The Last Testament: A Memoir (9 page)

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Moreover, if thou hast power over what hath not yet come, canst thou not unspool the future with a gentler thread; one weaving a tapestry whereby righteousness is always rewarded, and evil always punished; so that mankind may behold with perfect clarity thine infinite justice?”

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“Interesting; interesting,” I said. “Yet I think I would prefer to work in mysterious ways.”

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“But consider,” Abraham responded, “how much more reverence humanity would give thee, if it knew it lived in a universe in which the good and the wicked received condign reward and punishment in proportion to their conduct.”

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“Nah,” I replied. “I hear what thou sayest, but I’m still going with mysterious ways.”

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“Verily, it is thy world, I just live here,” Abraham continued; “I simply think, a little transparency may prove a useful bulwark for those plagued by anger or doubt; and furthermore—”

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“Mysteeeeeeerious waaaaaays!”
I shouted, attaining a tone of spookiness by using a thick Girgashite accent (Girgashia being the Transylvania of its time), and deploying thunder and lightning effects, and throwing a plastic spider upon him;

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All of which he took very earnestly, for recall this was all happening as he slept; and so he awoke in his tent screaming, breathing deeply, and with sweat soaking his brow; until at last his passion cooled, and he regained himself, and said with relief, “Oh! It was all a dream”;

¹⁹
Whereupon he looked beside him on the floor, and beheld the plastic spider, and screamed
“Or was it?!?”
; and I filled the tent once more with evil laughter, and thunder, and more plastic spiders.

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Yea; Abraham put up with a whole lot of crap from me.

CHAPTER 17

¹
B
ut nothing compared to the ordeal I put him through 20 years later.

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I had told Abraham that a great nation would one day spring from his loins; but he and Sarah were old, and she was barren; so she allowed him to be with her handmaiden, Hagar, who had replaced her previous handmaiden, Lee Roth.

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And Abraham and Hagar lay together; and at some point during their lying together, they had sex.

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And Hagar gave birth to a son, whom she called Ishmael, because she wanted him to grow up to narrate a novel everyone pretended to read.

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Fourteen years passed; and by now Abraham was 100, and Sarah was 90; and though thy modern men of medicine can make nonagenarian women squeeze out triplets like unto softballs from a pitching machine, it was not so back then.

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But I was finally ready to make good on my covenant; so I enabled Sarah to conceive and give birth to a son, Isaac; whereupon she demanded that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away; for she had grown weary of Hagar, whose handmaidening frankly was not what it used to be.

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So Abraham did as Sarah asked, and exiled Ishmael; who nonetheless went on to become the progenitor of his own great people—the Arabs.

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(Who are still working through their issues about the sending-away-Ishmael thing.)

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Abraham dearly loved little Isaac; but one day when Isaac was a small child, I told Abraham to sacrifice him as a burnt offering to me, to prove once and for all that he was loyal enough to deserve to become the first patriarch.

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So I watched Abraham rise at dawn, and cleave the wood for the burnt offering, and saddle his ass, and mount it with his young son; and I thought, “So far, so good.”

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And I watched him spend three long days clinging to Isaac on his ass, and three long nights clinging to him in his tent, until he reached the base of Mt. Moriah; whereupon he told his servants to wait for him while he and Isaac climbed; and I thought, “Impressive.”

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And I watched them ascend, and heard Isaac naively ask his father where the lamb for the offering was, and saw Abraham choke back his tears, and mutter through his heartache, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering”; and I thought, “Nice one.”

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And I watched them arrive at the place of the sacrifice; and beheld Abraham build an altar, and lay the wood upon it, and in a state of the most piercing anguish bind his own struggling son and lay him upon the wood; and I thought, “I think he’s gonna do it!”

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And I watched Abraham, sunk in grief beyond measure, stretch forth his hand with the knife and see for the last time alive the beautiful son I had promised him, yet was now bidding him slay with his own hand; and I thought, “Incredible! He’s actually gonna—”

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“My L
ORD
!” interrupted Michael, my angel. “I mean not to be rude, but dost thou really mean to let Abraham go through with the sacrifice?”

