God came down and told Moses to count everyone. He did. There were 603,550 people in the 11 tribes. He didn’t count his own tribe (the Levites) because god conveniently decided that the Levites were the ones in charge of the tabernacle and moving it around. The Tabernacle is a giant tent. They started calling it that all of a sudden. I don’t know why being in charge of moving around a giant tent makes you not part of the census, but that’s just what god decided.
So Moses got around to scheduling where all the different tribes should camp and everything was great. It’s worth noting that Moses was in charge of about 10 percent of all people on the planet at the time, if these numbers are correct. So god put the Levites in charge of the tabernacle and made them the elite race all around. He said, “Anyone who’s having first born sons that aren’t Levites have to give the Levites money.” God totally said this. The Levites were just carrying out his command.
Aaron and Moses decided that in order to shield god’s face from whoever was talking to them, they had to wander on right back to the red sea to kill a dugong. (Side note: If you don’t know what a dugong is, I didn’t, it’s related to a manatee.) Which wasn’t that big of a deal because, as we’ve mentioned before, they had only made it about 40 miles. You could easily do that in a couple days on camel back. They didn’t. But you could.
So they killed a bunch of dugongs and used their flesh for the tabernacle and used their fat for burning their lamps. Now the dugong is endangered. Good going, dipshits.
God made a few adjustments to the rules like, if you fuck with someone’s shit, pay them back 120% the damages and this amazing test to see if your wife is cheating on you.
Up until now there haven’t really been any rules for women and their sexuality, other than to not be around if there’s any blood inside their vaginas. Then came this radical new idea that women may occasionally enjoy sex and seek it out for themselves. This terrified men. The idea finally came into everyone’s head of, “How do I know that my wife isn’t voluntarily fucking someone else.” Up until now the only thing they had to worry about was rape and this was such a tragedy that they rarely discussed it. So Moses had a failsafe plan.
“If you suspect your wife of infidelity, bring her to the tent of the priest with some grain. The priest will loosen her hair and make her hold the grain. Then he’ll force her to drink bitter water as he draws symbols on her thighs. He gives a big long ramble about how if she’s guilty then she has disgraced the lord. If she drinks the bitter water and dies, she was unfaithful. If she drinks the bitter water and is fine, she was faithful.”
This is certainly better than the Salem witch trial logic, but still, i think, had room for improvement.
So a year had passed since god so mercifully didn’t kill every firstborn son of Israel in the plague that he sent to free them from slavery, so god said to Moses, “Remember last year when I told you to kill a bunch of lambs and eat them a certain way. Time to do that again! And every year. Forever!” Moses told his whole tribe that and they were like, “Goddammit. How many animals do I have to fucking kill before this god of ours is satisfied.” “A whole lot more.” replied Moses.
God sent a cloud. They knew it was a god and not just a random cloud because it talked to them and said, “Get the fuck out of Sinai. Now that you’ve set up a nice little community here, get the fuck out. Right now.” A lot of people complained about this and one guy even refused. God set them all on fire and was going to just fucking kill everyone; but Moses said, “God. Please don’t kill all of us.” God listened.
So they traveled on. After they had been so comfortable eating the few foods that god allowed them eat, now they were right back to eating quail and Manna. (Manna of course being the mysterious flour that rained from the sky which the people named ‘what the fuck is this shit’) Moses brought it up to god that everyone was hungry and thirsty and that he had 600,000 mouths to feed and god said, “Check this shit out.” All of a sudden a bunch of game birds flew down to the tribe and the Israelites gleefully slaughtered all of them. Apparently every single person got 60 bushels or 2000 liters of meat. I’ve never heard of meat being measured this way and I think it’s pretty weird. All of a sudden god said, “Actually fuck these people.” He struck down thousands of them with plague and told Moses, “Bury these motherfuckers and move on.” Moses called this place Kibroth Hattaavah. So they all moved to Hazeroth. Not be be confused with Hasselhoff. Which is a far sexier place,
Now apparently Moses’s wife, Zeppora, had died at some point. Moses was so shook up about this that it’s literally not mentioned. He had a new wife now who wasn’t a Levite. if you’ve ever been in an interracial relationship before, you know exactly what happened next.
