. Do you think God loves setting up his creations to fail? You spend 99 years assuring someone that they're going to get something and see how long it takes them to give up on you. Abraham was a champ for making it 86 years before taking matters into his own pants. Doesn't Abram get hurt falling on his face two times? Why doesn't he catch himself? I've never actually fallen on my face before because I have hands to catch myself. Even that time I'd been drinking and I was walking with my hands in my pockets and my so-called friend pushed me over a bush and I couldn't get my hands out of my pockets. I was still able to land on my shoulder. Of course, I wasn't 99 years old at the time, so that might be the problem. Why does God need to make a covenant with Abram? What is the whole point? Is it like God's own version of Little Computer People? Or The Sims, to you youngster generations who have no idea what an Apple IIe is. Even if it was like Little Computer People, what was the point of Little Computer People? To keep him happy? To keep him from knocking on the monitor all of the time because his stupid dog was out of food? Am I missing the point of The Bible? Is it about Man or God or God's relationship with Man or Man's relationship with God? Is it answering the question about why we're here? We're here because God was lonely or bored? What does God gain from making Mankind? Is our purpose just to serve God? That's a pretty flimsy purpose. "God created Man so that Man can serve God." There must be more later on that explains it better or else who would believe this stuff? Why would they need to? What does God gain from making a covenant with Abram? If he doesn't gain anything then is it just a game? If it's just a game, are we the pieces? Is the Monopoly Dog joyful in the knowledge that its existence means something because we play with it? Would it cherish me if I whacked off the tip of its dingle? Am I being blasphemous? I don't mean to be! I'm just asking questions! I think I need a Teacher's Edition of The Bible which gives me more answers in red ink. Why does God rename Abram? Was he tired of thinking of him as 'Space Panther'? Oh wait, that was that other guy! Now that Abram is named Abraham, how am I going to sneak in Lost questions? I never even got around to Alias questions! Did you think Jennifer Garner was hot? Even with her caveman forehead and punched-in-the-face lips? Do you think God pulled a dirty trick on Abraham? For years and years, he promised Abram all sorts of rewards for just following him and, all of a sudden, he plays the cut off the tip of your penis card? What kind of a token is that to remember a covenant? I'd sooner forget it! Noah received a beautiful rainbow to mark his covenant. Abraham got screwed! And so did I and I'm not even Jewish! Stupid parents and jerko doctors. Give me my penis back! Do you think Abraham's servants saw what was happening to all of the men and tried to run away? How many of them wish they'd never left Haran or been purchased by Abram or been born or had a penis? How does a 99 year old man cut the foreskin off of a person's penis? Very carefully! Ha ha! And shakily, probably. Abraham is still having trouble believing anything God says. Why doesn't he believe God when he tells Abraham about Isaac? Is Abraham starting to feel guilty for doing it to his wife's servant? Have you heard Patton Oswalt's comedy routine about the old people having sex and having a baby? Because that's what I thought of when God said old Abraham and old Sarah could have a kid. I would quote some of it to see if you remember hearing it but I don't want to be sued by a troll. Can Patton Oswalt sue me for calling him a troll? Because he calls himself one all the time! I just thought he meant it literally. Will that hold up in court? So Abram didn't find anything ridiculous about having a child at 86 but he finds it totally incomprehensible that he could have a kid at 99? I think he just wanted a little strange from a stranger from a strange land and didn't think Hagar would get pregnant at all. And he's probably laughing at God's suggestion not because he's 99 but because Sarai is old and wrinkly and fugly and he's pretty sure he isn't doing it with that old hag anymore! But he will because God says he will. So ha ha on that sexist old fart! Abram so wants out of having a disgusting old person baby, he tries to give the covenantial blessing to his sort of bastard son Ishmael. Aren't you glad God hears him and says, "Oh, don't worry about that! That kid is blessed too, bitch! You made a huge mistake, buddy! And now your seeds are going to have a bunch of half-brother thorn seeds to deal with!" Or something. I'm not sure how it's all going to work out. I'm just a dumb guy reading The Bible, not a historical scholarly Rabbi with smarts. Did Abram already know how to perform circumcisions for some reason? Or did God provide him with the manual? Or did practice make perfect? Do you think he started on his cheapest slaves? He probably saved Ishmael and himself for last. Do you think you could perform your own circumcision? At 99? Would you want to? What do you think Abraham did with all of the extra foreskins? Do you think Sarah made a bathrobe out of them? Or some slippers?
FAITH vs SCIENCE
HISTORICAL FACTS The Guinness Book of World Records was begun when the managing director of the Guinness Brewery got drunk and tried to race a Golden Plover. He declared himself faster than the Plover (even though witnesses said the Plover fell and skinned its knee while it was far ahead) and decided to put it in a book declaring himself the fastest human being since Tutankhamun. This managing director held every single record in the first printed copy which he wrote on the back of a bar napkin and sold to a publisher who decided they should make a real book of world records that didn't include Peanuts Shove Up Bum and Minutes Urinated At One Outing. The Guinness Brewery's managing director's name was Hugh Beaver. Hee hee hee! Seriously! Hugh Beaver! When I was in elementary school, I had no idea that my penis had been mutilated when I was a child. It's not like anybody ever sits you down and explains this horror to you. One day, I was peeing at the trough urinal when an Asian kid stood beside me to pee. I had no idea why his penis looked like a tube and not like a mushroom! I thought maybe his penis was shaped that way to make it easier to pee into my Coke. The copy of the King James Version of The Holy Bible which I am using was published in 1995. I hope there haven't been any major revisions since then! The most religious fish in the ocean is the Starry Flounder. You probably thought I was going to say the Angelfish but those guys are total whores.
ESSAY
ASSIGNMENT. A.
Choose a random record in The Guinness Book of World Records and beat
it!
DRAWING TIME! You can skip this section this time since I really don't want a bunch of people e-mailing me pictures of penises.
WHAT DID CHRISTIAN LITERALISTS LEARN? God, like many women, will only have a relationship with you if your penis looks a certain way. |
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