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“No; no I do not, and it is good that thou interruptedst me,” I said; “for truly, watching Abraham these last three days has filled me with . . . I myself am unsure; but witnessing someone close to me prepare to kill the thing he holds most dear in life solely to gain my approval . . . his suffering . . . I found it almost—”

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“My L
ORD
!” yelled Michael again, and pointed at Abraham, who was now swinging the knife; and I nodded my head, and Michael appeared unto Abraham at the last possible instant and stayed his hand, and looked over the hillside for a substitute; until his eyes fell upon a wayward ram, which was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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And Michael congratulated Abraham, and comforted him, and promised on my behalf yet again that his descendants through Isaac would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore.

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But I remained alone, staying aloof for a time from the affairs of men, to contemplate the truth about myself I had discovered while observing Abraham.

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For lo, I had destroyed the world in a Flood; I had razed the Tower of Babel; I had leveled Sodom and Gomorrah; all manner of catastrophe had I already visited upon you, in the name of righteousness;

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Yet it was only then—after finding myself enthralled by the slow, silent agony of one I greatly loved;

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I say, it was only then, that I first began to consider the possibility, that there was something seriously wrong with me.

CHAPTER 18

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T
hings between Abraham and me were never the same after that.

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Sarah died a few years later, leaving him disconsolate; feeling guilty, I gave unto him another wife, Keturah; she was 19 years old, and he was 139; it was a classic January–December romance.

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And Abraham found for his son a wife; she was Rebekah, the daughter of Isaac’s cousin; not ideal, but alas Isaac had no available half-sisters or nieces.

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And Abraham passed away at the ripe old age of 175, and was laid to rest alongside Sarah in the burial cave of Machpelah, near Mamre, toward the back, in the Jewish section.

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And Isaac proved even more steadfast and upright than Abraham; I saw no need to test him as I did his father; and of the three patriarchs he gets by far the least play; for his life was not nearly as interesting as Abraham’s had been, or Jacob’s would be.

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Yea; he remindeth me somewhat of John Scott Harrison: the only man to have been the son of one US president, and the father of another.

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(Never challenge me to a trivia contest; epic shall be thy ass-whooping.)

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Isaac built on his father’s wealth, for he bought all the wells in the valley of Gerar, profiting greatly thereby; even more so, after an adorable two-year-old Beersheban girl, Baby Milkah, accidentally fell into one.

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Everyone within a 500-cubit radius came to assist in her rescue; the incident brought renown to the well, and honor to Isaac and all those involved;

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Though sad to say Milkah herself grew up jaded by fame, and died of an incense overdose at age 16.

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Isaac is best known for his two children, the twins Jacob and Esau: Esau emerged first from the womb, red and hairy; and impishly clasping his heel was Jacob;

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And with his arrival the biblical narrative becomes more engaging; for from infancy it quickly became apparent to everyone, that Jacob was one tricky little bastard.

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Fooling Esau into selling his birthright for a bowl of lentils; deceiving his own dying father into giving him the coveted blessing of the firstborn—these are but two of the hundreds of tricky little bastard things that tricky little bastard did;

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I excluded them from the Bible, only so that the book of Genesis did not turn into the book of That Tricky Little Bastard.

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Jacob was naughty, roguish, and full of mischief; a conniver; Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson rolled into one little Semitic Iron Age package.

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He even had his own catchphrase: “Thou gotst jaked!”

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A visiting merchant slips on wet sand and falls into a dungpile: “Thou gotst jaked!”

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A dim-witted neighbor is cozened into using his own precious silks to wipe himself in the dark: “Thou gotst jaked!”

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Uncle Laban unwittingly cedes him possession of all his speckled and spotted cattle: “
Dee-amn,
thou gotst jaked!”

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Jacob was as wily a trickster as I have ever seen; on occasion an unscrupulous cutthroat; one of those people whose success others resent, considering them personally unworthy of such earthly achievement; and rightly so.

²¹
I
loved
Jacob.

CHAPTER 19

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I
t was Esau who most frequently and painfully received unto himself the business end of Jacob’s artfully wielded shaft; most significantly in regards to the two incidents I reference above, in Againesis 18:13.

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(Truly it is a worthy thing, to have every sentence of one’s literary output citable by chapter and verse; not only is it convenient, but it bestows upon one’s every utterance the heft of unimpeachable authority.

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In fact, here is a little boon I shall grant my readers: