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.