The Story of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

liked that so much, in fact, that he promised never to kill everyone on earth again (Gen. 8:21), which was a lot to promise, but damn that grilled meat smelled
so
good. “In case I forget this promise, Noah,” God had announced, “I will use rainbows as a reminder to myself.” (Gen. 9:13) God dug rainbows. He hadn’t “planned” them exactly, they were more a by-product of rain and sunshine—but they were so pretty that they occasionally mesmerized him.
    For a moment, sniffing that grilled meat, God considered softening his approach to the humans, dealing with them mainly through rainbows and pleasant breezes and falling stars. “I don’t have to be so angry all the time. I can be gentle with them.” Men were not to be harmed, God announced (Gen. 9:6)—feeling a little weird saying that, given that he’d just killed all of mankind, but still—it was that kind of moment.
    But as soon as the barbecue was over, what did Noah do? He got so drunk that he fell down, which caused his robes to fly up, which then revealed his penis and balls! (Gen. 9:21) That was bad enough—if there was one thing God could no longer abide, it was having to see
that
stuff, especially on a guy who was six hundred years old! That part of the body simply does not age well at all, God thought. But it got worse. When Noah’s son Ham accidentally walked in and saw his father laying there, what did this belligerent old jackass Noah do? He came to and started yelling at Ham, and not just, “How dare you look at my penis?!” (which would have been acceptable to God because looking at penises was bad). No, it went way beyond that—the old man shouted that Ham’s unborn son would be a slave. (Gen. 9:25) Which was crazy. Ham inadvertently walked in and saw hisfather’s penis and now his unborn son was going to be enslaved for it? God thought about scolding Noah for getting so drunk that he fell down. “Don’t drink so much, Noah,” he considered saying. “Or if you do, wear undergarments.”
    But he didn’t, because … well, he’d already stated that Noah was a good man (Gen. 6:9) and how would it look if he turned on him now? “He wasn’t actually a good man, I was wrong.” God couldn’t say
that.
First of all, he wasn’t wrong. Even if his plans sometimes didn’t make sense to him, they were still perfect. He
knew
that. No, he would stick with Noah. So what if the only words God ever heard him speak were drunken, belligerent nonsense? Nakedness was a shameful, disgraceful thing. True, Ham had not “meant” to see his father naked, it was probably the last thing he wanted to see—probably, but not definitely. After all, homosexuality had been rampant in the world God had just inundated with water. Maybe Ham was a secret, incestuous homosexual? Could he prove he wasn’t?
    In time it became crystal clear to God: Ham’s son
deserved
slavery.

Chapter Six
    But things just kept going wrong. No matter what God did, the same problems kept coming up. Later, he would wonder whether using Noah-the-drunken-asshole to spearhead the re-population of the world had been a mistake. Maybe he should have just drowned
everyone
and walked away from the whole thing. He could always look for life elsewhere in the universe and try to work with it. These humans were impossible creatures.
    Before long, pretty much everyone on earth congregated in one place. (Gen. 11:2) They all wanted to work together, to build a great city with a tower at the center of it. God did not like this one bit. He found himself speaking aloud: “Let us go down and confound their speech so they cannot understand each other.” (Gen. 11:7) Once again, he stopped. Why did he keep saying “us?” There was no
us,
there was only
him.
God found these slips of the tongue extremely disconcerting. Why did they keep happening? “Maybe I was