Genesis 3:1-24

“I guess the saying’s true, in the poker game of life, women are the rake.” –Ed Norton in Rounders

You’ve heard the story about how God threw the first dude a bone and hooked him up with this slammin honey named Eve, right?  (If you haven’t heard it, why don’t you get with the program and click here.)  Well this story is about her.  Now let me say from the get go that I got nothing against Eve.  She was always yapping her jaw during Mad Men episodes, and she only bought skim milk, but all-in-all, she was a pretty cool chick.  Plus, Adam’s my boy.  So if he’s into her, I’m happy for him.  And what’s he gonna do?  Hold out for a better option?  Yeah right.  One time I saw him spitting game at a snow leopard, and it was like watching Helen Keller on American Gladiators.  Brutal.

But all of that to say: something wasn’t quite right with that Eve chick.  I’m not gonna say she was gullible, but I will say that Adam used to take her snipe hunting, like, once a week and she never figured it out.  And I’m not gonna say she didn’t know her place, but she was always mouthing off to Adam with stuff like, “who made you the boss of me?”  And Adam would say, “God.”  And she’d be all like, “whatever.”  So yeah, Eve was good looking and all that, but she had some baggage.  She just – I don’t know – she just seemed like the kind of chick who could destroy everything good and beautiful in the world.  You know the type.

So one day Eve was walking through the Garden of Eden singing “The Bear Necessities” and munching on a coconut when she bumped into a giant, talking snake.  Now I don’t know if life was like a Disney movie back then and all the animals could talk, or if Eve had gotten into some magic mushrooms that morning or what, but for whatever reason, it didn’t bother her when the snake slithered up and said, “Hey toots, did The Big Man really say you guys couldn’t eat from any of these trees?”

“Silly goose!” said Eve.  “No, he didn’t say that.  He just said ‘don’t eat from that tree in the middle cause it’s bad for you and you’ll die.’”

“Die?!  Oh that’s rich,” said the snake.  “He’s just messing with you.  He knows if you eat that fruit you’ll be able to do math and will finally understand the ending of Donnie Darko.  He doesn’t want that.  Trust me on this: you’ll be fine.”

Eve fell for it like Kirstie Alley at a Las Vegas buffet.  She scarfed down some forbidden fruit, mixed up a nice fruit salad, and gave the stuff to her man, Adam.  He went for it as well.  They both agreed that this fruit was the best thing they’d ever tasted and were headed back to the tree for round two when they started noticing parts of each other they hadn’t seen before – butts and birthmarks and whatnot.  They were as naked as porn stars at a job interview.

This wasn’t the best timing cause God was on his way down to the Garden for He and Adam’s daily racquetball game.  Adam wasn’t in their usual meeting spot so God hit him up on his cell, “Where you at?”

“Here I am,” said Adam from a nearby bush.  “I heard you coming and I hid cause I got nothing on but my birthday suit.”

“Who told you what a birthday suit is?” asked God.  “You been nibbling on the naughty tree?”

“It’s this chick you gave me!” said Adam.  “She fed me some of those bad apples for breakfast and now I’m cruising around down here in these shrub skivvies.  Also, she makes me drink light beer.”

If you ask me, Adam had every right to toss Eve under the bus for her little stunt, but she wasn’t about to take the fall for this one.

“It was the snake’s fault,” said Eve.  “He told me it’d make me a better driver!”

“Bad move,” said God to the snake.  “I’m taking back those legs I gave you, so now you gotta crawl on the ground and eat dirt for a living.  Also, women aren’t gonna talk to you ever again.  They’re gonna think you’re gross and their sons are gonna chase you with shovels.”

But he wasn’t done.

He said to Eve: “Guess what, honey?  No more storks for you.  You gotta start squeezing out babies on your own.”

“Won’t that hurt?” asked Eve.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said God.

And to Adam, He said: “I’m pulling out all these money trees I planted.  From now on you gotta work for your cash.  Sometimes for eight or nine hours a day.  In a row.  And you gotta do this for, like, forty-five years.  And you only get 10 vaca days per year.”

