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CHAPTER FORTY
SEVEN
God tells Jacob to go back to Beth-el and make another altar among the other altars littering the area. Jacob says, "Get cleaned up, everyone! Get rid of all of your non-God godth! We're going on a road trip to Beth-el to build another altar!" Everyone gives up their strange gods and earrings. Jacob buries the loot by an old oak tree near Shechem (who was still dead, probably). Everyone is afraid of God, so Jacob and his group are not bothered by the Perizzites or the Canaanites. Jacob returns to the mysterious Luz which is now Beth-el. Jacob builds an altar and names it El-beth-el, The God of the House of God. Deborah dies. Um, Deborah is apparently Rachel's nurse. Deborah is buried under an oak in Beth-el and her grave is named Allon-bachuth, or the oak of weeping. God appears to Jacob again and blesses him and renames him Israel, just like that gay guy did! God tells Jacob (or Israel (or perhaps Abraham, even!)) to be fruitful and multiply. God tells Israel that he shall give birth to multitudes and all the land promised to Abraham and Isaac is now promised to Jacob (who is also Israel). Jacob builds a stone pillar and anoints it with oil and calls the name of the place Beth-el.
STUDY QUESTIONS! Why does God keep sending his people all over the place but he keeps bringing them back to Beth-el? Why don't they just remain at Beth-el? Is it because there aren't any rich people to scam or to steal from there? I guess God has to lead his people around so they can amass wealth since that seems to be the most important thing according to Christian Evangelists. 'Believe and tithe and God will return the money to you a hundred fold! Amen!' Why does everyone have to give up their earrings as well as their strange Gods? Did I miss something somewhere? Do earrings represent some kind of blasphemy or idolatry that hasn't been mentioned yet? Or does Jacob just dislike earrings? Why does The Bible say all of the strange Gods and earrings were buried by Shechem? I suppose it means the grave of Shechem the rapist. I don't want to suggest that perhaps the translators or writers really meant Shalem since it seems weird to say they buried the loot next to the grave of some other guy. Suggesting that The Bible got something wrong might make people think The Bible is fallible which it obviously isn't since it was probably written by God through Divine Inspiration. So you're just going to have to believe that the big clue to this treasure is that it was buried next to an oak which is next to Shechem the rapist's grave (because Simeon and Levi obviously would have given all of the people they killed a proper burial, right?). Would the movie National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets really have gone over budget if they had hired one fact checker so that they could tie the story together into a narrative that made sense instead of the retarded mish mash it ended up being? What are the Olmec doing in the Black Hills of South Dakota? Why would they have a legendary and important city there instead of near their civilization in Central America? And how could they have rescued a slave off the coast of Florida when they didn't live there? And then, even if they did do that in Florida, take him to South Dakota to see their hidden city of gold? Seems like a long way to go! Why would Queen Victoria and the maker of the Statue of Liberty know about the golden city? And why would the clue in 1865 point to a statue that won't be given to Paris until 1889 which has a clue mentioning a couple of pieces of furniture that weren't yet built or even thought of in 1865? Why would the imperialist sculptor Borglum be involved somehow in trying to cover-up the location of the city by making his racist sculpture? And why is it that in all of these treasure hunting type of movies, they encounter some of the greatest engineering feats ever imagined by anyone? Every ancient culture seems to have had access to some really brilliant mechanical engineers and architects! And if that Wilkinson guy was really just trying to make a good name for his family, why did he hire thugs to run over people and shoot people while trying to get the clues away from Gates? Sure, he's a good guy at the end (sort of, if you squint a bit) who sacrifices himself when it's really the last option and he's lost control, but he sure did a lot of horrible things along the way. The big reveal that he was helping and trying to do a good thing for his family name was tarnished a little bit by the rest of the movie. Just a little bit! Jacob thought he might be attacked for what his sons did but they are able to travel to Beth-el with no trouble. Why is everyone so afraid of the Jewish God? Ha! I'm just kidding. That was probably rhetorical. Is Jacob retarded? Why does he keep naming things The God of the Noun of God? It's really annoying! I bet it's why the Catholic Church has the Trinity Dogma. With all these Gods of Gods