Aaron and Miriam (Aaron’s wife who wrote the song about killing everyone) started talking shit about Moses, and Aaron saide, “We used to work together. Now you think you’re so cool with your Cushite wife.” Moses didn’t even wanna address this, but god came down and said, “Fuck you Aaron. I like moses more that you. Fucking deal with it. Him and I speak face to face like boys. Even though I said he couldn’t see my face because it will kill him, we totally speak face to face. When I talk to you, I talk in riddles. Because I hate you and I want you to be confused.”
God punished Miriam. Not Aaron, by giving her leprosy. He said, “Put her out in exile for seven days. Then I’ll heal her.”
So before they decided to move on, Moses sent some spies up to Canaan. Canaan was the land originally founded by a bunch of freed slaves who were cursed because their patriarch, Ham, saw his dad, Noah, naked one time. The spies came back and said, “There’s lot of fruit and shit there and a lot of milk and honey. This land seems nice. The only problem is all the people there are fucking massive. Like bigger than anyone I’ve ever seen. We probably can’t even kill them. We look like fucking grasshoppers compared to them.”
The Israelites just starting flipping the fuck out. This guy Joshua said, “We’ve been wandering around this goddamn desert for what seems like forever. Fuck you Moses and fuck you Aaron. We’ve been following all the ridiculous rules god set for us and we are going to go fuck up the Canaanites and take this fucking land.”
Moses prayed to god, “Why the hell are you fucking with us? Do you want us all to die out here? What the fuck? I know that you’re slow to anger and a very forgiving god. Even though I’ve personally seen you kill people by the thousands for fucking up just one time and occasionally for no reason whatsoever, and you totally almost killed my son for no reason.”
God replied, “I am a very forgiving nice god. Even though I’m totally not, because anyone who ever complained this whole time, will not get to step foot in Canaan. Now go wander around Saudi Arabia for a while. Once everyone’s dead and their kids stop complaining, then I’ll let you guys into Canaan, which is apparently the land of milk and honey I promised ya’ll.”
So every single person who complained about not being able to go to Canaan, with the exception of Joshua, died immediately from plague. The rest of the men decided, anyways, to go fuck with the Canaanites. Moses said, “Don’t fuck with them yet! They’ll kill you because god doesn’t have your back.” Sure enough, the Canaanites beat the army all the way back to this other place called Hormah.
Moses and the remaining tribe, who were still numerous as a motherfucker, slaughtered a bunch of animals and tried to appease god. One guy, though, went and gathered some wood from the forest on Saturday. God told moses, “Make sure every single person in your tribe. All of them. Throw rocks at this motherfucker until he dies.”
God also told moses to tell everyone to start wearing tassels.
This guy Korah decided to start voicing his opinion on the fact that Moses was giving special privileges to the Levites and about the whole Canaan thing. God decided to open up the earth and swallow him and his 250 followers. This caused a huge uprising against Moses and Aaron. Aaron tried to convince god not to kill everyone who was rising up. God said, “Fuck that shit.” And killed 14,700 of them immediately.
Moses made each tribe have their own leader with their own staff just like his. He showed them how to make holy water and told them all the different ways people can be unclean which goes on for pages and pages. Now if you ever became unclean, all you had to do was wash in this holy water and exile yourself for seven days. If you didn’t, you were a fucking deadman. Moses also added, “If you are clean still, and you touch the holy water of cleansing, you’re now unclean. Fuck you. That’s why.”
So, thanks to a good supply of their water being used for holy cleansing water and washing their animal sacrifices, the tribe starting running low on water. They, of course, starting freaking out and being like, “Moses! What the fuck are we doing out here? We probably just should’ve stayed in Egypt as slaves.” God heard them complaining and said, “Hey Moses, why don’t you tell that giant rock right there to pour out some water for you?” Moses recalled before when god told him to hit the rock with his stick. So he hit the rock with his stick and water came out.
God said, “What the fuck, dingus? I told you to talk to the rock, not hit it. You’ve made me oh so super mad. Just for this one thing that you did, you can never enter Canaan. Fuck you.”
So, Moses sent a message to the land of Edom and said, “Can we pass through?” Edom’s rep replied, “No. If you even try, we’re going to fucking kill all of you.” Moses said, “We just want to pass fucking through, we won’t even leave the road.” This pissed off Edom so bad that they charged the Israelites and tried to kill them all, but the Israelites got the fuck out of there.
So Aaron died and everyone took a month off for mourning. Then some Canaanites came and kidnapped a few Israelites. God told the Israelites, “If you destroy this entire city. Men, women, children, and livestock, burn it all to the ground. That will please me.” So that’s exactly what they did, and god was pleased. Then they wandered off.
