The Last Testament: A Memoir (17 page)

²⁶
Elaborate eating restrictions, given to people who would be consuming exactly one (1) foodstuff for the next four decades?

²⁷
Seafood etiquette instructions, given to desert tribesmen whose only prior experience with fish involved walking through them?

²⁸
Lectures about uncleanness, given to nomads who emitted a collective fungal stench so awful it actually
deafened
people?

²⁹
No; the Hebrew dietary laws were carefully conceived and calibrated by the angels and Moses and Aaron and me, for the health and maintenance of the long-term neurosis of the Jewish people;

³⁰
That they may forever display their faith through the ritual observance of rules too emphasized to be ignored, too random to be logical, and too vague to be satisfying.

CHAPTER 10

¹
A
part from these laws, I also transcribed to Moses on Sinai the chronicle contained in the first part of the Bible: the stories of Creation, and Adam and “Eve,” and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the patriarchs; even Moses’s own story;

²
Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, “Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, ‘Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses, “Until I reached the point when I said unto Moses”’”; whereupon he laughed.

³
Well, chuckled.

⁴
The whole transcription took 40 days and 40 nights; exactly the same length of time it took for me to inundate the entire planet; which demonstrates either the relative difficulty of writing, or the ease of flooding.

⁵
In recent decades scholars have analyzed the Old Testament and concluded that it is an amalgam of the work of at least four different authors, working over a period of roughly a thousand years.

⁶
But thou wilt recall that in Againesis 3, I talked of other “scholars,” and how they had concluded that life on earth evolved over
billions
of years; perhaps thou rememberest the explanation given therein; I will not repeat myself, but it applies here as well.

⁷
The only portions of the Pentateuch I did
not
give directly to Moses, were those relatively small sections comprising the story of the Jews’ post-Sinai travels, which he and I worked on together on the road, Kerouac-style.

⁸
And this seems like an apt moment to answer one of the questions I have been asked most frequently since the Bible began its unprecedented run at the top of the best-seller lists: what advice do I have for young writers?

⁹
Verily, there is no question I take more pleasure in answering; not only because it appeals to my ego (which is fathomless), but because I take pride in being part of the great storytelling tradition.

¹⁰
For I was not the first to publish an account of the Creation; others preceded mine by hundreds of years; indeed,
Gilgamesh
predates Genesis by over a millennium.

¹¹
Gilgamesh
is, of course, a work of fiction, whereas my account is history; but as literature its merits are considerable; especially when thou recalleth that its author had to write in cuneiform on soft clay tablets, and thus never knew if his latest plot twist would turn out literally half-baked.

¹²
So, having been a slave to the Muse since long before the Greeks blasphemously personified her, I will share with thee a few of the most valuable things I have learned about the craft of writing.

¹³
Write what thou knowest.
Obviously, this advice is more limiting for some than others.

¹⁴
Do not wait for inspiration.
For lo,
I
am inspiration; and I am pretty busy.

¹⁵
Grab the reader’s attention early.
I learned this the hard way.

¹⁶
(“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”; that alone makes one want to read Genesis.

¹⁷
But “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side of Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab”; that alone makes one want to wipe thy nether regions with Deuteronomy.)

¹⁸
Bestrew thy chapters with interminable lists of the names of ancient wells.
I figured this out early on, and I never looked back.

¹⁹
Publish and perish.
Either that, or do
not
publish and perish. My point is, unless thou art me, any option involving not perishing is a non-starter.

²⁰
And finally,
write
!

²¹
Never stop writing; it is a muscle that must constantly be exercised, even by me;

²²
For after the Koran, I put down my pen, and did not attempt another work for 1,200 years; that work being
The Book of Mormon;
which having sold nearly 100 million copies is a huge commercial flop;

²³
And far worse, reads as a preposterous, laughable, and absurd series of fairy tales;

²⁴
Although the musical is awesome.

CHAPTER 11

¹
A
s the weeks of dictation wore on, and Moses failed to appear, and the Israelites remained forbidden from venturing onto Sinai; the mood amongst these festive vagrants quickly deteriorated from Woodstock-like, to Ozzfest-ish, to Altamont-esque.

²
At last the restless crowd surrounded Aaron and said, “We came here to commune with God at this rock; but lo, thou wilt not let us touch the rock; and now, we want rock.

³
Rock! Rock! Rock!

⁴
We want rock; we feel it in our hearts; and no stiff-necked clergyman shall forbid us from worshipping at its altar; for we are young, and angry, and rebel against thy authority.

⁵
Dost thou hear us,
old man?
”

⁶
And they made to storm the mountain; so the overwhelmed Aaron placated them by gathering together their jewelry, and fashioning it into a golden calf that they could worship as a god.

⁷
And he made this calf; and then, to appease the crowd, he sacrificed a bull to it;

⁸
And then, with grief in his heart, he led a day-long prayer service for it;

⁹
And then—out of a pit of sadness whose depths even I could not plumb—he led a two-week orgy in its honor.

¹⁰
I saw all this and grew angry, for Moses and I had just hit our stride; we were up to about half a scroll a day, easily; the words came pouring out onto the goatskin.

¹¹
My wrath waxed hot; and I looked down upon the Chosen People, in full bacchanal mode, uncloaked and oiled and squirming upon the sands like unto a desert skin-cobra; and told Moses I had had enough, and would smite the lot of them, so that he and I could start all over again with a people more worthy of us.

¹²
(I was thinking the Mayans; I liked their passion.)

¹³
But it was at this moment that Moses showed how arrogant of my authority he had become; for without the slightest sign of fear, in the middle of my hotwaxing, he interrupted me:

¹⁴
“You know what, God? Fuck thee.

¹⁵
Thou heardst me:
Fuck . . . thee.

¹⁶
What, we’re 400, 450 years into this Chosen People thing, I just spent the last month writing the whole story down on your fuckin’ rolly-scrolls— Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all that fairy-tale shit—and now we’re gonna toss the whole thing out into your oblivion pile just ’cause my happy little family is down there partying in the desert?

¹⁷
What, thou seest some bullshit little golden calf and feel all threatened by that?

¹⁸
‘Smite this, smite that, look at me, I’m the L
ORD
All-Smitey, la di da’?

¹⁹
Dick move, dude.

²⁰
Verily.

²¹
Thou mayest be God, but thou actest like
The Man.
”

²²
And that was when I forbade Moses from entering Israel.

²³
I am by no means averse to receiving constructive criticism; I received it from Abraham, and I would go on to receive it from many other great men in my career; David, and Muhammad, and Kanye.

²⁴
But such criticism must be offered in a spirit of respect, both for me and the organization as a whole; and when disrespect is shown—nay, flouted—an example must be set, even with someone like Moses.

²⁵
Of course, in the Bible it says I punished him for striking a rock with his rod to make it gush water, rather than merely waving it
over
the rock, as I had directed.

²⁶
Yea; the Bible saith a lot of things.

CHAPTER 12

¹
O
f the 40 years’ wandering in the desert, the less said the better.

²
Only a handful of incidents from that period are recounted in the Bible; some military skirmishes, and a few spy missions, and the occasional admonitory epidemic; but for the most part it was a dreary time.

³
The Israelites bivouacked at dozens of lonesome encampments, every one of them devoid of any kind of nightlife or theater scene.

⁴
The migration quickly fell into a routine; at the front of the procession was the Ark of the Covenant, and the small band of priests in charge of it; and behind the band followed the ragtag bunch known as Arkheads;

⁵
Ex-rebels grown middle-aged and fat, passing their days listening to the same chants over and over again and living off whatever scraps fell from the sky;

⁶
And perpetually in need of a miracle.