things, it's bound to get confusing! So, let's see, God is the God of the people of God. And Beth-el is the house of God. And God is the God of the House of the God of the people of God. God it? Ha ha! Got Milk? Are you sick to death of everyone stealing the Got Milk ad campaign? You'd think it would have been over with ten years ago, right? The stupid ad is 16 years old! It isn't even that good and yet it is credited with bringing milk out of some kind of sales slump. And for the last sixteen years, every other corporation, bumper sticker manufacturer, religion and would be business person has stolen the campaign for themselves. Can that even be considered parody when you change one word in a two word question? Got Jesus? Got Beer? Got Chips? Got Testosterone? Got Aids? Got Cigarettes? Got Laid? People in advertising must be the dumbest people in the world. I think the series Mad Men is giving those jerks a lot more credit than they deserve. The entire cast of that series should be made up of monkeys. Who the heck is Deborah? Why is she important? It's not like Zeppo or Bilbo died! At least that would have been worth mentioning, seeing as how they're also Jacob's wives. But Rachel's nurse? Please! The fact that she was buried under a weeping oak (like Shechem!) had better become important to the plot later on or I'm going to be angry for having wasted my time reading that sentence! Isn't it convenient to be able to say, "Hey, God spoke to me! He said everything around here is mine and my descendants and that I am going to have lots of them (descendants, that is!) and they're all going to be princes and nobody better try to stop me because God is on my side and he'll destroy anyone who doesn't allow his prophecies to come true"? I guess if God is also talking to the other races at the time, they probably weren't very forthcoming with what they were told since it was probably, "Hey, this is God. The land you are on won't belong to you for long and you'll probably be killed by the Jews who I've decided to take a first-hand interest in. So, you know, good lucke with that!" Why is God in agreement with the guy Jacob wrestled? Did God like the suggestion that Jacob now be called Israel? Or is this some kind of substantiation that the man who wrestled Jacob was God somehow? Jacob is building another altar at Beth-el? How many altars must there be now? And how many times is the place going to be named Beth-el when it's already named Beth-el? The mountaintop must be lousy with altars! Does every generation have to repeat the actions of the previous generations? If so, when is Jacob going to dig wells and pretend that Leah and Zilpah and Bilbah and Rachel are his sisters so he can scam some asses off of some local leader? Pretty soon, right?
The Atomic Bomb
HISTORICAL FACTS Currently, close to six thousand altars litter the mountaintop at Beth-el. Although since most of the altars are just piles of stones, a large percentage of those altars are probably just the result of rock slides. Mount Rushmore is a favorite argument for creationists to use when discussing Intelligent Design. They equate a mountain sculpted to look like people as being equal to the fact that people exist. But they ignore the fact that many, many rock formations look like many, many objects without anything but erosion having changed the rocks. What about the supposed face on Mars? Intelligent Design? Or are people just seeing patterns as they always do? Humans are more equivalent to a mountain that sort of looks like a big thumb rather than a mountain that looks like a work of art. To think people were designed when there are so many things wrong with the human body, so many extraneous pieces and parts that any engineer could vastly improve on, is just an insult to an Omniscient and Omnipotent Creator. I'm going to name my next pet, El-elohim-el, The God of the God of God. Except my next two pets are probably going to be gerbils named Lemiwinks and Paris Hilton. I chose the Atomic Bomb as my Faith versus Science section this time because I was reminded of it when I used the word Trinity in the Study Questions section. Six months until Lost starts up again!
Choose one. A.
God has spoken to every generation since Abraham and told them the same
exact things. When is this going to stop? Why doesn't God continue to repeat
this speech generation upon generation? Did he give this speech to all of
the children of the direct line between Noah and Abraham? Will this stop at
Moses since after Moses' death, the Jews finally make it to the Promised
Land? No wonder it's called the Promised Land since God has been promising
it to the Jews for hundreds of years!
DRAWING TIME! Paint a landscape of Beth-el.
WHAT DID CHRISTIAN LITERALISTS LEARN? If you can put the fear of God into enough foreigners, you can murder and plunder entire cities for any reason and everyone else in the world will be too afraid of retribution to retribute you. |
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