Genesis 9, 10, 11

Kill and Be Killed

God repeats to Noah and his sons the totally awesome advice that worked so well for Adam and Eve: knock boots like there's no tomorrow, and make sure to ride bareback. "Only this time," God says, "could you tone down the wicked progeny a hair? It's a bitch to get mud out of this long white beard."

That Noah's nuclear family is the only one left on the planet means that the human race is descended from Noah, a sinless, just man, and not from those sinful, fruit-eating malcontents Adam and Eve. If we were all sinners because Adam and Eve were, then we must all be sinless and just because Noah was. Whew! What a load off my mind that is!

But God can't let Noah and his sons go off to make the beast with two backs with their wives before talking their fool ears off. After all, God hasn't spoken to Noah in year. So much has happened. Where to start?

Well, God tells them that all the animals are delivered into their hands, but that they shouldn't eat of flesh that has blood in it. Noah doesn't exactly know what that means but hopes it has nothing to do with cunnilingus. He really wants to earn his red wings.

God says that anyone who kills another man will himself be killed by other men, which will set off a recursive loop of never ending bloodshed. Unless, of course, no one ever kills anyone again.

Like I said, never ending bloodshed.

Then God does something that emboldens homosexuals generations from now: he creates rainbows. The rainbow symbolizes God's promise that he will never again destroy the whole world with a flood, only large parts of it, with the help of the US Army Corps of Engineers and underwater earthquakes. That rainbows appear only after a rainfall trips Noah's irony alarm, but God doesn't "get" irony, so Noah let's it drop.

Everyone settles into life after the flood. Noah takes up winemaking, because if anyone needs a drink, he does. He proceeds to get shit faced and passes out naked in his tent after playing the bongos along with the Dead's American Beauty. Ham, Noah's middle son, stumbles in on the ugly scene and quickly tattles on dad to his two brothers, Shem and Japheth. In what surely is the first improv skit in the Bible, the brothers wrap a blanket around their shoulders and walk backward into Noah's tent to cover the old man up so they don't see his hairy peter. Just before they lay the blanket down, a bell rings and Shem and Japheth now pretend to be Austrian bounty hunters trapped in a comedic Broadway murder-mystery.

Noah wakes up hungover, checks his nanny cam, and discovers that Ham saw the Marie Claire magazines he was jerking it to before "Casey Jones" came on. Noah does the only rational thing: he curses Ham's son, Canaan, to be the servant of his uncle Japheth. Adding insult to injury, God decides "to enlarge" Japheth, just so it hurts a little more when he sodomizes his nephew.

Speak Now or Forever Need a Translator

The sons of Japheth's, Noah's youngest son, are called out. It's a list that would strike fear into every grade-school teacher in America. "Is Abim-a-el here? Am I pronouncing that right? A-bim-a-el? No? A-bim-a-el? Why don't I just call you Abe, ok?"

The one cool name in the interminable list? Nimrod. One of Japheth's descendants is named Nimrod. That's it. No joke. Nimrod. Just Nimrod.

The kids scatter and form every nation on earth, and everyone speaks the same language. But the nations get together to build a city and--get this--a tower. A really tall tower. The thing towers, you know? It's tall. It's built of brick and slime. It's like the coolest thing ever! The people are stoked. A tower! Yay!

Of course, the tower annoys the snot out of God.

"Behold, the people is one," God says, "and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

Yes, now that the people have Tower Technology, when will the madness end? Two-story homes? Ferris wheels? Fire engines with those telescoping ladders? Madness, I say. Madness!

Fearing something--the Bible is scare on details--God punishes the tower-building nations by confounding their language so that no one can understand each other. He then scatters the people across the globe. Again. because they already were scattered across the globe to begin with. And that's the story of how New York was founded.

To wrap up chapter 11, all the descendants of Shem, Noah's oldest son, are listed. It's as annoying and tedious as Japheth's list, but the last few names are important. There's Terah, who sires Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran before his father does, but still manages to have children: sons named Lot and Iscah and a daughter named Milcah. Milcah marries her uncle Nahor, a creepy development in a long line of unsettling occurrences; Abram marries Sarai, who, we're told, is barren. TMI, Sarai. TMI.

Terah decides to take this one third incestuous little group to into the land of Canaan by way of Haran, where Terah dies of embarrassment because he knows Sarai is barren.

Canaan, you may recall, is the eponymous land of the cursed ass-boy son of Ham.

What could possibly go wrong there?