“That sounds terrible,” said Adam.

“Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays,” said God.

God could see that Adam’s tree branch man-thong was starting to chafe, so he made Adam and Eve a pair of leather onesies.  Then He sent them off for nine hundred years of morning sickness and morning drive DJs, respectively.

Fast forward 6,000 years and here we are today.  Ice caps are melting, stock markets are crashing, the Los Angeles Lakers are winning, and something called a Ladygaga is giving deaf people new reasons to praise their good fortune.  We let dinosaurs go extinct.  The Kardashians continue to reproduce.  And somehow, after romping and stomping around the globe for six millennia, we still don’t know how to fly!  Safe to say: things haven’t turned out like we hoped they would.

Some people blame the Freemasons for this.  Others blame Rosie O’Donnell.  Not me.  I blame that Eve chick.  (And Rosie O’Donnell.)

Genesis 11:1-9

One of the great things about God wiping the whole world out with a flood (Note: see Jars of Clay or Steve Carrell for more info on this) was that you didn’t have to travel cross-country to see your crew anymore.  I mean, I love a road trip as much as the next guy who just finished On The Road, but sometimes I don’t feel like sitting in a Jeep Grand Cherokee for 15 hours just to watch my bro get hitched to some broad I don’t even know, you know what I’m saying?  Sure you do.

The flood solved this problem.  For starters, most of your bros would have been dead.  Yeah dude, it sucks, I know.  Let’s pour one out for our lost homies.  Whoa, whoa, whoa not too much, dude!  Geez bro, Boone’s Farm doesn’t grow on trees you know.  So anyway, yeah, a buncha your boys bit the dust.  That’s a real banger.  But the good news is: the bros who hadn’t died all lived within walking distance.

See, after the flood, Noah’s grandkids kinda skipped over the whole “fill the earth” part of God’s command.  They treated the Middle East like it was a Chicago suburb: they walked until they came to a place where there wasn’t a house and then they built one there.  This made for some killer block parties and you never had to go far to find an above ground pool, but it wasn’t how God meant for people to live.

Something else you should know about the post-flood populace: they all spoke the same language.  The Bible doesn’t tell us what language, but it was probably English since it’s the easiest.  This setup worked out great for everyone since it made it a ton easier to give instructions to the lawn guys, order chicken chow mein, and do other multi-cultural stuff like that.  Also, the lines at the DMV moved way faster.

With so many people living in the same place, speaking the same language, and watching the same randomly-hot local news weather lady, it wasn’t long before someone decided they use their combined powers to do something crazy.  Now if it had been me I would have said, “let’s invade China” or “let’s elect the first black president” or some other silly thing like that.  You know, some stunt that only works if you have a whole bunch of poor people speaking the same language.  But these people were a bit more practical than that.  So they decided to build a skyscraper to heaven.

The idea was, “if we build the tallest building in the world, we could probably talk Travis Pastrana into parachuting off of it.  That’ll turn into a Red Bull commercial and at least 4 million hits on YouTube.  We’ll be famous!”

“Plus,” someone else added.  “If we’re all working on the skyscraper project, no one will ever want to go to college out of state, and we’ll be one big happy family forever and ever.”

So they got after it.  Bricks were baked.  Mortar was mixed.  Lunches were packed and mustaches were grown.  Quicker than you can say “Hola mamasita” downtown Babel was overrun with Mexicans and racist high school dropouts, and it started to look like a real construction site.  Scaffolding, backhoes, union bosses, beer guts – it could’ve been a jobsite down the street from my place; the only difference being that no one was speaking Spanish so it was easier for the guys to tell dirty stories about their common-law wives and/or live-in girlfriends.

The whole “same language thing” also made it a ton easier to get stuff done around the site.  Since no one was wasting time looking for an English speaker or miming instructions using hand puppets, the skyscraper started coming together so fast you’d have thought it was a montage from an 80s movie. The skyscraper was halfway there (“waaoooh, living on a prayer”) after only a couple weeks of construction.

