 
### SATAN'S GUIDE to the BIBLE

A Seriously Humorous Review

### Revelation 3

## Noah's Flood – Worldwide Genocide

... from the God of Love

And why drowning most of your children

is a perfectly divine parenting model

Copyright 2014 Stuart Lorde-Jardine

Illustrations: Mic Lewis

Cover art: Dave Fymbo

Inspiration: Prince of Darkness

Published by Hades Central at Smashwords

Dire Licence Warning

Your eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away.

Failure to comply with this injunction may result in the beast that comes up from the Abyss attacking you and overpowering and killing you, and your dead body will lie in the street.

As per the biblical book of Revelation 11:7-8 ... possibly

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

Pastor Alec Jardine

Table of Contents

Revelation 3:1 \- Sons of the Gods

And one woman and three men do it again

Revelation 3:2 \- Mother No-Ah's Ark

And seven by seven leaves no room for dinosaurs

Revelation 3:3 \- Father Noah's Hangover

And rainbows, fossils, testiculations and blood transfusions

Further SGB Revelations

Connect with SATAN'S GUIDE to the BIBLE

Revelation 3:1

SONS of the GODS

And one woman and three men do it again

Genesis 4:25 – 6:8

THE fires of Hell burned brightly as Satan, Hitch and Snikwad meandered through the galleries and caverns, acknowledging the grateful salutes of the demons as they went. Their excursion was more than merely pastoral. Following the extended excesses of last night's debauch and neglect, they needed to ensure that the non-Christians and the backsliders in the pits and torture chambers were now suffering properly once more.

'Hitch, my pulpy little parcel of platitudes,' spoke Satan, his voice rising above the shrieks and moans. 'God came to me in visions of the night last yestereen and She wants a report on our progress through the Bibles. How do you think we're doing?'

'Exceptionally well, Most Iniquitous Calignosity,' replied Hitch, waddling as fast as his stunted legs would allow in order to keep up with the great strides of his Master. 'We're nearly into the fifth chapter of Genesis already. We've had two creations; one act of divine surgery; an original sin with a talking serpent; an eviction from Paradise; the planet's very first murder; the construction of the world's first city, and the development of metallurgy. I'd say we were ready to report back to God.'

Snikwad skipped happily along, bounding energetically from rock to rock and grinning cheekily down at Hitch.

Hitch ignored him.

'Right you are then boys, let's us return to the throne room,' Satan ordered. 'Hitch: a pot of hot nightshade tea, and then some soothing aloes for my wings ... inspecting the chambers always dries me out. Snikwad: give that demon his pitchfork back and fetch the Crystal Ball ... and no parades this time ... just the Crystal Ball, thank you.'

Snikwad was gone.

Back in the Sacred Grotto and seated comfortably on the Bone Throne, Satan sipped his tea from the skull of a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, as Hitch tenderly massaged the cool aloe vera through his great leathern wings. 'Ooh that's lovely,' he sighed. 'Just a little more on the left tip, if you will.'

'Certainly, Vituperousness,' Hitch responded, bending to his task. 'And your head, Rambunctious Ingurgitator: how are we feeling this morning? Quite the carousal you all had last night ....'

'Tell me about it, Hitch,' Satan laughed. 'God we put a few away. Hope we didn't keep you up with all the noise ...? Ha, ha, and man that Snikwad: just the devil with the ladies, isn't he ...?'

'Very gymnastic, one might say,' muttered Hitch. He hated being reminded that there were certain things he was no longer equipped to do.

Satan paid him no heed. 'Where's that sprite got himself to anyway? I only want the Crystal Ball, not one of his Bollywood performances.'

The infernal glow in the Sacred Grotto dimmed and the acrid stench of newly-burned brimstone rose on the wind that suddenly blasted in from the outer reaches.

'What the ....' spluttered Satan, spraying his tea over the platform.

Hitch cowered behind the Bone Throne.

Snikwad materialised through the thick yellow smoke at the foot of Lucifer's Ladder, enrobed in a monk's garb, his face unseen beneath the enveloping hood. In his paws lay the Crystal Ball on a delicately embroidered cushion.

Satan thought better of chastising the sprite right at that moment – mood was all-important when invoking a visitation from _anyone's_ idea of God.

'Oh Lord of Hosts, oh Great Heavenly Father who hears our prayers, grace us with thy presence,' intoned the Prince of Darkness.

From behind the throne Hitch frantically tugged the end of Satan's tail.

'What are you doing, I'm calling God you fool?' hissed Satan, bending down to glare at the trembling hobgoblin.

'Mendacious Majesty you said "Lord" and "Father", quailed Hitch. 'We were expecting a _female_ expression of God. You told us "She" came to you in visions of the night.'

'Oh My God you're right! What are we going to do Hitch ...?'

The Crystal Ball began to pulse in Snikwad's paws.

'I don't know, Darkness, I don't know,' he bawled. 'If you pray to the wrong concept of God, you'll probably just make the right one madder and madder!'

A low humming started to emanate from the Crystal Ball.

'Fuck, Hitch ...!'

Hitch squealed and flung himself into a tight foetal position under the throne.

Satan thrust a great taloned hand after him and hauled the squirming hobgoblin out by the scruff of the neck. He held his petrified minion out at arm's length towards the Crystal Ball and shook him violently. 'Say something, damn you ... any fucking thing!'

' _Stella Maris_ ... _Regina Coeli_ ,' squeaked Hitch, hoping the ecclesiastic Latin would mollify the approaching deity. 'Star of the Sea ... Queen of Heaven, we adore You for all the works of Your hands, that reveal so much wisdom, goodness and mercy, Oh Lady. You have spread so much beauty over the Earth and in Hell and it speaks to us of Your beauty, even though these beautiful things are but a faint reflection of You and Your incomprehensible Beauty, Oh Great Blessed Mother ... err Virgin ... Spouse ... umm...'

Satan shook him like an overstuffed rag doll until he couldn't speak. 'That's enough, this isn't the Vatican, Hitch,' he whispered loudly. 'We don't want God to think WE care about Her sexual status, for Heaven's sake....'

The humming of the Crystal Ball grew to resemble the sound of a choir of heavenly angels. The miraculous orb floated from Snikwad's tiny paws and expanded to fill half the Sacred Grotto once more. As the swirling mist cleared, a rainforest scene appeared, revealing an exquisitely dressed young Asian woman wringing rivers of water from her long black hair.

She smiled.

Satan smiled sheepishly back, and then glanced sideways at the awestruck Hitch who still hung open-mouthed over the high flint steps.

The apparition paused in the task of squeezing the centuries of libation from her hair. 'Please put him down, Lucifer.'

Satan obeyed.

'We know each other, don't we, Blessed One ...?' offered Satan meekly.

'Indeed we do,' replied the deity. 'I am God. I appear as Phra Mae Thorani. I first knew you as Mara the Evil One. You and your armies of demons and your daughters tried to drive the Buddha off his throne under the Bodhi Tree, but I expressed the water of the faithful from my hair and the ensuing Flood washed you away.'

'Ah, well now, I can explain that ...' began the Christian construct.

'Save your explanations, Lucifer-Mara,' the Buddhist goddess silenced him. 'Today it is I who am here as _your_ Satan. I stand to oppose you. I will tempt you. I will test your knowledge of the biblical scriptures. What have you learned since God as Anyanwu appeared? '

'Together we have learned much, Gracious Lady,' Satan responded, stepping back to discretely lower himself onto the throne and push Hitch out in front. 'This is Hitch, our learned spokesman... person... hobgoblin.'

'Hello Hitch,' smiled Phra Mae Thorani.

'Most Beauteous Mother of the Earth,' swept Hitch, almost tumbling off the top step.

The Earth Goddess politely covered her gentle laugh with her hand. 'Pray tell me what you have discovered thus far in the Israelite writings, Hitch.'

'The origins of the Israelite writings began in ancient Sumer in about 4000 BCE, with the plural Shaddai, or more narrowly the Anunnaki, concepts of Divinity,' he began. 'The Sumerians conquered much of the Middle East and spread their culture and religion to places that included the land that would one day become Israel. Over the centuries other empires swept across the region, influencing the Divinity concepts and the writings. Following a Reformation, Divinity for the Israelites became the Elohim deities. In the Bibles – as we know them now – the Phoenician Elohim of Genesis Chapter One created the universe and everything in it in 6 Days. But there was another Reformation, and Genesis Chapter Two describes the Yahweh deity re-creating everything in 1 Day. Underneath the mythological surface stories lies layer upon layer of historical allegory and metaphorical symbolism.'

'Very good.'

'Are we right ...?' enquired Satan hopefully from over Hitch's shoulder.

'I'm not necessarily here to tell you if you're necessarily right or if you're necessarily wrong, Lucifer-Mara. I'm not necessarily even here at all. Those of us who are God function in ways mysterious to both man and demon,' was the enigmatic reply. 'Carry on please, Hitch.'

'Following the two Creation myths, we had the Original Sin allegory: where Eve represents the cause of corruption amongst Jesus' ancestors, and the Talking Serpent represents my Master ... or maybe a human penis ... or maybe a primitive culture,' stuttered Hitch, embarrassed to be mentioning penises in the presence of a young representation of the Divine Feminine. 'The Adam Family are evicted from the Temple in Jerusalem and Adam and Eve beget two sons, and one kills the other in a religious schism, and the Yahweh concept of God banishes the Cain faction to go and start their own religion in the City of Enoch, and that's as far as we've got, Most Immaculate Cause of Our Salvation and Singular Vessel of Our Deepest Devotion,' Hitch concluded.

'Have you found independently verifiable evidence that any of us who are God inspired or authorised the writing of any of these writings?'

'None whatsoever, Gracious Lady: only the belief of believers.'

'And have the writers or re-writers of the writings declared that either the Elohim or Yahweh loves any human?'

'Not as yet, Bounteous Earth Mother,' answered Satan, keen to be seen to have some input himself ... and being very careful to avoid uttering a Divine Name.'

'Very well: keep searching. I commend you on your journey thus far gentlemen. My compliments to you both and to Snikwad,' she smiled as she turned her lovely countenance into profile and resumed the never-ending task of trying to dry her hair.

Snikwad held the cushion aloft and slowly the mist began to regather and swirl in the Crystal Ball as it returned to size and the humming gradually faded away to silence.

'That went WELL,' Satan exclaimed at last with relieved surprise. 'I really like God when God is a woman.'

'The absence of wrath and jealousy is most refreshing. I feel quite serene myself, Tranquil Vituperation,' agreed Hitch.

As the abominable gleam rose again in the Sacred Grotto, Snikwad glided away in his monk robe to return the Crystal Ball to its resting place.

Buoyed by the edifying encounter with God, Satan launched himself off the steps on his freshly moisturised wings. 'Back to the Bibles,' he whooped, gliding to a halt by the altar.

Hitch plopped down the high flint steps one by one, grumbling as he went.

Snikwad sprinted back into the Grotto; powered up the screen; hauled the King James Protestant Christian Bible off one of the piles of scriptures; scraped it clean of certain evidence of last night's debauch, and flipped it open to display Genesis Chapter 4, Verse 25.

' _And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: "For the Elohim", said she, "Hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew."_ puffed Hitch.

'Seth is the name of an Egyptian deity,' declared Satan with authority. 'What's a pagan Egyptian deity doing in the Word of the Jewish Yahweh?

'The Egyptian Seth and the Hebrew Seth are philologically indistinguishable,' answered Hitch. 'I see this as another example of the intermingling, or syncretisation, of mythologies. In my estimation, the Yahwist revolutionaries were Diaspora Israelites from Egypt, and although the Egyptians are traditionally seen as the "bad guys" of the Bibles, we find a curiously distinct pro-Egyptian bias in the re-written scriptures. The male-only Yahwists are about to give us another – but this time male-only – list of who-begat-whoms, and they begin it with the Seth character from Egypt. Seth, by the way, sounds like the Hebrew word for "granted" or "appointed" ... or the Hebrew word for granted sounds like Seth ... whichever.'

'It says the Elohim granted Seth to Eve, whereas Eve acquired Cain from Yahweh. I can't see why the Yahwists would write Yahweh as the sponsor of the evil Cain, and the old Elohim as the sponsor of Seth the good guy ...?'

'Nor can I,' confirmed Hitch. 'It doesn't seem logical. Many times on our journey we will ask questions about logic and consistency.'

'You don't have all the answers?'

'Far from it, Perfidious Prince: the more I study the more questions I have.'

'Fundamentalists don't seem to have that problem.'

'I guess not,' chuckled Hitch. 'Often the less you know about something the easier it is to explain. The Egyptian Seth was the third son of Mother Nut, and now the Israelite Seth is the third son of Mother Eve.'

'And one of the Egyptian sons killed his own brother, and an Israelite brother did the same – just not in the same order of birth.'

'And Divinity in the Egyptian sense, punished Mother Nut by making childbirth sorrowful for her: just as Divinity in the Israelite sense did the same to Mother Eve.'

Hitch began to scan the page. 'OK: it says Seth begat a son from an unnamed wife and Seth called his son, Enosh.'

'Enosh is just TOO suspiciously close to the eponymous Enoch of the City of Enoch from the Cain list – could they be the same person? They're both grandsons of Adam and Eve....'

'There is much scholarly discussion on that very point, and indeed it may be so – and some would have it that there is an ancient African origin there.'

'Maybe God _is_ black after all,' offered Satan, as he started reading for himself. 'And look, the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible has the book of Jubilees in it, and Jubilees tells us that Enosh was "a faithful and righteous servant of God". Enosh, in the Ethiopian version of the Bible – and who's to say it's not the REAL Bible? – married his own sister, No-Am – which is just too suspiciously close to No-Ah, or Naam-Ah. And not only that: as the result of a certain "divine revelation", Enosh – a third generation Homo sapiens – invented the Ge'ez alphabet. Humans have been having these so-called "divine revelations" for thousands of years you know, Snikwad. Just take that Joseph Smith Mormon President Prophet fellow with his magical spectacles and his Reformed Egyptian language and his own very special revelations, for example. And you don't need to cumber yourself with the burden of proof or anything inconvenient like _evidence_ if "God" has been talking to you. You simply adopt a very severe tone and utter certain of those special hypnotising trigger words Hitch was talking about, and declare that you've been given a "revelation", and the pre-conditioned believers will put themselves into a state of mind that will allow them to swallow whatever you put on the hook.'

Snikwad fell to his knees and began bowing and praying towards the KJV.

'What have you spotted, little man?' enquired Satan. 'Ah yes indeed.... It says right here that at that time: _men began to call on_ (or proclaim) _the name of Yahweh_ ... that's why you were bowing and worshiping, isn't it Snikwad?'

The happy sprite nodded enthusiastically.

'There is no evidence that I know of that third-generation Homo sapiens had ever heard of Yahweh, let alone proclaimed him,' said Hitch. 'The very earliest possible reference to what may be a local deity – or perhaps a place – called, perhaps, "Yahweh" is from an Egyptian inscription about 1,400 years before Jesus,' Hitch informed them. 'What looks like the YHWH, or Tetragrammaton, on the inscription, may, some speculate, mean the "Land of Yah". However, men are unlikely to have been proclaiming the name of Yahweh, or Lord Yah, or Land of Yah, way, way back before 1400 BCE in Enosh's time. It is highly significant, though, that the writers here seem to infer that men _weren't_ proclaiming Yahweh before Enosh's time: which would mean that Yahweh isn't the original deity of the Bible people.'

'Or of anyone else.'

'Precisely. I suggest that the people who re-wrote Genesis – and the people who were reading Genesis back then – knew that Yahweh was simply a minor local deity who had gained some local prominence in their own period of history, following the Yahwist Reformation. We must remember that Yahweh and his son Jesus did not gain wider prominence until followers of Jesus took over the Roman Empire from within, about 400 years _after_ Jesus' time.'

'OK, now, Chapter 5 begins just here,' read Satan. 'It gives us the second list of who-begat-whoms, but starts by repeating that Adam had a son called Seth and a grandson called Enosh. Significantly – and suspiciously – Eve and her sons Cain and Able are not mentioned, and nor is Yahweh. Not only that, it talks of the Elohim creating the whole Adam Family as miniature replicas of themselves. Yahweh, I remember, is NOT said to have created the single male Adam in his own image in Creation Two. This little item right here about the Adam Family, looks like it's a continuation of the Elohim's Creation One myth.'

'Quite so, Erudite Rancour: I see this jumbling and cobbling together of Elohist and Yahwist writings as more of the innumerable clues that led to the development of both the Documentary Hypothesis and the Reformation Hypothesis as plausible explanations for the untidy patchwork.'

'So, if no one had heard of Yahweh before about 1400 BCE in historical time, where are we in biblical time?'

Hitch read from the KJV. ' _And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and he begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: and the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: and all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. And Seth lived an hundred and five years_ (or two hundred and five years in the Greek versions of this myth), _and begat Enos: and Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died_ ... and, and, and then we have Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, another Enoch, Methuselah, another Lamech, and, umm, finally Noah ... Persevering Malignity ...,' grovelled Hitch as he rushed to finish the list of biblical males.

Snikwad pretended to fall asleep on a stack of old sermons.

'I'm going to rip your fucking pelt off and cast your pearls before the swine,' growled Satan, drumming his taloned fingers on the altar.

'I don't have pearls, Supreme Iniquitousness: it's one of my punishments.'

'Punishment for being a crashing bore, I suspect.'

'Indeed, perhaps, yes, Malfeasant Perdition ... umm, ah, yes the lists do go on and on don't they,' he cheesily smiled. 'Now, Enosh seems to have been born 235, or maybe 435, years after Eve was transformed from a rib: which puts us between 3769 and 3569 BCE, Darkest Eminence. And my, these pioneering biblical gentlemen did live a miraculously long time didn't they. Even after Your Most Malignant Self brought sin and death into the world, many of these semi-sinless, early biblical Homo sapiens males lived to be nearly 1,000 years of age. Women aren't worthy of mention in this list, I'm afraid, because of that unfortunate Eve and the Talking Serpent incident ... don't you think... Dearest Advertency ...?'

A sympathetic Snikwad saved the moment. He suddenly waved and beckoned them to another passage in _Your Bible and You_.

Satan plopped a relieved Hitch out of the way and examined it himself. He chuckled and read out loud from where Snikwad had indicated:

' _When Adam was created, God gave him a constitution designed to last forever, sustained only by the choice products of nature and the fruit of the tree of life._ Wait a minute, the Tree of Life ... that's one of the Magical Faraway Trees – Adam wasn't supposed to be eating from _either_ of the Magical Faraway Trees. Don't Christians read their Bibles...? _If he had not sinned, his teeth would never have decayed, his hair would never have fallen out, his eyes would never have grown dim, and his heart would have gone on beating forever and ever. The abounding vitality of his life would have been his through all eternity._

' _Even after Adam sinned and God said to him, 'Dying thou shalt die' (Genesis 2:17, margin), it took a long, long time to wear him down._

' _Your Bible says that Adam lived nearly a thousand years – 930 to be exact. His son, Seth, lived 912 years, and his grandson, Enos, 905 years. Cainan lived 910 years, Mahaleel 895 years, Jared 962 years, and Methuselah – the oldest man who ever lived – 969 years._

' _Are these fictitious figures? Not at all. When one considers how close these pioneers of the human race lived to Creation, they no longer seem unreasonable._ '

'It's no wonder God wants me to re-examine this stuff,' said Satan, shaking his massive horns. 'How can we expect educated people to just flick the Jesus Switch in their minds and cast reason and evidence out the stained-glass window and accept all this as true?'

'That's especially so when the writer of this passage recognises that the figures appear "unreasonable" and "fictitious",' Hitch put in. 'And justifies them only by appealing to a belief in "Creation".

'You have got to love that word "belief", guys. It helps you get through so many unaccondable things.'

'The NIV commentators say: "Whether the large numbers describing human longevity in the early chapters of Genesis are literal or have a conventional literary function – or both – is uncertain."

'So, here we have more doubts and questions in the minds of believers as to what's to be taken literally and what's not. I guess you can just make it up as you go along and change it when you need to,' said Satan. 'But if these folks can acknowledge "literary conventions" right here, Hitch, my soggy little bundle of sass, I'm sure they can also recognise at least some of the literary conventions identified by you and your colleague Barbara Thiering and others.'

'A thousand thanks, Most Malevolent Majesty. Now, certain Christians believe no one has ever ascended to Heaven other than their Jesus ... because this is what Jesus is reported to have said himself. But we do find that the Enoch character from this list not only walked with the Elohim, the Elohim seem to have taken such a shine to him that they lifted him up into the clouds to the ceiling of Heaven, to dwell with them there for all eternity. The Ascension of Enoch is not popular with some Christian translators, and they will have Yahweh make him merely "disappear" ... and not ascend to Heaven like their Jesus.'

'Certain folks do like to maintain the exclusivity of their beliefs.'

'They do. The culture of Enoch was of major Israelite significance, as we said. Not only do we have a City named after him, we also have three books named after Enoch.'

'Are these books in the Bibles?'

'Just the first one: but it's only found in the Bibles of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christian Churches.'

'Why's it not the others?'

'I suspect they found the flying chariots and visions and dreams and angels fathering humans too unbelievable.'

'Yes, you would not find any of _that_ sort of thing in any of the REAL Bibles, Hitch.'

'Once again, "God" didn't make the choice of what is God's Word and what isn't – humans wrote it and humans chose it.'

'So where's Daughter Naam-Ah from Chapter 4?'

'Ah yes, at the end of our second list here, we have another Lamech, and this Lamech had a son called No-Ah.'

'Aha ... very much like the Lamech at the end of the first list who had a daughter called Naam-Ah. Was there an imminent disaster here too?'

'You better believe it, Sire.'

'So have we arrived at the same people – and the same place in mythologised history – by two different genealogies?'

'I suspect we have. And the same thing happens with Jesus in another five Circles of Time.'

'How can that be?'

'Barbara Thiering demonstrates that two competing religiopolitical factions each claimed Jesus as their own. Each of their two genealogies seeks to show that Jesus actually belongs to them.'

'He couldn't belong to both.'

'No one is ever incorrect when it comes to religiopolitics, Darkest Prince, so both genealogies are unquestionably the Word of God ... no matter what the apparent contradictions.'

'So here in Genesis we have two factions – the Cain-Lamech faction, and the Seth-Lamech faction – each claiming ownership of the coming hero?'

'Precisely as I see it. Cain-Lamech had three sons and a daughter Naam-Ah. Seth-Lamech had No-Ah, and No-Ah had three sons.'

'So if No-Ah was really Naam-Ah, we have a matching pattern of one female and three males descended from Lamech.'

'Yes. We find the pattern of one significant woman and three men repeated throughout the Bibles,' said Hitch. 'So far, we've had Mother Eve and her three sons at the beginning of the Circles of Time. We're here at another turning of a Circle, and we have, originally, I suggest, Mother No-Ah and her three sons.'

'That's some speculative speculation.'

'Speculation is indeed what it is, but I acknowledge it as speculation and offer clues to support it as we go along. As I also demonstrate, Rancorous Eminence, much religious belief and doctrine is quite clearly based on nothing more than speculation and assumption and credulous wishful thinking anyway. You know, like Jesus having nails driven through his hands. It's all very gruesomely spectacular and it suits the emotional horror Christians love to feel, but nowhere do his followers directly write that it actually happened. I'm most definitely not expecting anyone to "believe" my own speculations, however.'

Snikwad tapped the screen excitedly. He'd found a table with the names of the ten men from the Seth list on one side, and the meanings of their names on the other.

'Will you look at that,' exclaimed Satan. 'When you read the meanings together as a sentence – with only a little judicious assistance – they reveal Jesus in the Old Testament after all ... if you really _want_ Jesus to be there.'

Snikwad collapsed on the altar and pretended to die like a character in a nineteenth century melodrama.

'What have you found?' enquired Satan with a smile. 'Ah, look at this Hitch. That Mormon prophet president fellow, Joseph Smith Jnr. had it revealed to him in the Nineteenth Century of the Common Era that Adam, just before he died, summoned Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahaleel, Jared, Enoch and Methuselah, as well as the "residue of his posterity who were righteous," to Adam-ondi-Ahman. That was that place in the USA where the non-existent altar was never built by Adam. And it was there he "bestowed upon them his last blessing". So if the Prophet Joseph can have "modern revelations" made to him in the Nineteenth Century CE – with not a shred of corroborating evidence – we can understand how people who wrote what are now known as the Bibles also had "revelations" with no corroborating evidence. The table we just looked at shows that if you try really, really hard, you can find just about whatever you want to find in these writings.'

'Except evidence that the Elohim or Yahweh authorised or inspired any of them.'

'Except evidence that the Elohim or Yahweh authorised or inspired any of them,' Satan nodded. 'OK, I'm going to play along for a while with your speculation that we have a Mother No-Ah and not a Father Noah. And I'm going to play along with the idea that Mother No-Ah has either three sons, or three brothers. Now, what's the disaster that's about to befall them?'

'The wages of sin, Perfidious Lord.'

'I'm all ears, Hitch.'

Snikwad sat upright and pricked up his own ears.

' _There were giants in the earth in those days_ ,' read Hitch.

Snikwad shivered.

'Real giants?' asked Satan.

'Enormous giants,' answered Hitch. 'The possibly biblical book of 1 Enoch, tells us they were 3,000 cubits high.'

'A cubit is about half a metre – so these guys were about 1,500 metres, or a mile high. No wonder Enoch isn't in the REAL Bibles.'

'Modern translators of certain Bible versions are uncomfortable with the whole "giant" business, however. Some will use the Hebrew word _Nephilim_ , which means "fallen ones", instead of the word giants, as a smokescreen to cover up another bit of God's Word they don't quite like ... I suggest. But for some, even with Nephilim, it's all still rather too mythological-looking for a non-mythological Bible that is supposed to be the geological and human history of the entire planet. The Nephilim, or giants, you see, could be the offspring of the fornications of the Sons of God with the daughters of men ... and that opens a whole whited sepulchre of theological worms.'

'I thought Jesus was the only Son of God ... apart from Adam who sort of was as well ... only differently?'

'Yes, this is a very untidy verse about "God" having multiple sons. If Yahweh is supposed to be "God", then Yahweh having plural sons makes Christianity look unkempt, because Jesus isn't "thine only Son". Lots of Christians wish this bit wasn't in the Word of God either.'

'That's quite a few verses in the Word of God so far that Christians aren't happy with.'

'It is ... and the list grows. But this verse really does say "Sons of the Elohim" in Hebrew, and if you're going to call the Elohim "God", then you really do have to translate it as "Sons of God", whether you like it or not. You can't just go around picking and choosing as it suits you.'

'Obviously you can, Hitch.'

'Well, yes, obviously you can, Verisimilitudinous Mendacity. I propose, however, that these Sons of the Elohim were Jesus' corrupt ancestors. Like the rulers of many cultures, Jesus' ancestors were believed to be god-kings, and that's what's being referenced here, I suggest. Quite simply, Jesus' ancestors were believed to be god-kings. It's quite clearly claimed in the Christian writings that Jesus was descended from King David of Israel... in both contradictory genealogies. In Jesus' day, Yahweh was the only permissible deity for Jewish people. Jesus, therefore, was claimed by his followers to be a Son of Yahweh, and not the ancient Elohim as his ancestors had been. Much of the rest of Jewish society had moved on from believing their kings were sired by their gods on their virgin girls.'

'So where's the sin, Hitch? I'm Satan, I want the sin.'

'Well, the actual sinning part is all very vague here too. No one is quite sure how to translate it, but it seems that the Sons of God were making super-babies with attractive young human women ... which, in the surface story, of course, upset the misogynous Yahweh no end.'

'What I think it really means,' Hitch continued. 'Is that Jesus' ancestors were fornicating with women of a low social order, and this was part of the corruption that the puritan Yahwists objected to. I suspect the Yahwists threw them off the throne and out of the temple, and declared that no human was the Son of Yahweh ... or of any other version of God.'

'Christianity is based on the premise that Jesus is quite literally a son of Yahweh.'

'It is.'

'But these myths are not meant to be taken quite literally.'

'And nor are the later legends concerning Jesus... at least not by the learned folk.

'The writers of the surface story are telling us right here though, that humans have gotten themselves into trouble with this miserable new Yahweh deity once more. And wouldn't you know it, women are to blame ... again,' said Satan. 'First there was Eve and the Talking Penis, and now gorgeous young human hotties are leading the Sons of the Elohim astray and making super-babies who grew up to be the Mighty Men of Old. What was a male patron deity and his boys-only followers to do, Hitch?'

'If there were no women and no Divine Feminine in the temple in Jerusalem, there would be no problem,' answered Hitch.

'Of course not. Get rid of them. That'll fix society good and proper. And yes, Hitch, I do see that women are not named _at all_ in this list of the descendants of the pro-Egyptian Seth religiopolitical faction.'

'Not one woman is named, Blackest One.'

'OK, so what _did_ Yahweh do about this situation down on the floor of his dome?'

'He exterminated almost everyone and started all over again.'

'What ...? Where's the love in that...? Can you see love there Snikwad ...?'

Snikwad shook his head, his eyes wide.

'Yahweh wished he had not re-created humanity. According to whoever re-wrote Genesis, it seems that humans the whole dome over only ever had evil thoughts back then ... and according to certain conservative Christians they haven't improved since,' said Hitch. 'The NIV talks of: "One of the Bible's most vivid descriptions of total depravity". Conservative Christians do love to see depravity in people who aren't just like them ... and dwell on the depravity endlessly... especially if it's sexual depravity. But there really isn't much of a description of depravity – or of anything else – here at all. We only have this short, garbled jumble about Sons of the Elohim, and human women, and giants who may have been a mile tall. You see, to justify the totally ungodly act which is to follow, believers need to read much more into this passage than is actually there ... again.'

'I see here that Yahweh was so miffed, he reduced the lifespan of the totally depraved humans to a miserable 120 years,' said Satan.

'Ah yes. Now that's something else that's most unclear in this amazingly unclear piece. The 120 years may mean the seriously reduced human lifespan; or it could mean the period of time that Yahweh gives as a buffer before he sends his Wrath ... who knows?'

'I like Wrath,' gloated the Evil One.

Snikwad danced a little war dance.

Hitch read from the KJV. ' _And Yahweh said, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them"_.'

'What had the flying, feathered dinosaur-fowls done to upset Yahweh?'

'I don't know.'

'Were the Sons of God maybe performing unnatural acts with chickens or something?'

Snikwad made particularly lewd hip movements while clutching a feather duster and received a clout on the back of his head for his troubles.

Hitch chuckled. 'I rather think we're talking about classes of human once again. If we take the Earth as meaning the temple in Jerusalem, and take the Sons of the Elohim as the corrupt Elohist priests, and the depraved Men and Beasts and Fowls as members of the temple community, we bring ourselves down to a realistic local scale. This fable is also an allegory with a number of layers of local political history. It appears to me to be a story of how Sumerian humans originally upset the Shaddai. The original story then had a layer of the Phoenician Elohim written over and through it. Then, a layer of the Jewish Yahweh was written over and through it again. The final biblical story we have today is simply an adaptation of a very ancient Middle-East "making-the-gods-angry" theme. It's not real-time history. It's political allegory.'

'But I was looking forward to the depravity and the wrath and the destruction of the sinners. Nothing makes one more smugly self-satisfied than imagining the suffering of people who don't believe the same things you do.'

'Fundamentalists love to wallow in the sin and depravity and divine retribution too, but what we have coming up is another allegory of the Yahwist reformation hidden, under an ancient Sumerian myth.'

Snikwad grasped one of Satan's clawed fingers and tried to drag him desperately towards the screen.

'What is it little guy?'

Snikwad pointed urgently towards the page he had found.

'Apparently the fornication and total depravity is my fault here too,' Satan informed Hitch.

'This is a news flash to me,' declared the puzzled hobgoblin.

'And it's devilishly crafty just how I did it,' Satan explained. 'You said the giants were called Nephilim, and Nephilim means "fallen ones".'

'Yes.'

'Well as you know, the boys out there manning the torture chambers and I are Christian angels fallen from the biblical Heaven.'

'Yes.'

'Apparently, I encouraged the boys to mate with all those sexy human females so we could pollute the human race with Satanic seed.'

Roars of approbation rose from the chambers.

'Why did you do that?'

'It's because of the whole Garden of Eden and Original Sin business. You see, I – disguised as the Cunning/Naked Serpent as we've said – seduced Eve with my charming ventriloquialism, and she and Adam ate the Forbidden Fruit, and every human born thereafter was tainted with this Original Sin. For Yahweh to forgive the sin, a human blood sacrifice would have to be made to him – because, as we know, flowers and prayers and carrots just don't cut it as far as Yahweh is concerned. But the human sacrifice would need to be perfect and sinless.'

'Like Jesus.'

'Exactly. And as the enemy of Jesus, it was my job to prevent the possibility of a perfect human ever being born. So if I were to spread my evil seed through the entire human gene pool, there could never be a perfect human to offer as a blood sacrifice to calm the wrathful Yahweh down.'

'And that's what the Nephilim – the fallen angels who are really your demons – were doing here in Genesis Chapter 6. They were spreading your evil seed across all the Sumerian and Egyptian and Chinese and every other non-biblical culture on the floor of the whole biblical dome.'

'Yes, and they very nearly succeeded,' Satan informed them both. 'Although there _is_ some confusion and disagreement among believers as to whether the Nephilim were the sons of the fallen angels – or if the Nephilim were actually the fallen angels themselves ... "God" wasn't very clear in what he inspired Moses to write here either. In the end however, No-Ah and his/her three sons were the only ones left on the entire floor of the dome who were of the pure unpolluted bloodline of Adam and Eve – which is the same bloodline Jesus came from ... of course.'

'And the surest way to rid the earth of your seed would be to exterminate all the impure blood. Which would mean an indiscriminate mass genocide of everyone inside the dome of the biblical Earth... except for No-Ah's pure-blood family.'

'It would. Not that it actually says any of this in Genesis of course. But if it's what you _want_ to hear, then you're going to put yourself into a state of the mind that assents to the proposition that it really is there... and that it is what God _really_ is telling us... and that God just overlooked inspiring Moses to write about it,' Satan told them.

'OK gents, time to sharpen the chisels and strap on the nail bags and go see how Mother No-Ah leads us into the next Circle of Time,' said Hitch. 'Because it says in verse 8 – the last verse of this possibly-inserted-later section – that only No-Ah found favour in the eyes of Yahweh.'

Snikwad lay on his belly on a treatise on the Dispensation of Universal Grace, making frantic swimming motions.

Scroll to the next chapter or go to: Table of Contents

Revelation 3:2

MOTHER NO-AH'S ARK

And seven by seven leaves no room for dinosaurs

Genesis 6:9 – 7:24

THE boys sat glued to the screen in awed fascination.

'Man that's some serious flood!' exclaimed Satan.

Snikwad scrambled up his master's arm and clung quivering to the tip of one of his horns.

They were watching a video depiction of the Mediterranean Sea bursting through the Bosphorus to fill the Black Sea: an event thought to be remembered in myth and legend throughout the Middle East and beyond.

'You'd sure think God was really ticked with you if that happened in your neighbourhood,' he added.

'Natural disasters are commonly attributed to wrathful "Acts of God" by unlearned humans,' said Hitch. 'Once again it gives them simple answers to complex questions.'

'Do you figure the writers of Genesis were writing about this Black Sea event?'

'Quite possibly, Malfeasant Scourge. But I suggest the origins of the biblical story we are about to read is more related to the local annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in ancient Sumer.'

'And possibly the annual flooding of the Nile and Pison. Don't forget these four rivers all came from the same source in the Library of Eden you know,' smiled Satan.

'Considering the mingling of mythologies, it is most likely.'

'In the Bibles, which God concept was it that was so ticked they sent a great flood: the Elohim, or Yahweh?'

'Both, Iniquitous Eminence. Once again we are about to read an Elohim story, with Yahweh entering later and making it a double story.'

'Just like when we had two creations.'

Precisely, Liege. We are about to read another myth that was well known to the common folk, but which also has layers of real human history underneath the surface story for the more sophisticated.'

'More allegories of the Yahwist reformation ...?'

'Indeed, indeed, Most Perceptive Rancour,' enthused Hitch. 'That and much more besides.'

Snikwad swung down from Satan's horn and paused the video.

'Right, let's have a look at our Double Deluge,' commanded Satan. 'And do please remind me of all that lovely sin and depravity and biblical fornication once again, Hitch ....'

'Yes, of course. We had the jumbled business of the Sons of the Elohim making super-babies with the Daughters of Men – which I suspect refers to Jesus' god-king ancestors fornicating with low-class women.'

'And the biblical Yahweh sees this wickedness and declares that ALL the biblical and non-biblical humans all over the entire floor of the dome only ever think evil thoughts. And though it doesn't say so in Genesis, Christians will believe the evil thoughts were put into Aztec and Zulu minds by the Christian construct that is my very good self.'

'Yes.'

'And then Yahweh realises he hasn't been as clever at being "God" as he should have been, and regrets ever creating the mud-man and his rib-wife.'

'Indeed. And the writers have Yahweh say: _"I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing – all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them"_ ,' Hitch read from the New Living Translation.

Snikwad somersaulted onto the text and landed with one foot on the word that said "Lord", and the other foot on the word that said "God", and danced a little tap dance.

Satan brought his nose closer to the writing, while Hitch folded his arms and nodded his head.

'Hmm,' mused Satan. 'We've got "Lord" – which is _Yahweh_ in Hebrew and _Kurios_ in Greek – written in verse 8. But then, lookie here brothers, we've got "God" – which is _Elohim_ in Hebrew and _Theos_ in Greek – written in verse 9. It really IS beginning to look a lot like we've got two God concepts and two stories cobbled together again, Hitch.'

'Quite so, Perceptive Perdition. In verse 9 we read that it's the Elohim who were miffed by all the corruption and violence in the world.'

'And not the Yahweh of verse 8 getting himself out of shape over the unseemly sexual habits of Jesus' family ... or my boys down there in the pits.'

A rumble of demonic voices answered from the depths of the caverns.

'Different God concept; different sins; different period of real human history, but same allegorised mythology.'

'Ah, but Yahweh is written of _before_ the Elohim right here: shouldn't it be the other way around if Yahweh is the new coach in the God League?'

'I suspect the story of Yahweh and Jesus' ancestors in what is now Chapter 6 is actually a continuation of Chapter 5, and I think we should really be starting Chapter 6 down at verse 9 with the Elohim.'

'Are modern translators trying to smudge things again, to make it difficult to detect that we're dealing with two stories and two God concepts?'

'I think so. We found the same chapter-shifting trick when we transitioned from the Six Days of the Elohim's creation, to the One Day of Yahweh's re-creation: so Genesis Chapter 2 doesn't start where it really should either. Then we saw what looks suspiciously like another pulling of the wool over the eyes when they started Chapter 5 where they did. Now we have the same thing again with the start of Chapter 6.'

'That's not very honest.'

'If indeed that's what's happened.'

'It says here that Noah was a righteous _man_ , Hitch, not a woman.'

'It does now: but as I've mentioned, Persevering Malevolence, the male-only Yahwists blamed the fornication and the evil on women, and may have changed the heroine Naam-Ah to the male hero Noah. After all, you can't really blame the woman Eve for giving the Serpent the opportunity to bring sin and sickness and menstruation and death to the dome in the first Circle of Time, and have every female human since Creation carry the guilt, and then turn around and make another woman the Saviour of the World in another Circle of Time. Please indulge me and continue to read this story as originally belonging to Mother No-Ah in these newer Israelite versions of the Middle East flood myths...?'

'Very well... pray continue,' Satan gestured.

'The Elohim tell Mother No-Ah: _"I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the earth with violence. Yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth!"_

'If the Elohim are plural, shouldn't it be "we" and "us" like we had earlier, and not "I"?'

'I have a couple of ideas on that score, Diabolical One. The Yahwists tweaked the existing Elohim stories to make it _seem_ that the Israelites had only ever had one God concept from the Beginning. They do this by making it _look_ like the new Yahweh and the old Elohim were one-in-the-same.'

'Which is what modern believers now believe ....'

'Yes indeed, Atrabilious Crapulence. It's only a small tweak in the scriptures to turn "we" into "I", but the Yahwists seem to have been perhaps a little sloppy here and there, and left some of the original plural references in. Or maybe it was quite deliberate for reasons I don't know.'

'So if Christians see God as the plurality of Yahweh, Jesus and the Holy Ghost, and they are quite happy for this Christian three-yet-one concept of God to say "I" when referring to all of themselves as one, then it's also reasonable for the plurality that's the Elohim to also say "I" when referring to all of _their_ selves as one,' offered Satan.

'My Most Erudite Vituperativeness is the very font of all insightfulness' grovelled Hitch.

Snikwad rubbed against his master affectionately.

'That's my boys,' rumbled the Lord of the Underworld. 'Now, Mother No-ah and her boys built themselves a huge boat called an "ark", didn't they?'

'Yes they did, but the Hebrew word used for the huge boat really means a "box" ... which doesn't sound anywhere near as biblically spectacular as an "ark".'

'Looks like that Humpty Dumpty words-can-mean-just-whatever-you-choose-them-to-mean business again. Folks know it's really a box, but just leave it as "ark" because they like that better.'

'Convention is indeed a powerful factor. Now, the ark,' explained Hitch, also maintaining the convention. 'Was to be about the length on one and a half football fields.'

'And made from timber ...?'

'Special timber called gopher wood.'

'Never heard of it ... and certainly not from that Baptist fellow in Florida.'

'Nor has anyone else.'

'Maybe it's magical timber?'

'There's no such thing as magic in the Bibles.'

'Miracle timber then.'

'That would be more acceptable. Only pagan religions and heathen superstitions have magic. Supernatural things in Bible religions are miracles.'

'And it's not the same thing?'

'Certainly not. Magic is just make-believe. Miracles are real.'

'Tell me about the wooden box, Hitch.'

'It's to be 150 metres long, 25 metres wide and 15 metres high, with three decks, a door and maybe some sort of window in the roof – God wasn't clear about that bit.'

'It would indeed need to be a magical-miracle vessel at that size, because humans pushed and pushed the limits of non-miracle wooden shipbuilding, and couldn't match it. For example, in the late Nineteenth Century the Americans built the Great Republic, which was only about 100 metres long and reinforced with iron and steel and metal keelson plates, but had to be abandoned because it leaked so much.'

'Aha, now the biblical Tubal-Cain had reached the biblical Iron Age by the time of the biblical Ark...' Hitch reminded him with a knowing smile.

'Of course – I'd almost forgotten that, my squelchy little sack of suet – the biblical patriarchs of 2500 BCE would have been far more technologically advanced than the godless sinners four and a half thousand years later in 1870 CE. Now, Hitch, I understand that the Bible tells us everyone laughed at No-Ah building the ark ...?'

'Umm ... nowhere does it actually say that, Caliginous Calamity.'

'I've heard preachers preach that it does. And millions and millions of Christians _believe_ very, very strongly that the Bible does say that, Hitch. So it MUST be true.'

'Preachers embellish scriptures. After a while, embellishments and assumptions – such as people laughing at No-Ah, or Jesus having nails driven through his hands – become part of unshakeable belief. And if you see that millions and millions of your fellow believers believe the same thing, then, indeed, it _must_ be true. The word "must" is a religiously indispensible word. Many believers don't really read the Bibles to absorb them; they mostly just believe whatever the priests and pastors and rabbis pull out and package together for them. It's the bits that the priests and pastors and rabbis DON'T pull out and package up that are the most telling.'

'OK now, remind us of the reason for building this great vessel ....'

'Because of all the sin, both the Elohim _and_ Yahweh are going to send a great flood to drown everything that breaths the breath of life.'

'They would have to flood the entire planet to do that.'

'They did.'

'And where are we in non-biblical history?'

'About four thousand five hundred years ago.'

'And the whole planet was covered with water four thousand five hundred years ago?'

'Yes it was.'

'Why No-Ah?'

'Because No-Ah was righteous and blameless, and she/he walked with the Elohim. Back then, deities regularly paid visits to the floor of the dome to conduct murder inquiries, or to sire baby god-kings, or just to go for a stroll in the garden to see what sins the evil fornicators they had created were up to this time.'

Snikwad pointed a tiny finger towards several commentaries on the righteousness of Noah.

'It seems that the Middle Eastern No-Ah's godly life was in stark contrast to that of every other human in every other culture on the floor of the dome,' read Satan. 'The Chinese and Egyptians and Melanesians and everyone else had all turned away from this Jewish deity no one was going to hear about for at least another thousand years. Nonetheless, No-Ah found favour in the eyes of Yahweh. Not only had No-Ah found favour with the yet-to-be-imagined new Yahweh, but the old Canaanite Elohim had also decided to establish a covenant with her/him. What do they mean by a "covenant", Hitch?'

'A covenant is an agreement: a deal between at least two parties. So too is a "testament". In biblical writings we have the Old Testament – or Hebrew Bible – followed by the newer New Testament. The OT is where we find the Elohim – with shadows of the ancient Sumerian Shaddai – and then the overwriting of the Jewish Yahweh.'

'But not Jesus.'

'No. Jesus only appears after a mysterious five-hundred-or-so-year gap between the two sets of writings: which just happens to be about the duration of a seventy-times-seven year Circle of Time, depending on whose version of the Bible you're accepting as the Word of God. The newer New Testament is believed by Christians to be a New Deal between Jesus the Son of Yahweh, and humanity as a whole. The deal is that if humanity accepts Jesus as a human sacrifice to Yahweh, then Yahweh won't send them down here for us to roast for all eternity.'

'But right here, the deal is that if No-Ah and Sons build a great floating box, the Elohim won't drown them in the coming flood.'

'Exactly, Darkness. The instructions state that No-Ah is to take her/his unnamed wife, and her/his sons/brothers and their nameless wives, along with two of all living creatures, and load them into the ark. There is great theological uncertainty, however, as to whether or not an expedition was mounted to collect the creatures from all over the floor of the dome, because the passage infers that the creatures will waddle and slither and hop from New Zealand and the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica, and present themselves in neat single-pairs to No-Ah at the foot of the gangway in the Middle East.'

'And they're to load food for everyone into the ark. How much food would they need, Hitch?'

'Enough to last a year.'

'For a pair of every kind of bird, animal and creature that moves along the ground?'

'Yes.'

'To last a whole year?'

'Yes.'

'How big did you say the box was?'

'Nowhere near big enough. Certain replicas have been built by certain believers who were certain of the truth of the literalness of this story – and what they unintentionally establish quite clearly is that there is no way everything and everyone could possibly have fitted in.'

'We need more magic-miracles here, Hitch.'

'That's the only way it could happen.'

Satan sat twirling his tail with a pensive faraway look in his eyes.

Finally he spoke.

'No-Ah has evolved to the level of Carpenter.'

'Quite so, Supreme Fiendishness, quite so,' cheered Hitch. 'We are about to enter a new Circle of Time with Mother No-Ah as our Saviour, and we have moved through another level in religious evolution. We had Fishermen, Shepherds and Gardeners with the Elohim; we then evolved to the level of Potter with Yahweh's Re-Creation in a later Circle of Time, and now, Mother No-Ah in this new Circle of Time, takes us up to the level of Carpenter.'

'It's a simple and effective explanation.'

'It is.'

Snikwad tapped the very last verse of Chapter 6.

' _No-Ah did everything just as the Elohim commanded her_ ,' paraphrased Hitch.

'So, we've got ourselves our miraculous floating zoo, sealed on the inside and the outside with asphalt or some other material, and we've loaded in the nameless wives and the dinosaurs and everything else, along with enough provisions to last us a year ... and we're all ready for the rain to fall.'

'Not quite, Imperturbable Mendaciousness: this is where Yahweh now enters the allegorical myth and alters the ship's manifest.'

'Why?'

'Because the Yahwist re-writers seem to follow a different holy numbering system, I think. However, just as it was when they wrote about the fornication and the giants and such, it's not clear what they actually mean right here. They have Yahweh say to No-Ah that yes, she/he is righteous, but she/he will need to take more living things into the ark. The single pairs of "unclean" animals will be fine as they are, but they will now need to take seven of every "clean" animal, and seven of every kind of bird, because in seven days time, Yahweh is going to make it rain for forty days and forty nights.'

'So that's five more kangaroos they need to fetch from Australia, and five more penguins from the Antarctic ...'

'Ahem, if you'll forgive me Master, but I think kangaroos and penguins are "unclean".'

'Says who?'

'Yahweh ... in about thirteen hundred years time.'

'So how does the No-Ah family know what's "clean" and what's not?'

'I'm not sure.'

'So we're to imagine a family of Jewish people standing in the middle of the Middle East, outside a great wooden box the size of a football pitch – with the rain about to fall in a week's time – having a verbally robust theological argument about whether or not they should saddle up the donkeys again, and head back to Australia for another five kangaroos, because their patron deity may or may not tell a future prophet, who may or may not have ever existed, that kangaroos may or may not be religiously "clean" ...?'

'It could maybe be another twelve kangaroos that were needed, Perditious Eminence, because another thing the re-writers weren't clear about was if Yahweh (or themselves really) meant seven individual animals, or seven _pairs_ of animals. The robust theological arguments continue to this day on that one.'

Satan shook his horns.

Snikwad tapped verse 5 of chapter 7.

' _And No-Ah did all that YAHWEH commanded her_ ,' paraphrased Hitch.

'Very much the same words as when No-Ah did all that the ELOHIM had asked,' remarked Satan.

'It's only a little block of five verses that the Yahwists seem to have slipped in here, because the story immediately jumps back into the Elohist version. The writers tell us that No-Ah was six hundred years old when the flood came upon the Earth. The pairs of animals came to the humans at the gangway ... and no mention is made of sevens, or of expeditions to fetch them, or if they were clean or unclean ... just pairs.'

' _In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened,_ ' Satan read himself. 'And there we are Hitch, my brilliant little bucket of lard: there we have your windows ...!'

'Yes, Most Advertent Diabolicalness. The Bibles tell us that this heavenly goldfish bowl humans call home has windows in it ... windows that the Elohim, or Yahweh, or Jesus, may conveniently open and close at their pleasure, to allow Floods of Water to baptise a corrupted Temple.'

'I think I see what you're telling me here, Hitch.'

'We're not simply dealing with literal floods, Mendacious Perfidy.'

'Allegorised history?'

'The very nature of certain otherwise impossible myths.'

'I'm reading in the New Living Translation that Yahweh shut them in the ark, and then: _For forty days the floodwaters grew deeper, covering the ground and lifting the boat high above the earth. As the waters rose higher and higher above the ground, the boat floated safely on the surface. Finally, the water covered even the highest mountains on the earth, rising more than twenty-two feet above the highest peaks. All the living things on earth died—birds, domestic animals, wild animals, small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the people. Everything that breathed and lived on dry land died. God wiped out every living thing on the earth—people, livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and the birds of the sky. All were destroyed. The only people who survived were Noah and those with him in the boat. And the floodwaters covered the earth for 150 days.'_

'That's it Eminence. Water to the top of Mt Everest, and all the kiddies, from Aztecs to Zulus, and all the creatures, from aardvarks to zebras, are drowned... dead... gone... no breath of life.'

Snikwad pounced on the keyboard once again and brought up on the screen, for the purpose of review, one of the numerous faithful photographic reproductions of a two-dimensional work of art from the Sistine Chapel.

'Can you see love here Snikwad?'

The sprite wiped a tear and shook his tiny head.

'Can you see love here Hitch?'

'Parental love, Malfeasant Lord: the right of a loving creator father to punish his wilful children and ...'

'Don't give me such apologetic fundamentalist bullshit, Hitch,' bellowed Satan. 'The so-called "God of Love" went straight for the fucking genocide option. Where's the love in that?'

Hitch was altogether too smart to argue.

'And where was the gentle Jesus meek and mild in all this, we might ask?'

'Jesus isn't usually associated with this event.'

'Well that's convenient. When it comes to creating supermodel humans and frolicking dinosaurs, Jesus is right there with the magic wand in his hand. But if there's nasty bits: well that was just God the Father and things are all better and different and nice now that Jesus has been to Earth to die for everyone's sins.'

'Christians are very selective when it comes to which parts of the Word of God they choose to attribute to Jesus.'

'So it seems. How many Jewish and non-Jewish humans do the selective believers believe were drowned by the genocidal Jewish deity in the sky?'

Snikwad waved them towards a very scientific-looking formula on the screen.

Pn = 2 [c(n-x + 1)] [cx \- 1) / (c-1)

'Hmm,' mused Hitch, examining the associated article carefully. 'I haven't seen this before. It was developed by Professor Henry M Morris III, and we have here an article referencing his 1984 book: _The Biblical Basis for Modern Science_. Ultraconservative estimates using this formula, put the world's population at around 235,000,000 souls in No-Ah's time. However, given that humans lived on average 912 years back then, and if the average length of a generation was 93 years, and the average family had 8 offspring, the actual number of sinners drowned could have been as many as 137,000,000,000!'

'And the population of planet Earth at the beginning of the 21st Century CE ...?'

'Around 7,000,000,000.'

'This article looks to be a prime example of what genuine science calls biblical pseudo-science, doesn't it?'

'It does.'

'What do scientific-method scientists tell us the world's population was at the time of our mythological flood?'

'Around 30 million at the close of the millennium. There were certainly not 235 million depraved, breath-of-life breathing sinners, let alone a ridiculous 137 billion.'

'Well now, let's leave the billions of biblical corpses to rot and take a little time out to discover what might _really_ be going on inside the allegorical ark,' commanded Satan.

Snikwad bounded onto Satan's shoulder, and Hitch nodded his head obediently.

'Introductions first, if you will, Hitch.'

'On board, we have Mother No-Ah and her/his three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth.'

'No family name ...?'

'No, but we could think of them as Sethians – the descendants of the curiously Egyptian Seth, who was the third son of the Jewish Adam and Eve.'

'And the ladies ... unnamed wives were mentioned ...?'

'This is a Yahwist re-write as far as I can see, Iniquitous Lord, and again women aren't actually worthy of mention by name. It was probably because of the shame on the female gender due to that unfortunate incident between Eve and yourself disguised as the Talking Serpent. And the early Church Fathers, we saw, were only too happy to constantly remind women of that historical fact. However, we _are_ lead to believe that indeed four female humans were on board the ark.'

'Four ...? Don't be ridiculous Hitch. This is the Middle East in the Bronze Age. These guys were patriarchs. They've got to repopulate the entire floor of the dome within a few centuries of this Flood. They had harems, Hitch: harems full of young, firm-fleshed, fecund breeding stock. One wife each ... ha, ha ... as if ....' laughed Satan.

'Conservative Christians interpret it that way.'

'They would.'

'Nonetheless, a lack of names in the Yahwists' re-written Genesis hasn't prevented later believers from receiving divine revelations concerning names for the wives on the ark ... unofficially of course. However, in the _official_ Bibles of the Christian Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and certain Ethiopian Jews, we have a book known as Jubilees, and in it we just happen to find the names of four of the possibly numerous wives.'

'And this book of Jubilees isn't in the Roman Catholic, or Protestant, or mainstream Jewish versions of the Bibles, because they don't believe it's really the Word of Yahweh. But Ethiopians believe it really _is_ the Word of Yahweh.'

'That is correct, Erudite Duplicitousness.'

'Yahweh himself could choose to end the debate over this vitally important theological point ... if he wanted to.'

'He could.'

'But he doesn't.'

'No.'

'Not even when believers pray to him.'

'No.'

'But Yahweh chooses instead to answer the prayers of believers with sore knees and lost car keys and such?'

'Yes.'

'So ... Hitch ... nobody really knows if Yahweh divinely inspired the writing of Jubilees or not?'

'No.'

'Which means nobody really knows if Yahweh inspired _any_ of the biblical writings at all?'

'Yes.'

'Which also means that just maybe Yahweh doesn't, you know, exist! And maybe Yahweh's just as imaginary as everyone else's idea of God ...?'

'That would mean we don't exist either, Iniquitous Mendacity!'

Snikwad rushed up and kicked Hitch on the shin.

'Enough of such talk,' growled Satan. 'Tell me the names of the wives.'

'Oww ... yes ... yes ... forgiveness, Merciful Duplicity,' Hitch pleaded as he hobbled towards the screen. 'I see here we have Emzara as the wife of the male Noah. And... well, well now ... it turns out that Emzara right here, was a granddaughter of Methuselah: the longest-lived gent in the Bibles, who reach 969 years of age and then conveniently fell off his perch in the very year of this biblical Flood. Shem's wife was named, Sedeqetelebab. Ham's wife was named, Ne'elatama'uk. And Japheth's wife was named, Adataneses.'

'I'm sure I'm not going to remember _any_ of those names,' said Satan. 'Couldn't they have been called Eve, or Ruth, or Mary or something simpler? Maybe that's why the Yahwists didn't write them in the list, Hitch.'

'Entirely possible, Majestic Darkness,' agreed Hitch because mostly it was just easier that way. 'And other sources give other names: including, I hasten to tell you, a Jewish source known as the _Genesis Rabba_. This is a midrash that names Naam-Ah as the wife of Noah.'

'Ah, now this is maybe the Naam-Ah who is descended from the evil Gardner priest Cain, who harpooned his Shepherd brother Able with a pitchfork. And who may well be the female Naam-Ah from the first list of begats, who may be the same character as the male Noah from the second list of begats.'

'Exactly, Perspicacious Sentience, the writers of the midrash wouldn't have seen the two characters as being identical, I'm sure, but I think they have put the two characters together in the same period of biblical time.'

'Just as you have done, Hitch. And I'm glad to know Noah didn't really marry himself... or herself ... I think ...? It's all a bit of a contradictory jumble really, Snikwad,' said Satan, scratching his familiar under the chin.

'It's very murky out there in the world of belief. Bright and shiny but murky ... if you know what I mean?'

'No.'

'And there are Islamic traditions, and there are Irish traditions.'

'For this Jewish mythology? You have got to be kidding me – how far can belief be stretched?'

'Beliefs can be amazingly elastic, Perditious Serpent. The wives named in Irish folklore for the sons of No-Ah are: Olla, Olliva, and Ollivani: not very creative in their variation, but certainly easier to remember. And we read of Noah's wife as, Percoba.'

'This Irish folklore is obviously an expansion and adaptation of the Jewish folklore we have right here in Genesis,' said Satan. 'We can take and physically hold this Jewish folklore in our hands and demonstrate that it's far older than the Irish folklore. By the same token, we can also take and hold Sumerian and Egyptian folklore in our hands, and demonstrate that it's far older than the Jewish folklore.'

'And arguing that the ancient Sumerian folklore is based on the Jewish folklore, is like arguing that the Jewish folklore is based on the Irish folklore,' agreed Hitch. 'The possibly scriptural Second Book of Adam and Eve, tells us that Adam left an instruction that his body – along with some gold, incense and myrrh – should be taken on board the ark. And then, after the Flood, he was to be buried in the middle of the earth. Now, it seems this burial place is where "God" will one day come from to save humanity.'

'Not Jesus?'

'No. This is an Arabic book from about the 6th Century CE. Jesus had already been to save humanity by then.'

'You know what I'm thinking when I'm thinking about a year in the ark, Hitch?'

'Nooo ....'

'I'm thinking manure, that's what I'm thinking, Hitch.'

'OK.'

Snikwad's ears drooped and he held his nose tightly.

'There would be shiploads of it from three decks the size of football fields filled with everything that breathed the breath of life; all to be scooped up and disposed of by eight humans – half of whom may be expected to be pregnant. How many animals were on the ark, Hitch?'

'No one can agree,' answered Hitch. 'Fundamentalists try to minimise the number as far as is absolutely possible, because of the obvious size limitations. Hundreds, thousands, millions, who knows – the Internet is full of all sorts of pseudo-science, religious ramblings and other downright nonsense on the subject. One thing is very clear: even if all the slugs and snails and everything else had made their own travel arrangements, and arrived from all over the dome at the gangway in single pairs at the appointed time, they and their water and provisions for the year would not have fit inside amongst the steel struts and cross-braces. We need more magic-miracles.'

'And we would need even more magic inside the miraculous wooden box, to reproduce each of the numerous specific eco-systems and micro-climates to support the tropical butterflies and pandas and koalas and Antarctic penguins, and everything else that had evolved to live in complex symbiotic relationships within their respective environments. And then there's the dinosaurs.'

'To save space, No-Ah only took juvenile dinosaurs, or hatchlings, on board the ark and they conveniently hibernated.'

'Of course ... that's the answer. And what did the sabre-tooth tigers and Tyrannosaurus rex eat?'

'All the carnivores went vegetarian for a year – and/or or No-Ah took extra tortoises and such along as "fodder food" for them, because tortoises sometimes don't need to eat or drink for a year.'

'It says all this in the Bibles?'

'No. The dinosaurs and tortoises and vast numbers of other ideas and beliefs are speculative suppositions only.'

'So you start with a belief in a magical-miracle floating manure factory – and you're obliged to never be wrong in the slightest detail or your entire "reality" will come splashing down all over your new chasuble – then you have to rush about fabricating speculative props to try and hold up the collapsing beams that are increasingly shown to be full of mythological wood-rot and scientific shipworm.'

'Only if one takes these myths literally, Mendacious Malefactor. If one understands them as parables that present allegorised history, the props aren't necessary.'

'OK, let's leave the literalists to scoop the poop and exercise the cheetahs, and have ourselves our own speculative look at what might be going on here. Start with the water, Hitch. Could the windows and fountains have let in enough water to fill the dome to cover Mt Everest?'

'No. But back when people believed they lived in a reverse goldfish bowl, that idea sounded quite reasonable to them. Scientific shipworm has now established that humans don't literally live inside a biblical dome, with Jesus hovering around up on the clouds holding a window-winder in his hand. But this hasn't stopped faithful-unto-death believers imagining some very imaginative solutions for all the water. My favourite is the idea that the antediluvian planet Earth was surrounded by a vapour canopy.'

'What's "antediluvian"?'

'It's Latin for "before the Deluge" – the Deluge being the biblical flood.'

'It sounds like one of those bloviated words you'd invent to make it sound like you weren't dealing with myths and miracles and magical floating zoos.'

'It's serious theological terminology.'

'Of course it is.'

Snikwad tapped the screen and threw himself about making violent hissing noises.

'Ah yes,' read Satan. 'If the Earth's atmosphere had had to support the weight of additional water vapour, the surface temperature would have poached living organisms the very moment they were created. And if somehow there _had_ been a water canopy, when it fell, the release of latent heat would have steamed No-Ah her family in a pressure cooker.'

'Yes, real science has trashed the wishful thinking of the vapour canopy prop. Then there's "runaway subduction", where this time the magma from under the earth's crust boiled the oceans to cause 40 days of rain.'

'Which only works with miracles again.'

'And then we have the "hydro-plate hypothesis", where water trapped ten miles underground suddenly burst forth as the "fountains of the deep".'

'Evidence?'

'Not a shred.'

'Plausibility?'

'Zero, in the arena of proper, peer-reviewed, evidence-based science. And we also have comets, and new ocean floors, and God only knows what else from the febrile minds of believers. Literalist flood beliefs contradict the cold hard sciences of geology, physics, astronomy, biology, palaeontology, chemistry, geophysics and more. The scientific community at large considers this stuff to be pseudoscience at best. Mostly, though, it just looks like make-believe on top of make-believe, from folks with a very large investment in not ever being wrong.'

'I'm reading here on a Christian site,' said Satan. 'That while scientific theories undergo constant revision, the only source of information about the Earth's origins that _never_ needs revision is the "Word of God".'

'Demonstrating clearly the difference between belief and accondance, Rancorous Lord. You're trapped by belief. Accondance frees you to explore. And anyway, that statement is another Christian falsehood. Christians, as we've been demonstrating, constantly revise, dilute, distort and obfuscate the "Word of God".'

'What's happening with the people and the ecosystems in the ark, Hitch?'

'The writers don't tell us. They just say that the Waters flooded the Temple for 150 days.'

'We're not talking about literal water are we?'

'Not in most of the layers of this allegorical myth.'

'Where and when did the first layer of myth begin?'

'In written form, it began with the Shaddai in Sumer again. And just as the biblical First Creation is set in about 4000 BCE, at the historical beginning of the Sumerian Civilisation, so it is that the catastrophic biblical Flood is set in about 2500 BCE, at the historical flooding of major Sumerian cities,' Hitch explained. 'But because myths often start as oral traditions, we may never know just when and where, or by whom, the first local flood was attributed to a wrathful deity.'

'What's the oldest, dateable, hard-copy evidence we have of the Sumerian myth?'

'The Sumerian _Gilgamesh_ poems date from the Third dynasty of Ur, at around 2100–2000 BCE. One of the poems speaks of Gilgamesh's journey to meet the flood hero Ut-Napishtim, and gives a short version of the flood story.'

'And the oldest, dateable, hard-copy evidence of the biblical Israelite myth....'

'From the Dead Sea Scrolls of around 150 BCE.'

'That's a two thousand year gap that believers plug with nothing more than belief, Hitch.'

'Not a thing more, Crepuscularity.'

'The ancestors of the biblical Israelites came from Sumer, didn't they?'

'The Bibles tell us so.'

'When?'

'In about the 2300 BCE: bringing with them, I suggest, the Sumerian creation and flood myths.'

'And we have adaptations of the original Sumerian flood myth from all around the Middle East, from different people and different time periods?'

'Yes, Gracious Vituperation: we have the Akkadian flood hero Atrahasis of about 1640 BCE, and an Assyrian version of Atrahasis from the library of Ashurbanipal from around 650 BCE. In the _Eridu Genesis_ , from the 1st Dynasty of Babylon – written in Sumerian script – it appears that the Enki concept of God warns the priest-king Ziusudra of an impending flood.'

'Aha ... this is the Sumerian water deity Enki you think morphed into the Akkadian Ea, and then into the Phoenician Yam, and then into the Israelite Yah, and then into the Jewish Yah-Weh?'

'The very same, Righteous Rancour,' said Hitch. 'The later Standard Babylonian versions of the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ are more detailed, and are from the 13th to the 10th centuries BCE: again featuring Ut-Napishtim as the hero of the Flood. The biblical No-Ah myth from the 2nd century BCE has about 20 major points in common with the older Babylonian myths. Bible believers say that the biblical myth was first written much earlier. Well they are quite right: yes indeed, it most certainly was written much earlier. It was written as mythology from all over the Middle East.'

'And Conservative Christians put themselves into a state of the mind that insists that Noah's Flood is real history and it predates these "pagan" myths that really didn't happen.'

'It's how belief works, Majestic Nefariousness.'

'Christian believers believe they can put a precise date on the Creation they attribute to Yahweh. Do they put a precise date on this Flood they also attribute to Yahweh but not usually to Jesus?'

'Some are quite convinced it was in precisely, 2348 BCE.'

'Do we have any record of anyone actually _believing_ in Yahweh in 2348 BCE?'

'Not a peep until about 1400 BCE at the very earliest.'

'OK Hitch, we've got the picture that the Bible story is a myth based on earlier myths, but what do _you_ see as the allegorised histories underlying it?'

'If I may, Precious Damner, I would like to start with the most recent?' begged Hitch.

Satan nodded his assent, and Snikwad rolled onto his tummy on the NIV and cutely rested his chin on the heels of his palms.

'Again and always, it references the Yahwist Reformation. Think of this flood as a baptism – like in Christianity – where sins are symbolically washed away by water, and the repentant person emerges from the waters renewed and purified. The recipient of the baptism is "born again". We read that Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, and it was a symbolic Jewish ceremony. Right here, the symbolism seems to me to be the sins of Jesus' corrupt ancestors being washed away by the baptism of the Yahwist Reformation. The Jewish people have been born again into a new Circle of Time.'

'And do you know the good thing, Snikwad?' Satan asked his diminutive minion. 'No Aztec or Zulu kiddies were literally drowned in the making of this myth.'

Snikwad hugged his master's thumb.

'And we don't need to worry about cleaning up dinosaur poo,' chortled Hitch. 'In early versions of this allegory, I suspect the Water represented Floods of conquering invaders. We have historical evidence of empires that swept over the region in repetitious cycles over thousands of years. We may understand too that the conquered attributed the deluge to "God" punishing them for their sins. Yahwist biblical writers inform their people in the most castigating manner that Yahweh sent floods of Babylonian invaders to punish them for not worshiping Yahweh faithfully enough. For the Yahwists, the Water in the already allegorised myth will represent a symbolic purification by their reformation. Water, as we saw, had different connotations in Creation One and in Creation Two.'

'Repetitious cycles of invasion... as in your Circles of Time, Hitch ...?'

'We have certain major repeating events in genuine history that I propose to address as we come to them on our journey. However – to whet our appetites – from independently verifiable sources we have it that in about 1500 BCE, a flood of people called the Hittites swept down the Euphrates and sacked Babylon. In around 2000 BCE the Elamites flooded in from the East and sacked the Sumerian city of Ur. In very approximately 2500 BCE, Sargon the Great baptised the city states of Sumer when his Semitic Akkadian Empire flooded virtually the entire Middle East.'

'Ah, so this is your idea of Circles of Time repeating every 70 times 7 years or so.'

'Indeed, Malfeasance. Our simple story of a genocidal Yahweh or Jesus opening the windows of Heaven to fill the dome with water, looks to me to be a cover story for some very real history.'

'And with these flood myths, we can see that Divinity will warn certain favoured people of the coming Flood of invaders, so they may make good their escape.'

'That is indeed how I see it, Most ....'

Snikwad frowned and tapped the screen meaningfully.

Satan leaned forward to peer at what he was being shown.

'Some of your dates are pretty wobbly,' growled Satan. 'Are you mining the data to make it fit your pet theories?'

Snikwad glared at Hitch.

'No, Tranquil Archdemon. The Bibles tell us that Yahweh sent a flood of Babylonian soldiers in about 500 BCE, as punishment for Israelite sins. Independent sources confirm the date, but not the reason of course. The dates I have for the Elamites and the Hittites are pretty close to correct, but, yes, I did stretch the Sargon dates, because I think the writers and re-writers of the Bibles have stretched the No-Ah dates ... and we can't be sure what they may be referencing and in which Circles of Time.'

'How so?'

'Mother No-Ah doesn't begin her mission as the Saviour of the World until she is 600 years old – quite late in life, even for a biblical heroine. I suspect biblical writers and re-writers were referencing a character in genuine historical events in about 2500 BCE, when the mythological No-Ah was a spritely 100-year-old. I suspect the writers and re-writers _also_ place her in a repetition of genuine history in about 2000 BCE, when she was 600 years old. This is part of my Circles of Time hypothesis. Someone as important as Sargon the Great would most likely have been remembered in allegorised history, and I suspect he is right in there amongst the wobbly dates of biblical mythology.'

'Yes, I see that you're collecting little hints, little clues that guide you towards developing your hypotheses,' said Satan. 'But you must be careful that you don't become so convinced by your own ideas that you only collect whatever supports them.'

'Precisely, Guileful Probity. I have changed my hypotheses many, many times, and I continue to do so. As we progress on our biblical journey, with the help of you and Brother Snikwad, I will very likely make further amendments ... or burn some of my straw men altogether. It's scientific method versus dogmatic intransigence. It's accondance versus belief.'

'So, Hitch: could it be that you may come to assent to the proposition that Yahweh or Jesus created the universe as scientific and historical fact ...?'

'Quite unlikely given the total lack of evidence so far ... but I'll keep my eyes and ears open nonetheless.'

'How long did you say the allegorical Ark was bobbing around on the Waters of the Yahwist Reformation?'

'One year and ten days.'

'Right, well, I think we'll just leave them to it and have ourselves a little rest. I fancy a quiet nap before we enter the next Circle of Time – because, Oh My God, my head is spinning with all this detail. And I'm not even going to ask if we find any godly love here, Snikwad ... I'm perfectly sure we don't. Hitch, have the demons toss a few more atheists on the fire. It always soothes my troubled mind to hear them scream.'

Scroll to next chapter or go to: Table of Contents

Revelation 3:3

FATHER NOAH'S HANGOVER

And rainbows, fossils, testiculations and blood transfusions

Genesis 8:1 – 9:29

THE Elohim remembered Noah.

' _The Elohim remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark, and the Elohim made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided_ ,' Hitch paraphrased from the English Standard Version of the Protestant Christian Bible. ' _The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of 150 days the waters had abated, and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen._ '

'There's no question is there?' asked Satan rhetorically. 'The Elohim – or maybe Jesus – had pulled the plug on the fountains of the deep and opened the windows of the dome and flooded the entire upside-down, inside-out bowl until the mountains were covered.'

Snikwad scurried over the keyboard and brought up a new page, which he tapped while posing dramatically with a severe look on his face.

'Ah,' declared Satan. 'Looks like we've got ourselves another one of those biblical non-contradictions again, boys. It says here that the inerrant Bible teaches us the waters rose a mere 15 cubits. But if Mt Ararat had been covered, the waters would have been at least 10,274 cubits deep. We need to do some emergency dogpaddling, Hitch.'

'Fundamentalists kick up quite a splash over this one, Iniquitous Damner: they take it that the flood _covered_ the mountains by the said 15 cubits. But the writers clearly write that the Waters rose only a miserable 15 cubits and covered the "harim". _Harim_ is a Hebrew word that can mean "mountains", or "hills", or general lofty high places. Once again no one really knows what God really meant, so helpful believers need to give God a bit of a helping hand right here with the business of communicating with His creations. Some things – like leaving clearly defined theology – the Bible version of God is not very good at. But again, what I suggest we have here is the Yahwist re-writers being either sloppy in their re-writing, or deliberately vague. In the original Sumerian myths, the Flood was the flooding of a river. In Atrahasis III we read: _Like dragonflies the dead bodies filled the river. Like a raft they drifted to the edge of the ark. Like a raft they floated to the bank of the river_. In later versions, the Sumero-Babylonian mythographers rewrote the original myths and the river eventually became a "sea". Later Israelite mythographers and others would re-rewrite it and re-adapt it many, many times more. And just as we can patchily trace the evolution of "God" throughout the Middle East over thousands of years, so too we can patchily trace the evolution of the myths.'

'Fifteen cubits would have been enough to literally devastate a river community – such as the early Sumerians – and we can understand them attributing this genuine, historical natural disaster to Divinity as punishment for their sins. And we can understand too, the inhabitants of the colonies of the later Sumero-Mesopotamian and Egyptian Empires adapting and re-adapting the original myth to suit their needs. But I think you're going to tell me this fable also refers to the Yahwist Reformation again ... aren't you, Hitch?'

'Certainly, Most Egregious Diabolicalness. By the time we get to the Circle of Time of the Yahwist Reformation, we are most definitely not dealing with a literal flood. For the Yahwists, human males were mud-men with a little bit of the Divine blown into them in the form of the Breath of Life. Women don't seem to count, I'm afraid. Water for the Yahwists was not the Elohists' Water of Darkness, but a cleansing force that baptised away the sins of humanity.'

'And the figurative Flood of Yahwist reformers drowns – or takes the Divine Breath of Life out of – Jesus' corrupt god-king ancestors. It's not that they physically drowned, but the Yahwist Reformation took away the little bit of Divinity that had been blown into them. In effect, they were spiritually dead. But after that, the Israelite society is symbolically "born again" ... just as Christians see the same sort of symbolism in their own "born again" baptismal beliefs.'

'As I see it, Mendacious Lord,' agreed Hitch enthusiastically. 'Now, given that harim can mean a "high place", I suggest the "mountains" of Noah's myth represent the high places of worship of the Elohists. Later on in our journey we will come across a huge biblical tent called the "Tabernacle". The height of the "Holy of Holies" in the Tabernacle was 10 cubits.'

'Meaning the figurative Waters of the Yahwist Reformation could figuratively rise 15 cubits, and figuratively cover the Tabernacle, and figuratively take away the Breath of Life of the depraved fornicators and their super-babies inside.'

'Quite so. Later in our journey we will find that the re-writers have Yahweh give instructions to his faithful followers that the "high places" of their fellow Canaanites/Phoenicians/Israelites were to be broken down during the ethnic cleansing of the Promised Land. Right here, in keeping with the tradition of the myth, the Yahwists chose to forewarn the new "Noah" so he – and it definitely would have been "he" this time – could make preparations for the coming Reformation Flood. In this part of the myth, I will now refer to our main character as "Father Noah".'

'And here again we have another layer of historical allegory hidden neatly inside a familiar old myth that had already been adapted and adjusted and allegorised numerous times before,' concluded Satan.

Snikwad danced over the surface of the altar making blowing noises.

'Ah the wind, the wind, Little Buddy,' nodded Satan. 'We've got the wind, or the Spirit – or the Christian Holy Ghost if we so choose – from the Elohim blowing over the water just like we had in Creation One. Is this a demonstration of history repeating itself, Hitch ... your turning of the Circles of Time?'

'Yes, yes,' enthused Hitch once again, resisting the urge to hug his master. 'Wind and Water and a Baptism and a new Saviour, or Messiah, to usher in each New Age.'

'Messiah ...?'

'Yes, Vituperative Advertency. The word "messiah" is from the Hebrew language and it simply means "one who is smeared, or anointed". The Greek equivalent of messiah is _christos_. And just like the Greek words _theos_ and _kurios_ , the word "christ" is not a name: it too is a title and job description. Christ is not Jesus' surname. There was never anyone called "Jesus Christ", in the way you would say "John Smith". Even the name "Jesus" was possibly more of a title. To his contemporary followers, he may have been the new "Yah-Shua", Anglicised to "Joshua", who was also the new "Messiah".'

'Aha, and have we now found Yah-Weh's son, Yah-Shua/Jesus the Anointed/Messiah/Saviour/Christ, here in this New Beginning?'

'No, Atramentous Perseverance, we don't find Jesus until another five New Beginnings.'

'OK, I get it, Hitch ... we have a new Saviour at the beginning of each Circle of Time, with Noah and Jesus and so forth, and there's Wind and there's Water, but what happens next in the mass extermination of humanity we have in the surface story in front of us right here?'

'After forty days Father Noah opened the window of the ark and sent out a raven that kept flying backwards and forwards for the next fortnight or so, eating dead bodies, until the water had dried up from the earth.'

Snikwad leapt over from the screen and grasped Hitch's tail and sank his teeth in.

'Ow, ow, you evil little brute, what did you do that for?' shrieked Hitch, clutching his injured appendage.

Snikwad spat out fur and blood and stood with his hands on his hips shaking his head.

'I see what you mean...' said Satan, running a taloned finger across the screen himself. 'The Bibles don't say _anything_ about the raven eating carrion. You just made that bit up, Hitch ...!'

Forgiveness, Master, but it wasn't me, it's just another one of those commonly accepted biblical embellishments.'

'Ah yes, and again, believers do love to give the eternal and never-changing Word of God a bit of a hand ... just to demonstrate what God _really_ meant. There's nothing quite like claiming you know the mind of God, is there Snikwad?'

Snikwad shook his head in agreement. And then nodded in agreement.

'Now, we also have a dove right here,' Satan went on. 'Noah sent it out, but it couldn't find anywhere to set its feet, so Noah took it back into the ark again. I guess it didn't like perching on the floating bodies the way the raven did, or landing on the mountain tops which were now visible. Then after a week Noah sent the dove back out again, and this time it returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf from a tree that had survived under the raging torrent for the past year. Olives won't grow at altitudes much above 1,200 cubits, so this tree must have been covered by 9,000 cubits – or four and a half kilometres – of water, and then magically ... err, miraculously sprouted fresh leaves during the week the dove was back on board the ark.'

Hitch and Snikwad sat, appearing to listen intently.

'I'm really quite enjoying myself with this tale, chaps. I shall read on,' Satan informed them.

Snikwad smiled and blinked silently.

Hitch knew better than to utter so much as a word off his own.

'Noah waited another week and sent out the dove again, but this time the dove did not return. I guess that means it had either been eaten by the raven – because the raven was the only other breath-of-life-breathing thing on the planet outside the ark – or maybe it was now building a nest for the other six – or maybe thirteen? – doves that were still on board. And lice ... did we mention bird lice? Did this dove have the lice? I wonder who counted the lice? Do we think bird lice are "clean" or "unclean" ..? Hmm. If there were only two lice and one lice ... umm ... louse died, the species would have gone extinct. Maybe that's how the dinosaurs went extinct, boys! Yahweh declared them to be "unclean", so Noah & Sons only took two of each genus on board the ark and some of them died. That would explain it. It _must_ be true because it fits with the Bible and I _want_ it to be true. And fish. Now was this fresh or salt water, I wonder, because that is vital for fish species? And what about whales and dolphins and turtles and seals that breathe the breath of life? They existed in the dome at the same biblical time as the non-biblical dinosaurs and the fire-breathing biblical leviathans. How did fire-breathing leviathans live in the seas in the first place? The water would have put the flames out. This is puzzling ...? And viruses ...? But viruses may not be living things. And they don't actually breathe ... or do they? But they would be unclean I'm sure; so there would only be two viruses ... viruae ... virusui ... whatever ... and they would have needed hosts, or maybe one host ... and if they killed that host and the host was one of the unclean beasts – like a pig or something – then we wouldn't have had bacon sandwiches after the Flood either. How do you think Noah knew when the viruses turned up at the gangway ...?'

Snikwad shrugged his shoulders and opened his palms.

Hitch stared back in stunned silence and also held his palms open. He knew better than to interrupt when Satan was in one of these moods.

'Anyway,' the Prince of Darkness rambled. 'For _whatever_ reason, the dove didn't come back, and on the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year of life, the waters had returned under the floor of the dome, and had evaporated back up to the vapour canopy that used to surround the biblical planet Earth. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the ground was completely dry. Then the Elohim said to Noah: "You can come out now, you and what's-her-name your wife, and your sons Shem and Ham and Japheth, and whoever the help-meets were they married and ruled over". Don't have names for the gals on the ark, so I just did a little biblical embellishing there myself, Hitch old boy. It's alright, everyone does it. And the Elohim told him to unload all the dinosaurs and giraffes and elephants – there's always giraffes and elephants in the Noah's Ark picture-books at Sunday school, Snikwad – and polar bears and camels and eagles and chickens and butterflies and lice and kangaroos. _Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth._ Aha, "be fruitful and multiply": we heard that at the beginning of the first Circle of Time, didn't we Hitch?'

'Indeed so, Tenebrous Majesty,' offered Hitch gently, hoping his Lord had finished.

'I think it's time we had ourselves another one of those historical reality checks, boys.'

Snikwad gratefully pounced on the keyboard.

'As you will, Darkness. Certain folks of the Evangelical Christian persuasion pinpoint the date of Noah's Flood to precisely 1,656 years after Jesus created the universe in 4004 BCE, which gives us exactly 2348 BCE. We can also count the begats backwards from Jesus: again giving us the exact dating of 2348 BCE. However, other believers calculate the date to 2,256 years after Creation, or 1748 BCE. This contradictory 600-year difference gives us yet another of the numerous clues pointing towards to the Circles of Time hypothesis – and justifies somewhat my suggesting that Noah may reference Sargon the Great in one of the Circles of Time.'

'While the various biblical deities were supposedly flooding the dome and the flat earth, what does empirical evidence tell us really was happening on the spherical Earth at this point in historical time, Snikwad?'

The sprite bowed and ostentatiously waved their attention towards the screen.

'In the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Shijiahe culture flourished in the Yangtze River region in China,' Hitch read.

'And the Jewish deity nobody was to hear of for another thousand years or more up and drowned them all?'

'Every last one. And this was also the era of the semi-mythical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors of China.'

'Semi-mythical, Hitch ... you mean rather like the semi-mythical folks we have right here in Genesis?'

'I expect so, Crepuscular Prudency. I estimate that Adam and Eve and Naamah and Noah and many others each represent a number of genuine historical characters from a number of Circles of Time. However, and for me this is a fascinating however, the one character – say the murderous Cain, for example – will also represent an entire culture, or religiopolitical faction: hence the reasons why the characters here are only semi-mythical.'

'Do Chinese historians and archaeologists and geologists report Jesus washing away their ancestral culture?'

'No.'

'I wonder what they think of supposedly modern Christian civilisations who say he did ...?'

'I dread to think ... especially when I read Christian references to "heathen Chinese".'

Snikwad had adorned himself with a string of beads and a scarf that was lying on the altar, and was now swaying and dancing in a very fluid and graceful fashion.

'Ah, the Indus Valley Civilisation, Snikwad, of course,' nodded Satan, once again admiring the prodigious talent of his diminutive minion. 'It existed between 3300 and 1300 BCE, Hitch, and was at its very height when Jesus flushed them all away in 2348 BCE. Do Indian folks have any record of Jesus or Yahweh drowning their ancestors?'

'Not a peep here either, I'm afraid. And for some reason, certain Indian scholars don't seem to credit biblical writing as genuine history. Coincidentally, the Indic city of Lothal is estimated to have been founded in just about 2348 BCE as well. Not only did the people of Lothal make strides in metallurgy – which would have helped No-Ah & Sons strap their leaky boat together – they look to have built the world's first dockyard.'

'Which is where Mother No-Ah could have moored the ark, Hitch! Maybe the biblical ark was actually _built_ in Lothal! No one can prove it wasn't, and it is perfectly logical from a biblical perspective ... so we could choose to believe that it's true ... and then it would be!'

'Quite so, Erudite Mendacity: that is how biblical beliefs are established. On the figurative level however, one of the Rivers of Jewish missionaries flowing out of the Library of Eden to bring the Water of Yahweh to the Indian "heathen", may have meandered through the Indus Valley Civilisation and debouched at Lothal – meaning we can glean some fascinating historical possibilities from these allegorical myths.'

'So we don't need to reject them completely?'

'Good God no – we just need to get over believing in them. Egypt, right about this time, was at the very height of the civilisation of the Old Kingdom – which ran from about 2686 until about 2181 BCE – and was transitioning from the Fifth to the Sixth Dynasties.'

'Did a great flood wipe away the Fifth Dynasty? Maybe the biblical flood is at least partly true after all!'

'No, it's probably just the case that King Unas didn't have a son to inherit his throne when he died in about 2345 BCE. Unas' successor, Teti, seems to have married Unas' daughter, Iput, and together they began the Sixth Dynasty, and reigned until about 2333 BCE.'

'We have a comprehensive list of names, and accurate dating to within a few decades here, Snikwad,' declared Satan, stroking his goatee. 'These Egyptian folks must have been keeping some pretty good records back then. Do _they_ mention the Jewish deity's punitive deluge?

'Not a chisel-mark anywhere. Not so much as a hieroglyph that mentions their entire culture disappearing under 10,000 cubits of biblical water. Recorded Egyptian history is largely continuous from before the middle of the Third Millennium BCE until the present: no biblical flood, no sphinx or pyramids covered in mud and rocks and fossils ... nothing.'

'By the way,' enquired Satan. 'Christianity first took off in what is now Europe. What were the supermodels doing while everyone else was developing these great civilisations?'

'Chasing pigs through the forests.'

'Right.'

Snikwad made fervent praying motions towards the screen.

'Ah yes, the Pyramid Texts, Little Man, very good,' praised Satan. 'Possibly the oldest extant religious texts in the world. And the first of them were inscribed in the pyramid of our old pal Unas, who died around the time of Noah's Flood, in 2345 BCE. How old did you say the oldest extant biblical texts were?'

'About 150 years before Jesus.'

'Two thousand years difference ... again.'

'Yes.'

'Do the Pyramid Texts mention the Jewish deity, Yahweh, as "God" ...?'

'No.'

Snikwad stretched out his arms and grasped his toes and rolled round and round the altar like a coin.

