The Last Testament: A Memoir (5 page)

²²
(Granted, this made him the most famous man among 23 people; but still.)

CHAPTER 7

¹
I
shall skip over the next ten generations of begetting; thou mayest consult Genesis 4 for the thrilling details of how Irad begat Mehujael, and how Mehujael begat Methusael, and how, with the help of Vicky—an Edomite streetwalker with a heart of gold—Methusael begat Lamech.

²
I shall also skip over certain other questions thou mayest have; such as “So who did Cain marry?” “Where did all the other people come from?” and “Doesn’t this mean there was all kinds of crazy incest going on?”

³
That last allegation is shocking and outrageous; and I would like nothing more than to provide thee the simple explanation for how all this begetting was accomplished in a perfectly wholesome manner;

⁴
But alas, I have been advised by counsel not to discuss these matters due to ongoing litigation.

⁵
Instead I will now turn my attention to my next great crisis; for one of the lessons I had already learned about godding, was that it involved a good deal more crisis management than I had anticipated.

⁶
So after Cain, I decided to step back for a little bit; to let mankind find its own way in the world; to sweat not the small stuff—for lo, it was
all
small stuff.

⁷
Thus I observed silently as generation begat generation; as the human race developed new skills like hunting, and gathering, and the now-lost art of gatherhunting.

⁸
There was ample time for everyone to learn from their mistakes; for recall that in those times people’s lifespans were many centuries long.

⁹
(The record was Methuselah, who lived 969 years; the last 940 of which he spent repeatedly telling family and friends how much better things were the first 29.)

¹⁰
And I watched it all unfold, and I could not but be impressed with the great achievements of my own greatest achievement; but the wickedness . . .

¹¹
My goodness, the wickedness.

¹²
I shall spare thee the embarrassment of describing in detail the wanton debauchery of thy ancestors; I will simply say that the wickedness continued to grow, and in all aspects of society: family life grew more wicked; tribal governance grew more wicked; even group sex grew more wicked, which was surprising, since it was starting from a point that was already pretty wicked.

¹³
Finally I came to feel what is recorded in Genesis 6:6: “And it repented the L
ORD
that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart.”

¹⁴
At this point I can almost hear some of my young doubters reading this in their dorm cloisters, sipping their bean extracts, brows arched midsmirk, scoffing, “But if you’re ‘God,’ why didn’t you just make man perfect to begin with, wiseguy?”

¹⁵
There are two answers to this question, the first being: consider thyself smited.

¹⁶
But the second is, that in creating the human race I
did
achieve perfection; a perfection of balance between the forces driving it toward good, and those driving it toward evil.

¹⁷
The dozens of distinct impulses and drives within thee, may be likened to individual athletes tasked with uniting themselves for the betterment of a team; a team which may be a nation, or a tribe, or a family, or even a single human soul.

¹⁸
And some teams rise, and others fall; and some succeed dishonorably, and some fail with honor; and individual victories and defeats are short-lived; yet the larger cycle of victory and defeat is eternal.

¹⁹
And eventually all the teams go under, and are replaced by new franchises that play in stadiums with bigger luxury boxes than the previous ones; and it is in the biggest such box of all where you will find me, rapt, smiling, sipping a metaphysical brewski; enthralled by the game, and the perfection of its entertainment;

²⁰
For I am the L
ORD
thy God, Commissioner of the Universe: and I am always ready for some football.

²¹
Yet once in a while something in the very fabric of the sport goes so awry, that the Commissioner himself is obliged to step down from his high perch, and reset the balance.

²²
In the sphere of football, this means re-allotting draft picks, or renegotiating the collective bargaining agreement.

²³
In the sphere of divinity, this means drowning humanity.

CHAPTER 8

¹
O
f all the people of his time, only Noah found grace in my eyes; for he was wise, and upright, and honest, and as it says in the text, he “walked with God”; though in truth I wish that now and again he would have
jogged
with God; for he had a bit of a paunch.

²
Noah was a great man; he had a lovely wife, Nameless; and three terrific children, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; verily, their domestic interaction had a real
My Three Sons
feel to it; for they were always courteous, and hokey, and unironically used words like “Jeepers!”