Round about this time God was rolling though the region and he noticed something fishy going on over in Babel.  When he saw the building, he got downright surly.

“You kidding me with this?!” he said to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  “We gotta do something about this.  Today they’re climbing a stairway to heaven.  Tomorrow they’ll be, I don’t know, landing on the moon?  Where will it end?  Mars?  The sun?  Infinity and beyond?  No.  We’ve gotta put an end to this.  Let’s go mess with the way they talk.”

Right when he was saying this, there was a conversation going on down at the jobsite that went something like this:

Foreman: Hey, Jorge, run this stack of drywall up to the fourth floor.

Jorge: Que?

Foreman: What?

Jorge: Que?

Foreman: Take this drywall upstairs.

Jorge: No hablo ingles.

Foreman: What?

Jorge: Que?

And the same thing was happening all over Babel.  One minute two guys were laughing at a joke about a Jewish gynecologist and the next they were shouting at each other in German and Russian.  One guy was trying to order off the Roach Coach in Portuguese while the dude taking his order was yelling back in Pig Latin.  It was a hot mess.

Within fifteen minutes of God’s proclamation, progress on the tower had stalled out worse than Ted Haggard’s dating life.  Everyone was pissed and nothing was getting done.  Rather than going round and round forever like some retarded Three Stooges sketch, the workers decided to bail on the building and go their separate ways.

So the people of Babel left the skyscraper looking like the Death Star in Return of the Jedi and wandered off to different parts of the world where they could buy Hello Kitty merchandise, worship cows, and wear sombreros (respectively) in peace.

Genesis 18:22 – 19:29

Before there was an Oakland, California, or a Gary, Indiana, or an East St. Louis; before there was a Playboy Mansion or a Sigma Chi House at the U of I; before guys started doing coke in Miami, or hookers in Vegas, or Hilton sisters in Los Angeles they were doing all of that stuff and worse in a place called Sodom and in another place called Gomorrah.  (And actually, no, Gomorrah is not where the word “gonorrhea” comes from.  I thought that too.)

As you’ve probably figured out by now, God didn’t take kindly to shenanigans of this sort.  There was a limit to the amount of crap he was willing to take from sinful cities, and, when he reached that limit, there was hell to pay.  You can ask New Orleans if you don’t believe me.  (Note: Hahaha.  J/K!  LoL!  Please stop sending me hate mail.)

Both Sodom and Gomorrah were well past that point.  God decided to schedule them for a “Hiroshima Sunrise” and he mentioned this one afternoon to his buddy Abraham when they were wrapping up lunch.  Abraham was bummed out when he heard of the coming destruction and he said to God, “What about the fifty decent, hard-working “Joe the Plumber” type guys in Sodom?  You gonna wipe them out along with the tattoo artists, Youtube commenters, and Duke lacrosse players in town?  That doesn’t sound like you.”

Abraham had a point.  God didn’t tolerate Tom-Foolery from his cities, but he also liked to pull the good guys out of town before the stuff hit the fan.  So he said, “Sure, I’ll forego the Fallujah Fireworks if there are 50 righteous dudes in town.”

You ever asked your Old Man for $10.00 and had him say “yes” so quickly that you were kind of disappointed and wondered if you should’ve asked for $20.00 instead?  That’s how Abraham felt.  God had been all about the 50-guy Free Ride, and Abraham wondered if he had set his sights too low.  So he angled for a 45-guy Free Ride.  Then a 40-guy, then a 35-guy, and on and on it went until Abraham had worked it all the way down to 10 guys.

“If there are ten Christianity Today subscribers in town who don’t cheat on their wives or their taxes and who don’t use LimeWire to download music off the internet, will you cut the city some slack?”

“You got it,” said God.  “If there are ten stand-up guys in town I will cancel the barbeque.”

I bet Abraham freaking cleaned up at garage sales.

