The LORD might benefit from a massive dose of Lithium, and perhaps a good SSRI. For starters.

That reads better if you do it in a Samuel L. Jackson voice.

In other words- pay your fucking taxes!

@3:
Yup. It was very easy for them to assume that the World was govned the same way their nation was...although the Bible is actually not all that sanguine about kings, probably the priestly influence which looked nostalgically back at the notional time of the Judges' rule ('That's four hundred years...what's that?, I thought rude boys don't cry!')

When a jack-Mormon boss said that he was disturbed by the accounts of how many people King David killed, I said, 'It probably bears no relation to reality ven if there was a King David---it was just their way of saying that he was a good king.'

When whether you starve or not largely depends on how much grazing and farming land your tribe controls, the king's ability to kill is your babies' relative food security.

Not even poetic...sounds like something a 13 year old would write.

OK. I'm getting tired of the Slog Bible Study posts. Yes, it's fun to laugh at the misguided ramblings of ancient sleep-deprived desert nomads, but I feel like we're just legitimizing it by posting about it at all.

Here's the summary for all future Slog Bible Study posts:

The Bible is a bunch of really old stories cobbled together, often poorly. It is not divinely inspired. Much of it doesn't even make sense. Don't live your life by it. The end.

@6 What's illegitimate about laughing at the misguided ramblings of ancient sleep-deprived desert nomads?

the LORD has anger issues.

What an asshole

I'd like to see the Lord matched up against Mike Tyson ca. 1989. I mean, I think the Lord would probably take him, but damn that'd be a pay-per-view bonanza.

It's going to be a sad, sad day for all those evangelicals who think the LORD is on their side.

@ 4, I believe they've found enough evidence of David to say he was a real person - the earliest biblical figure to be known to have existed. I don't think his kingdom was anywhere near grand enough to deserve the designation, though.

Lordstein can be, shall we say, an abrasive presence.

NO!

Zephaniah 1:14-19

So, don't get me started.

Now you're just making whole books and passages up....right?
One must appreciate the blinding before the viscera vomiting, otherwise it'd be cruel.

Passages like this are a good reminder that Yaweh started out as a minor war god, one of many worshipped by disparate tribes. His elevation to the One God was a gradual process of war and subjegation. Those who did not assimilate were annialated, a process still admired by evangelicals today.

I'll bet conservative evangelicals read that and instantly cream in their pants.

This passage actually sound to me a lot like God pitching an episode of Game of Thrones to HBO.

Oh shit. Paula Abdul is back for the new season of American Idol.

I used to be able to recite all sixty six books of the Protestant Bible, in order, from beginning to end. When I saw today's Slog Bible study, I instantly thought, "There's no such book!" I grabbed one of my Bibles to confirm it... and I was wrong. My knowledge is mostly gone! I probably know the amino acids and the state capitols now better than I know the books of the Bible.

Since it's pretty short, I actually took a couple minutes to read the whole "book", as they call them, an unrelenting sequence of damnations from beginning to nearly the end, when God suddenly becomes nice and says that everything will be okay.

So thank you, Slog Bible study, for reacquainting me with the one of the forgotten dusty corners of the Minor Prophets.

By the way, the Book of Mormon is even worse. That hackneyed amateur attempt at classic Jewish literature is like an angry minor prophet from cover to cover. At least the Bible isn't all Slog Bible study material. There's Psalms and Proverbs, the Pentateuch laws, the sayings of Jesus, the pornography of Songs - a lot of stuff to break the doomsday monotony. In contrast, open up any chapter of the Book of Mormon and some group or individual is either getting slaughtered, or advance notice of the slaughter is being given. I'm not exagerating; you can try it yourself. The Mormons are so killing obsessed.

So, perhaps particularly now that a Mormon is running for President, you might consider switching the old Jewish literature with a few nuggets from the Book of Mormon.

I really like @23's idea for the presidential campaign season. Please make it so, Goldy.

And if you don't want to perturb your Sunday tradition, do the BoM ones on a latter day.

@7 I meant legitimizing the Bible. Sorry if that was worded poorly.

@23, @24 Goldy moves in mysterious ways.

Somebody's pissed off at somebody and indulging in a little supernatural revenge fantasy.

@11- We have no direct evidence of David's existence, but we do know that the kings of Judah were claiming descent from him from an early date. Most scholars today think he was real, but it is beyond all doubt that the Bible hugely exaggerated his achievements and power. The United Kingdom of the Twelve Tribes never existed. He might have been an especially good tribal chieftain, but he was only a tribal chieftain and he would have lived in a stone hut, not a fancy palace.