³
So I told Noah my plan; and how I meant to save him and his family by having him build an ark of the dimensions 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits.

⁴
(Here I must insert a plea, that mankind at least consider reinstating the cubit system; which remains the most marvelous method of measurement ever invented, putting the metric and imperial systems to shame.

⁵
Four digits a palm, seven palms a cubit, six cubits a reed, two reeds a
nindan
and ten
nindans
an
aslu
—I defy thee to devise units of greater common-sense and utility; especially to anyone with even a passing interest in the irrigation of millet.)

⁶
And Noah did wondrous work constructing the ship, considering I bade him make it of “gopher wood”; that is the phrase used in Genesis, and scholars ever since have debated exactly what type of wood was so denoted; and the answer is, no type at all;

⁷
For gopher wood was at that time a euphemism, for lead-bolted plate steel.

⁸
And now I come to one of the bigger revelations thou wilt find within these pages.

⁹
I did
not
ask Noah to put two of every animal on board the ark.

¹⁰
I know that is what it says in the Bible, but consider: A phylogenetically complete double bestiary contained within a 450,000-cubic-cubit water-craft?

¹¹
Why, in but a medium-sized zoo, the animals themselves occupy nearly 450,000 cubic cubits; and that is to say nothing of the space required for their food and shelter, or their grazing and roaming areas; and of course a zoo contains but a tiny fraction of the total number of global species;

¹²
Not to mention the wide array of artificial habitat needs, ranging from arctic to tropical, that would have to be constructed and maintained on board; or the arduousness of gathering the animals from these habitats, many of them in continents heretofore not even mentioned in the Old Testament . . .

¹³
I could go on and on.

¹⁴
No; I did not say, “Put two of every animal on board the ship.”

¹⁵
What I said was, “Put two of
any
animal on board the ship.”

¹⁶
For I knew Noah and his family were in for a long, treacherous voyage; and that they would be confined indoors for over five months; and that under such circumstances, it would be comforting for all aboard, particularly the kids, to bring with them two dogs, or two cats, or even two hamsters.

¹⁷
I recommended dogs, but I left the choice to Noah; for I have never been a cat God.

¹⁸
As it happened, Noah
did
choose two dogs, cocker spaniel puppies he purchased the day before the rains came—Sparky and Pillow.

¹⁹
But hundreds of years later, when I dictated this story to Moses upon Mt. Sinai, he misheard me as saying “Two of
every
animal.”

²⁰
I corrected him immediately, but we both found the implication of the phrase amusing; and for the next hour or so we made much mirth of the idea of a ship containing so many animals;

²¹
For Moses would say, “It sounds un-‘bear’-able!”; and I would say, “Really? To me it sounds ‘purr’-fect!”; and he would say, “You’re a ‘dog’-gone liar!”; and so forth;

²²
And this brought us such happiness, that we kept it in; never thinking any of thee could possibly take it seriously.

²³
A six-day creation, talking snakes, 969-year-old men: such things are clearly factual and fall well within the realm of the credible.

²⁴
But two of every animal on a single boat?

²⁵
No; all the other animals—the beasts, and the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the earth—all of them were zapped frozen and left floating in ice cubes until the whole thing was over.

CHAPTER 9

¹
T
he tempestuous cruise of Noah and his family was of such duration that by the time the waves subsided, the buffet was almost depleted.

²
The ice sculptures had long since melted; the top-shelf liquor was gone; the bottomless shrimp were approaching their bottom, and what little cocktail sauce remained had to be licked off the side of the bowl.

³
The Flood had taken much longer than I expected; I confess that many of you were much better swimmers than I had ever conceived, and that your corpses proved far better flotation devices than I had previously anticipated.

⁴
But finally the last one of you drowned; and thou wert all devoured by fish; and these fish in turn shat thee out; whereupon smaller fish ate the thee-shit.

⁵
And the oceans began to withdraw; and here there is yet another animal-related error in the Bible: for Noah did not send forth a raven and a dove to determine whether the waters had subsided; he sent forth Sparky and Pillow.

⁶
Yea, he dropped them both into the waters; and Pillow swam but a few cubits, and yelped pitiably, and returned to the ark; but Sparky proved more intrepid, and paddled and churned through the endless ocean, until he disappeared beyond the horizon.