Now before you start thinking that Grandpa ‘Ham had some soft spot in his heart for morning drive DJs, Girls Gone Wild producers, or caboose cowboys, I should tell you: he didn’t.  Abraham was talking God down not because he wanted to save Sodom but because he wanted to save his nephew Lot who had relocated to the city when he got a job as a club promoter.

Unfortunately, there weren’t ten Republican voters within 100 miles of Sodom so, despite Abraham’s best efforts, the sulfur shower went ahead as planned.  God, however, knew what Abraham was getting at with his holy haggling, and He sent two angels to Sodom to clear out the Lot Clan.

Lucky for the angels, Lot was pretty easy to find.  He was working the city gate that night, checking IDs and handing out wrist bands.  When he saw the angels walking in, he got all geeked-out and invited them to crash at his place.  They were like, “Naw, we’re good.  We’re just gonna pass out in the Quad.”  But Lot was like, “That sounds terrible.  I got Pizza Rolls and Madden 1750bc on PS3.”  And they said, “Done and done.  We’re there, man.”

Somehow, word about Lot’s visitors spread around town faster than a cold sore at Band Camp.  Before the guys had finished a single game of Call of Duty multiplayer, someone started banging on the door.  Lot opened it to find every fairy and fanny bandit in Sodom standing on his porch.

“Send out those two guys who are crashing here,” they said.  “We want to…ask them something.”

“No you don’t,” said Lot.  “You want to do gay stuff to them.”

“Alright, you caught us,” they said.  “But seriously, send them out.  If you don’t, we’re gonna take you back to our place and make you watch Will & Grace all night.”

The angels had been hiding behind the door and, when they heard this, they dropped their pizza rolls and pulled Lot back inside.

It was go time.  The angels told Lot who they were, why they were there, and that Sodom was eight hours away from getting flooded with lighter fluid.  They told him to “grab yo kids, grab yo wife, and grab yo kids’ husbands cause they raping everybody out here.”

The next morning, Lot was in his bedroom trying to decide if he had room in his suitcase for his Scrubs Season 3 boxed-set when Angel #2 burst in and said, “Don’t you get it, man?!  This place is gonna look like a Jackson Pollock painting in about fifteen minutes!  Get out of town and don’t look back!”

Lot and Company booked it to the neighboring city and got inside just before the brimstone bombing began.  Everyone except Mrs. Lot, that is.  Lot’s Old Lady was a real sucker for volcanoes, Bruce Willis movies, and pretty much anything else involving explosions.  She couldn’t help but look back at the sulfur storm over Sodom even though Angel #2 told her not to.  When she did, she turned into a freakin pile of salt – just like that one guy in Indiana Jones.

And that – as they say – is that.

Genesis 28 – 31

The story of Jacob and Laban is like, super, duper long so I’m going to try and highlight the juicy parts. For real, it’s like five whole pages in the Bible, and dude that text is hella small.

Cool.  So Jacob was working for his Uncle Laban, doing hard labor and sweating like a Dr. Pepper commercial.  After a couple years of this Laban was all like, “Dude, I feel like a total jerk face.  You’re family and you’re working for me for free. How can I pay you?” Jacob put down his weedeater and he said “Uncle Labrador, your youngest daughter – my cousin – is like, bomb-diggity hot. I will work for you to see her nake- I mean, to marry her.” Laban stroked his face fur for a moment and said “Right on. Seven years of work, and she’s all yours.” They high fived, and the deal was sealed.

I don’t really know what to say about the fact that Jacob desperately wanted to bed his first cousin. It’s pretty gross by our standards, but I guess things were different a million years ago when the Bible was happening. There were fewer people in the world, so that meant fewer options. When the hottest babe around was your cousin, you made like you were in West Virginia and did what you had to do.

