Numbers 15, 16

God hasn't reinforced the need for the Israelites to make Him food in a while, so He launches into the details once again. As usual, it's all blemish-free animals and cakes made of oil. He specifically reminds them to make offerings when they take possession of Canaan, which I'm sure will be any day now.

The action quickly takes a left turn: the Israelites discover a man collecting sticks on the Sabbath. They drag the poor fella to Moses, who confers with the Almighty. God considers the matter for half a second and decides Stick Man must be stoned to death. And that's what everyone does. They stone a guy to death for collecting sticks on the Sabbath. Remember that the next time you pray to God to make your team win on Superbowl Sunday.

The stoning is why when God tells everyone to make fringes on their garments they end up looking like Dee Snyder from 1986. No sense in making God angry.

After Sticky is killed, Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and On gather two hundred and fifty princes and go against all common sense and confront Moses. They feel that Moses is hoarding too much of the cool holy stuff and leaving everyone else with nothing to do all day but stone guys who just want to heat a little water up for tea. Moses tells these clueless bastards that God will decide the next morning who is the holiest among them and, therefore, has the honor of approaching Him in the tabernacle. But make no mistake, Moses is not happy. He demands to know why these men--all from the Levite family, who you may recall God singled out to cart around the tabernacle items--aren't happy with their special status.

You'd think that the Levites, recalling the fate of previous men and women who complained against Moses and Aaron, would just head home. But where's the drama in that? Two guys, Dathan and Abiram, are ready to fight for the honor of carrying even more shit through the desert for an entity no one has ever seen. "Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?" they ask. "Moreover thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou put out the eyes of these men?"

You have to admit that they kind of have a point. But the Lord doesn't appreciate a sound argument and decides the next morning to consume all the Levites in fire. Moses begs God not to punish everyone for the actions of a few men, so God does the only rational thing: He opens up the ground beneath the dwellings of everyone related to Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and On, and they are all swallowed by the earth. Then He consumes in fire the original two hundred and fifty men who came to Moses to complain.

Still unable to grasp the punishment meted out to dissenters, the Israelites chastise Moses for allowing God to murder all of those people, many of whom had nothing at all to do with the original complainants. God, as anyone should be able to guess, is royally fucking pissed. "Are you people paying any attention at all?" He asks. "Get you up from among this congregation, that I may consume them in a moment."

All of a sudden everyone is apologetic, falling on the their faces and praying for God to spare them. Moses, who really should let the whiners get what's coming to  them, at least so he'd have fewer mouths to feed, intercedes once more on behalf of his people, but not before fourteen thousand die. 

Today's lesson: let Moses control the remote.

Numbers 14

Some people just never learn.

Even after the deaths of thousands upon thousands of complaining quail eaters, even after that complainer Miriam was stricken with leprosy and banished from the camp for a week, there are still some among the Israelites who think it's a good idea to gather around the water cooler and take pot shots at the bosses.

Like Moses himself, they wish that God would have killed them in Egypt instead of setting them free in the desert, and now that they are in the desert they wish God would simply kill them where they stand. And, they wonder further, if God wants them to live why are they going to fight the Canaanites just to die by their swords? They think it would be better to pick a new leader and head back to Egypt. For some reason they think the pharaoh is going to welcome them back home after Moses turned the Nile to blood, made frogs fall from the sky, and caused the deaths of innocent children. I'm sure pharaoh is baking a cake for them right now, a nice big explody cake with shrapnel filling.

Moses and some of the guys who checked out Canaan try to stop the people from bugging out by extolling the virtues of Canaan. "The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land," they say. "If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. And they have free wi-fi at the Starbucks."

The Israelites listened for a moment before collecting rocks to stone Mo and Co to death. They were desert stones, so they were heavy and hot.

At the last second, God jumps in. As usual, He's hell bent on destroying everyone for their insolence. Moses appeals to God's overinflated sense of pride. "Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man," Moses says, "then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness." 

God's still standing there with his arms crossed and that pout on his lips, so Moses tries for flattery: "The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.'

But God isn't falling for the same old tricks this time. He is sore pissed and ready to slap some bitches down. As a result He decides who among the Israelites will be allowed to enter the Promised Land.

"Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles," God says. "Which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have tempted me now...and have not hearkened to my voice; surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoked me see it." I'm not sure If I'm interpreting this correctly, but that list appears to include simply everyone.

Except for Caleb, the guy who ventured into Canaan to steal the grapes. He’s cool to live there, as are his descendants. They are to go into the wilderness by way of the Red Sea, presumably to prepare occupying--sorry, living--in Canaan.

God then turns to Moses and Aaron and tells them that the most annoying thing the Israelites do is murmur against Him. "I can never hear a thing they're saying," He says. "Maybe you could give them diction lessons?" The second most annoying thing is leaving the seat up.

Not only aren’t these murmurers allowed into Canaan, they can’t just leave either. They have to to stay in the desert for forty years. 

Moses tells they congregation their punishment for not heeding God's rules, and they decide, against the will of God (!), to climb a mountain near Canaan, where they are struck down by the residents of Canaan and driven to Hormah. 

Way to pay attention to the details, Israelites!

Numbers 12, 13

Do you recall when Moses got married? Neither do I, and I find it strange that we haven't heard from Zipporah, Moses' wife, all this time in the desert. Certainly if anyone was going to point out the stupidity of Moses not asking for directions to the Promised Land it would have been his wife.