They had to completely avoid Edom because they were scared, so that brought them right back down the side of the red sea. It’s really starting to look like they’re just wandering around in circles. Seriously, go on Google maps and search for directions from Cairo to sinai, sinai to Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia to Tabuk, Tabuk to Gaza, and Gaza back to the red fucking sea which you might recognize as either Sinai again or Back to Saudi Arabia. Poor guys.
So at some point of walking in circles, people started complaining again. Because, why not? God already told them they couldn’t go into the Promised land (The promised land is Israel.) God was getting really sick of people complaining about his stand up job of liberating them on a super long list of conditions, killing 10s of thousands of them, and making a 150 hour walk take years. (Seriously Google a walking journey from Cairo to Jerusalem.) So he unleashed a bunch of poisonous snakes to kill everyone. Once again Moses was like, “God. What can I do to stop all these snakes from killing my tribe?” God said, “Build a bronze snake and put it on a stick. Then people will stop dying.” Moses did just that.
So, they traveled on the the land of Moab. Every other culture they encountered on the way, they slaughtered mercilessly and god was happy. “Killing people of different cultures in exactly what I want.” God said.
Eventually, everyone was fucking terrified of the Israelites, so they recruited this guy Balaam to go and fuck with them. God told Balaam, “Don’t fuck with these Israelites. I like them.” Balaam decided to go with his buddies to go fuck with them anyways, and god was angry. Not angry enough to kill him, which as we’ve discovered doesn’t take a whole lot, but angry enough to make his life slightly more difficult.
God put random angels along Balaam’s path to Moab and Balaam couldn’t see them, but his donkey could. Whenever his donkey would see an angel, he’d change directions because Angels are fucking terrifying. Balaam kept getting off his donkey and beating the shit out of it. After witnessing this for about three beatings, god said to himself, “I love watching animals get slaughtered and burned. But watching them get beaten really pisses me off.” God decided to grant Balaam’s donkey the gift of speech.
All of a sudden Balaam’s donkey could talk and he decided his first words would be, “HEY FUCKER! STOP FUCKING BEATING ME! I’ve always been a good donkey and I’m being a good donkey right now. There’s a bunch of angels and shit in the way and I think it’s a bad idea for you to go and fuck with these Israelites.” Balaam was really confused and then god stepped in and said, “Listen to your donkey and stop beating it. I hate to see that shit. Now go help out the Israelites and kill a bunch of animals for me.”
Balaam built 7 altars and sacrificed seven bulls and rams at each one, because as we’ve covered before, the number 7 makes god super happy. God was pleased with all of this needless slaughter and sent 5 oracles balsam’s way. Each one said, “Don’t fuck with the Israelites. They’ll fucking kill you.” In one way or another.
So the Israelites were hanging out in Moab and a bunch of them started fucking Midianite ladies and worshipping this other cool god named Baal. Baal was a pretty laid back god and wasn’t opposed to the inter-racial fucking. Jehovah, the Israelites’ god, was like, “Fuck that shit! You’re fucking outside of your own race right in front of Moses? That makes me so mad I just wanna kill a lot of you.” God killed a bunch of them with plague and Moses killed a bunch more in an unspecified way.
Anyways, 20 years had passed and god demanded Moses make a new census, because god hates counting. There were 601,730. A whole generation had passed and there were still 2000 fewer people than before. God had killed that many of them. God then came up with the radical new notion that women are also able to inherit stuff from their fathers. As long as there are no sons. God is quite the feminist.
So speaking of inheritance, apparently, Moses decided to name Joshua the new heir of his throne as leader of unhappy nomadic tribe the size of the city of Boston. They celebrated and sacrificed a bunch of animals. God was happy because the smell of burning flesh pleases him. Moses invented modern marriage and divorce.
God still didn’t like the fact that a handful of Israelites had been fucking Midianites, so years after the fact, he decided to have the Israelites return and fuck them right up. They slaughtered all the men and sexually active women. Took hundreds of thousands of sheep and tens of thousands of cows and virgin women and sacrificed dozens of each to god. It’s not clear what they did with the women, but they label them among the animals that were “given to god.” I’m assuming they were also sacrificed. All of the 32000 women who were not sacrificed were handed out as slaves.
God then re-iterated his “thou shalt not kill” rule over and over again as the Israelites wandered through the land from city to city. He brought them up to camp next to Jericho. And that is where the book of numbers ends.
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