Fast-forward seven years of anticipatory staring and awkward conversations, and the wedding bells were ringing. Jacob was stoked out of his mind because he apparently really loved this Rachel chick. They partied hard and started gearing up for the no-pants-dance, if you know what I’m saying. Yeah, you know what I’m saying.  Jacob was chilling in his crib where the magic was gonna happen. With seven years of preparation, I’m guessing that place was decked out with disco balls and every kind of scented candle and massage oil you could imagine. Jacob was in there, ready to consummate the crap out of that marriage, when sneaky-sneaky Laban sent in his homely older daughter Leah instead of Jacob’s true love, Rachel.

I don’t know if Jacob was wasted, or blind folded (if he was into that), or if he was so just so amped that he didn’t notice, but he ended up sexing the wrong sister. He woke up the next day and saw Leah’s unibrow where Rachel’s angel-face should have been and he jumped out of bed like a bad Ben Stiller movie.  (I guess I could just say “like every Ben Stiller movie.”)

Anyway, Jacob was all like “What the crap dude?” and Laban was like “Oh, my bad, I forgot to tell you that you have to marry the older, uglier one first. It’s our custom.” I feel like me and Jacob are pretty similar, so I’m betting he said “I’d like to wipe my butt chasm with your customs” because that’s what I would have said.

Laban, who was their version of a used car salesmen – used donkeys? Carts? – was like “Look, you’re my favorite nephew. You can marry Rachel too, as long as you work for me for another seven years.”  Safe to say his name was Uncle Douchbag from that point forward.

Jacob was a good, honorable dude so I know he did some good work for Laban after marrying Rachel, but I really hope he found ways to stick it to him, like mowing “Laban sucks” into his lawn or something. During the next seven years, all Jacob did was work and make sweet love to his two wives. Between the two of them he had a bunch of kids, and despite his Uncle being a classic-case a-hole, Jacob made a good life for himself. He got a Porsche or two, wore Versace suits (but in a classy way, not in a Spencer Pratt at the MTV Movie Awards way), and basically was winning at the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em game that is life.

Eventually Jacob took a step back and looked hard at his life and realized “Man, Uncle Laban really sucks. He treats me like crap and is always trying to screw me over. Aside from all the babes and the massive prosperity, living with Laban is like living in Shawshank.” After that epiphany (which, honestly, should have happened 10 years earlier) God chimed in and said “Yeah Jake, you need to peace out, cue your exit music (probably Ozzy’s ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’) and head back to the land of your fathers.”

Jacob, in a rare Biblical move, actually listened to God.  He gathered his flocks and family and got out of dodge. He managed to sneak away while Laban was out shaving his sheep – which is actually not a euphemism – and it wasn’t until three days later that Laban realized he was missing two daughters, one son-in-law, tons of grandkids, and a bunch of goats. He pursued and caught up with them and a Real World style scream-fight slap-fest ensued. They set up a pile of rocks and basically said something like the following:

Laban: Why’d you leave and take Fubar and the Hot One away from me?

Jacob: Because you treat me like garbage.

Laban: Yeah, well, if you cheat on my daughters, I will kill you. But I won’t be around, so I’m setting these rocks up to symbolize the fact that God will be watching you, and he kills harder than I do.

Jacob: Right. These rocks also symbolize a boundary between us which we can’t cross to kill or maim each other.

Laban: I’m down with that.

Jacob: So, we’re cool?

Laban: I wish I could hurt you but God is on your side and I don’t want to go to hell.

Jacob: Good deal. Shalom!

They named the rock pile “Dr. Phil” and went their separate ways.

Genesis 1 and 2

The scene opens to black. And not like Halle Berry half-black. We’re talking total, complete, Wesley Snipes darkness. Darker than Fidel Castro’s heart and more formless than John Goodman’s abs. And then, kind of out of nowhere, God thinks, “Hey, let’s get some lights going up in this joint.” Now, if this had been 1995 and God had been into gadgets with catchy jingles he could have just clapped his hands and there would have been light. But this was back in the days before The Clapper so he actually had to say, “let there be light.” And KABLAMM! There was light.