You know who hasn't forgotten about Moses' wife? His brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam. They're still pissed that he married an Ethiopian woman. Read into that what you will. They also complain that people regard Moses as a prophet and not them. I guess they didn't pay attention to the previous chapter, in which those who bellyached about not having enough appetizer choices would up dead with quail between their teeth.

Another thing Aaron and Miriam forget is that God hears everything and leaps at the chance to defend Moses. Moses, He says, isn't your run of the mill prophet. For one thing, God appears to regular prophets in dreams and other unverifiable ways. "With [Moses]," God says, "will I speak mouth to mouth...and not in dark speeches." What that means, I think, is that God sits down with Moses for weekly status meetings in the large conference room at the end of the tabernacle. Of course, that has never happened. After all, God has appeared to Moses as a burning bush, a column of smoke, and a pillar of fire, and the one time Moses convinced God to let him see His divine face all God showed Moses was his butt. Mouth to mouth indeed! 

God being God, He can't let a lecture pass by without an accompanying punishment. So to ensure neither Aaron nor Miriam ever question God's judgment again, He gives Miriam leprosy. Not Aaron, who is just as guilty of complaining as Miriam, just Miriam. 

Moses begs God to cure Miriam immediately, but God is not in a forgiving mood and reminds Moses of the remedy for leprosy he dictated a few chapters earlier: basically seven days spent outside of the camp. Miriam is sent away for a week, and for those seven days the Israelites stay put and wait for Miriam to be clean again.

With Miriam cured, the Israelites march for a while and make camp in Paran. While there, God wants Moses to send out one man from each of the twelve tribes to spy on the land of Canaan. For forty days the twelve case the joint from a nearby mountain, keeping records of the relative morality and number of its residents, its topography, its various kinds of industry, its military preparedness, and the variety of its crops. Before returning to camp, the men sneak into a vineyard and steal a cluster of grapes, which they string up to a pole and carry to Moses like it was a dead deer.

They report that Canaan is flowing with milk and honey--typically interpreted as being a good thing, even though it sounds disgusting and soggy--and the cities are heavily fortified and filled with strong men. One guy, named Caleb, floats the idea that they just barge in and take the city. After all, God has gifted Canaan to the Israelites even though people already live there. Manifest destiny, right?

Some of the other guys--let's call them cowards--disagree, and like a reverse Dick Cheney concoct a story designed to dissuade invasion, namely that the land devours its own people and that roaming the countryside are giants so large that they, the twelve spies, were like grasshoppers next to  them. The Canaanites also have yellow cake and aluminum tubes, which they are totally going to use to make nuclear weapons. The New York Times runs the story and the case for war is made! 

Numbers 11

Some of the Israelites--about 600,000, if I'm reading correctly--have the temerity to complain about being freed from slavery and pushed into the desert to wander around for years eating nothing buy sky-bread and pigeons with absolutely no mention of where the water is coming from, and God is a little disappointed. Maybe "disappointed" is an understatement: He sets the camp ablaze with the "Lord's fire," which I assume is some kind of metaphoric punishment that causes great pain but doesn't do much actual burning because all the people are still there, and yet the edges of the camp are crispy. Magic, I suppose.

Despite enduring this terrible metaphorical burning, some people continue complaining, this time about the food. "We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt," they say. "The cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. And remember that little cafe on Bleeker, before it got real trendy? They made the best fish melon leek onion garlic soup. Those were the days!"

These complainers dream of other food because the manna is terrible. Despite what the illustrated Bibles of our youth depicted, manna is not host-sized disks of pure white flat bread. It looks like coriander seeds that are the deep brown color of resin. And it can't be plucked from the ground and eaten. No, first it must be ground in a mill, beaten in a mortar, boiled in a pot, and baked into cakes, and the finished product tastes like oil. Just the thing to make you reminisce about the food you were served when you were a slave.

Hearing the complaints, Moses finally cracks. His people are miserable, life is difficult, and he can't get cable in the desert, and he feels he can  no longer shoulder the burdens of his people alone. So downtrodden is Moses that he asks God to kill him right there if things don't get better.

God agrees that maybe--maybe!--He could have treated Moses a little better and transports everyone to the Promised Land immediately. Nah, I'm just kidding! God tells Moses to gather seventy elders of the tribes of Israel and bring them to the tabernacle. There the Lord will spread out evenly among the seventy the burden Moses that was once his alone.

God then commands Moses to tell the people that if they want meat, they can have meat. In fact, if they want meat so much they can gorge on it--not for a day, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but for a whole month. And it's imperative that they stuff themselves silly, not a simple "sit back in their chairs and have to unbutton their pants and rub their bellies" full, but so full that meat flows from their nostrils and makes them nauseated. And why is God doing that? Because the Israelites "have wept before [the Lord], saying, 'Why came we forth out of Egypt." Which basically means that because they acted like little bitches and complained about starving to death, God is being a total dick. Bon apettite, you whiney fuckers!

But Moses cites a flaw in this plan: where exactly will the meat needed to nauseate 600,000 Israelites for a whole month come from? God has a plan: a great wind will blow quails from the sea to the camp. I don't know what quails are doing on the open ocean, but who am I to question God.

The wind blows in so many quails that they are piled three-feet deep in every direction, and it takes two whole days for the Israelites to gather them. But God is about to play a huge joke on these complainers: just as they take the first of what they expect to be many, many bites of quail, God visits a plague upon everyone with quail between his teeth, which totally bums out Jimmy the Organic Quail Farmer who had been raising his own quail and decided to eat it that day. Poor guy got caught in a dragnet.