Once the lights came on, God looked around and realized there was nothing to see. No sun, no moon, no Larry King, no nothing. The place was deader than a white dude in East LA after midnight. God was kind of bummed and he thought briefly about uncreating the light because what’s the point of turning on a light if there’s nothing to see, am I right? But then he thought, “hey, why don’t I just make some stuff to see with all this light.” And BLAMMO! The sun, the moon, and Larry King were created. (Note: Though actually older than time itself, Larry King did not assume his present “human” form until the early 20^th Century.)

By day three God had pretty well gotten the hang of the whole “universe creating” thing. In the time it takes most people to finish the Lord of the Rings Director’s Cut, he had whipped up the oceans, the atmosphere, and the United States of America. (Note: Technically he only created North America, but we’re pretty sure he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t known the US and A was on its way.)

From there, he moved on to graduate-level creations like plants and fish and birds and whatnot. At this point, Gabriel the archangel suggested he create Double Stuft Oreos, but God said the universe wasn’t ready for them yet and created dinosaurs instead. And God saw the T-Rex which he had created and said, “It is awesome.” Gabriel saw the T-Rex and said, “I’ve seen better.” Because of this comment, Double Stuft Oreos would not be created for another8,000 years.

So here we are: day five of the Universe’s life. Like most 5 day-olds, there wasn’t much going on with the world. It just kind of lay there – smoldering in some parts, vegetating in others. Every now and then a volcano would go off. After about fifteen minutes of this, God found out what anyone who’s seen Dante’s Peak could have told him: slow moving lava isn’t as exciting as you’d think. So he created a zoo. He created emus and ostriches, elephants and aardvarks, alligators and octopi, and the cast of The Lion King. A few of the animals didn’t turn out quite like he wanted, but they looked so hilarious that he released them into the wild anyway. The platypus and the three-legged dog are two examples. Elton John is another.

As the sun set on the first Friday afternoon Happy Hour, God was almost finished with his universe. The land masses were rocking. The oceans were cruising. The waters above were doing their thing. The waters below were minding their own business. Things were humming right along. But something was missing. And then it clicked: what good is a zoo without a zoo-keeper?

So God went out the next morning and blew on a pile of clay and WHABAMM! Man was created. No one’s quite sure how this went down but it probably looked something like the movie Frosty the Snowman – just with more legs and less singing. The first dude’s name was Adam and he was played by Charlton Heston.

Adam was crowned King of the Jungle (Note: he preferred “Mr. Universe”) and was told to get busy naming animals and making fruit salads. Adam was down with this setup for awhile, but then one day, completely out of the blue, he was talking to God and was like, “Hey! What’s a guy gotta do to get a little bootie down here?” And God said, “Yeah alright, you’ve earned it.”

He put Adam to sleep, reached into his chest cavity, and ripped out a rib. Fortunately, the King of the Jungle position came with a pretty decent HMO so Adam didn’t have to pay out of pocket for any of this. God took Adam’s rib and transmogrified it into a smoking hot broad. Her name was Evelyn (“Eve” for short) and she was played by Della Reese – a younger, hotter Della Reese. There was some initial concern about Eve because she had been created before clothes were invented, but it ended up not being a deal because her hair was super long and she was always standing behind bushes and stuff.

So anyway, Adam woke up from surgery and immediately asked Eve to marry him. At first she said, “I don’t know, I just went through a tough breakup and kind of need to be single for awhile.” (Note: This is considered by most to be the first joke ever told. Although some have suggested that the creation of the bactrian camel was actually meant as a joke.) After a minute of awkwardness, Eve said “J/K, LoL! Of course let’s get married! Yeah!” And so they were.

After the wedding, God went home, put his feet up and spent all day Sunday reading the funnies and watching football. He’d had a busy week at work, and, with the two lovebirds running The Garden, he knew it was only a matter of time before everything went to hell.

(Closing Note: Some scholars believe that what God meant to say in Genesis 1 & 2 was, “see Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.” Someone should probably look into this.)