'Circles, Snikwad, you've found Hitch's Circles of Time. The ancient Egyptians believed the cosmos moved in ever-repeating cycles ... just like Barbara Thiering and Hitch said. They also believed their king was related to God ... just like Jesus. And the Egyptian king was responsible for ensuring the stability of things down on the surface of the Earth ... just like the Pope is now until Jesus comes back with his armies of angels.'

'And the Egyptians saw themselves as a "chosen" people. Chosen by Divinity to build a great civilisation and rule a great empire ... just as certain Jewish people consider themselves chosen by Yahweh for a similar purpose. And Christians generally believe that THEY are now Yahweh's chosen people, because Jewish folks largely rejected the notion that their patron deity Yah-Weh made a baby with one of their virgins and called him Yah-Shua.'

Snikwad, with a black belt tied around his waist, kicked and punched the air ferociously, before adopting a very martial-arts stance in front of a petrified Hitch.

'Don't touch me ...,' he squealed.

'Snikwad's just taken us to the other side of the dome,' explained Satan. 'To tell us about the Korean god-man, Dangun Wanggeom. His grandfather was Hwanin, the Korean Lord of Heaven. Like Jesus, Dangun was born down on earth under magical/miraculous circumstances. Dangun founded the first Korean kingdom in 2333 BCE ... 15 years before Jesus sent the biblical Flood to punish people for not worshiping the Jewish Lord of Heaven. Snikwad's eye-level taekwondo punches represent Dangun scaling a mountain.'

'Stonehenge in England is estimated to have been begun right about then,' read Hitch. 'No one knows who built Stonehenge ... but I guess not everyone was out chasing pigs all the time.'

'And Mayans occupied Central America in the period of the biblical Flood. Not one of these civilisations leaves any suggestion of the Jewish deity washing them away,' Satan added. 'OK Hitch, we've been pretty tough on Biblicists here, but do we have any independently verifiable evidence concerning a real, proper, down-to-earth, natural disaster flood on which the myths and allegories might be based.'

'Indeed we do, Mendacity. The Piora Oscillation was a sudden cold, wet period in the Holocene Epoch dated to about 3200 to 2900 BCE.'

'Too early Hitch ... what are you doing?'

'Taking us back one Circle of Time – a mystical 70 times 7 years before the date of the biblical Flood.'

'Perfect.'

'In the Middle East at that time, the Dead Sea rose nearly 100 meters before returning to normal levels. The unusual climate changes have been associated with the end of the Sumerian Uruk period. Archaeologists digging in ancient Sumer have confirmed an extensive layer of riverine silt deposits, dated to shortly after the Piora oscillation. This empirically verifiable river flood interrupted the progression of human settlement, and left a thick layer of yellow sediment throughout the cities of Uruk and Shuruppak, and stretched right up as far north as the city of Kish. Polychrome pottery characteristic of the Jemdet Nasr period of around 3100–2900 BCE was found _below_ the sediment, and artefacts from the Early Dynastic I period were discovered _above_ the sediment layer. Shuruppak was the home city of Flood heroes from various periods of Sumero-Babylonian history. The original Ziusudra, then the later Gilgamesh and Atrahasis are written of as having lived in Shuruppak ... but not Noah, and not Naamah, as far as we know. The colourful and famous archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley discovered flood evidence at the site of the Sumerian city of Ur, dating from about 3500 BCE... one mysterious Circle of Time earlier.'

'And – as is the way with superstitious human nature – these unprecedented and inexplicable natural disasters would have been attributed to "God" as punishing humans for their sins,' offered Satan. 'Were the Sumerians noted for the sins of homosexuality or fertility control? Those sorts of sins are always special favourites with conservative believers?'

'Homosexuality gets you fire and brimstone as a rule,' replied Hitch, in keeping with the tone of the question. 'We don't know the reason given for the very real floods in Uruk, Shuruppak, Kish and elsewhere, but noise and overpopulation feature as reasons in later myths.'

'Ah yes, nothing annoys the priests who write Bibles on behalf of God like raucous humans and their disgusting breeding habits. It's no wonder bishops and such take themselves off to live in celibacy in palaces, far away from the madding crowds below. How are fundamentalist Young Earth Christian Creation Scientists with all this verifiable evidence, by the way?'

'They usually ignore it. And often they deflect attention away and onto, say, their misrepresentation of the second law of thermodynamics and try to keep the focus there.'

"Hmm, takes the spotlight off Jesus again, doesn't it. But let's get back to the raven and the dove in Noah's myth, Hitch: what's happening there ...?'

'Barbara Thiering sees Ravens as representing priests in black robes, and Doves as representing priests in white robes, in Jesus' time. I suspect we're seeing the same thing here, Cimmerian Excellence. During the layer of allegory that refers to the Yahwist Reformation, the Noah character and his entourage of Yahwist faithful would have been holed up in a figurative Ark until the figurative Flood had assuaged. The Raven may represent black-robed priests who spread out as Yahwist emissaries, or missionaries. The Dove may represent messengers who sought news of peace, so Noah and the faithful could safely come and re-populate the temple in Jerusalem – hence the olive leaf as a symbol of peace.'

'Brings us back down to Earth again.'

'It does.'

'Then what?'

'Father Noah builds an altar and takes some of the endangered species and sacrifices them to Yahweh.'

'Yahweh hasn't seen enough dead things ...? For God's sake, he's just exterminated 137 billion miniature images of Himself, and Heaven only knows how many sparrows and other living creations he's supposed to have his eye on.'

'Apparently he must have needed more death to settle him down.'

'What's this bloody sacrifice business all about anyway, Hitch? Yahweh not only frequently slaughters things in vast numbers himself, he also seems to take some sort of perverse pleasure in watching humans kill animals – and at least one female human virgin we know of – for his personal benefit. I mean, he preferred Able's barbequed lamb to the wicked Cain's carrots. And Jesus' ancestor King David handed over seven sons of King Saul so the Gibeonites could execute them as punishment for the sins of their father, and they exposed the dead bodies on a hill in front of Yahweh. There's that old-time biblical justice for you again, Hitch, just like with the seven people who would be executed for the murder of Cain. And the writers do not write that Yahweh rejected these human sacrifices made to him.'

'Yahweh does seem to have found the human sacrifices satisfactory. And Yahweh also likes to smell the dead flesh burning, Truculent Calignosity,' Hitch offered. 'Because the writers here say that Father Noah took specimens of not some, but ALL the clean animals and clean birds, and burned them on the altar.'

Snikwad pounced on the keyboard once again and brought up on the screen, for the purpose of review, one of the numerous faithful photographic reproductions of a two-dimensional work of art from the Sistine Chapel.

'Well there's at least two prime breeding rams gone,' said Satan, looking at the image on the screen. 'And is that a fully-grown elephant I see in the background? How many of _them_ are they going to slaughter for Yahweh's happiness do you think, Snikwad?'

Snikwad shrugged and held up two fingers... and then ten... and then gave up with a cheeky grin.

'Are elephants clean or unclean, Hitch? Looks like Noah and Sons are going to sacrifice at least one, so I guess they _must_ be biblically kosher... and that means there could have been as many as fourteen elephants on the ark. Hitch...? Hitch what the absolute fuck...?'

'My, such titillatingly-displayed genitals on the young man kneeling on the dead ram in the foreground,' Hitch drooled, leaning in for a closer look.

Satan picked him up between his thumb and forefinger and dropped him out of the way like a soiled rag.

'It's religious art, Calignosity.'

'Looks more like assistance for the autoerotic practices of the celibate ones to me, Hitch.'

'My Mendacious Liege is of course correct,' he grovelled with an awkward smile.

'And man, that must have been some huge funeral pyre,' Satan continued. 'I wonder what they used for the fuel that person is carrying? Do you think that person one of the wives? No genitals or bottoms on display for the boys at the Vatican, so I guess it must be. The trees would have still been soaking wet, Hitch. Did Noah burn his ark? The magical-miracle timber would have burned beautifully with all that pitch on it.'

'No, Advertency: the ark seems to have remained largely intact, because believers known as "arkeologists" were to discover it a number of times during the 20th Century, in a number of different locations – each one of which truly held the true ark. The writers don't tell us what Noah actually used for fuel, but by whatever means, the aroma of the burning dead animals and birds drifted up towards the ceiling of the dome, and Yahweh smelled it ... and it calmed him down ... just like the death of his son Jesus would in another 2,000 years time.'

'Ah yes, when Heaven was literally the inside of the goldfish bowl, it was not much of a problem for smoke from sacrificial fires to waft up to where Jesus and Yahweh and the Elohim were playing their harps and listening to choirs of angels on the clouds. But you said it was the burnt offerings that calmed Yahweh down, which means he must have still been pretty wrathful... even after he drowned all those Chinese and Indian and Mayan kiddies?'

'Yes, the writers definitely write that Yahweh smelled what we may understand as an odour of tranquilisation. And that's what seems to have finally settled him down ... for a while at least. Some of the purposes of sacrifice are to thank your patron deity for _not_ drowning you in a flood, or showering you with fire and brimstone, and also to demonstrate to them just how much you love them, and to beg them to please not obliterate you with natural disasters or armies of invaders should you happen to stray from the path of righteousness in the future.'

'Amen,' intoned Satan.

Snikwad bowed and prayed.

'With the calming aroma of the burnt flesh and fur and feathers filling the ceiling of the dome,' Hitch told them as he reached for a copy of the World English Bible, 'Yahweh said in his heart, _"I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake, because the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again strike everything living, as I have done"_.'

'So the writers have the Jewish Yahweh tell us – in his heart – that his human creations only ever think of evil things from their youth, and it's pointless trying to reform them by punishing them with genocidal natural disasters: so he's not even going to bother trying again. I wonder if Buddhist and Hindu youths only ever think evil thoughts, Hitch? This piece of writing looks more like the word of some very misanthropic men, and not the word of "God". It seems to have about it its own aroma – the aroma of your unpleasant Yahwist reformers. But what is it that Yahweh does next in our surface story ...?'

'Yahweh becomes the Elohim again, Malfeasance. I suspect this Noah building the altar to Yahweh passage was an invention massaged into the old text by the reformers as part of their re-writing.'

'Rather like that Joseph Smith Jnr Mormon Prophet fellow inventing Adam's altar in the USA.'

'Very similar fabrication, I suggest, Inerrant Malediction. We now move back into what is simply a modification of the old Elohim text. The Elohim – after telling Noah and his sons that the surviving creatures were to be fruitful and multiply – bless Noah and his sons. The womenfolk are not specifically blessed. Possibly because all the sin and the Flood were the fault of women in the first place. The Elohim then instruct the menfolk to also be fruitful and multiply. The Elohim further remind the men that originally they had been given green plants as Food, but now: _"All the wild animals and all the birds will fear you and be terrified of you. Every creature that crawls on the ground and all the fish in the sea have been put under your control. Everything that lives and moves will be your food"_ ,' Hitch read from the GOD'S WORD® Translation.

Satan slapped his hobgoblin heartily on the back. 'There you are Hitch, you mushy little marvel: another step in the process of religious evolution. Israelite humans have now evolved to where they can comprehend Meat.'

'A multitude of thanks, Erudite Vituperation,' gasped Hitch, struggling to regain his feet. 'We saw Mother No-Ah evolve to the level of Carpenter at the end of the previous Circle of Time in perhaps 2500 BCE, and now we have seen Father Noah increase his religious sophistication to where he may now understand the more arcane Flesh at the beginning of the new Circle of Time in 2000 BCE.'

'And the Yahwists are telling us that it's the baptism of their reformation that brought the Israelite – or Jewish – people, in an even later Circle of Time, to this higher state of cultural sophistication.'

'Precisely as I estimate it, Darkness.'

'You said you thought the priests may now be at the level of Hunter, or maybe Butcher?'

'I can only speculate on this one I'm afraid, Crepuscularity: neither Barbara Thiering nor others – nor my humble self – have specifically identified priests referred to as Butchers. It's simply a logical extension of the Shepherds and Potters and Gardeners and such at this stage. We do have a couple of Hunters to read about, but that's as close as I can come.'

Snikwad lay on the altar pretending to throw a fit, with one end of a long plastic tube strapped to his arm and the other end in a half-consumed bottle of red wine.

Satan burst out laughing at the sight of this charade.

Snikwad opened one eye and grinned mischievously.

An unimpressed Hitch picked up on the reference immediately. 'Blood transfusions: this passage is where certain believers believe blood transfusions are said to go against the Word of God.'

'But they wouldn't have dreamed of blood transfusions in 2347 BCE ...?'

'No, but many cultures did drink blood in their religious ceremonies. This passage has Yahweh say: _"But flesh with the soul (or life) thereof, which is its blood, ye shall not eat",_ ' Hitch read from the Jubilee Bible 2000. 'Blood, I suggest, has a metaphorical meaning in the way Bread and Flesh and Naked do, but I suspect the Yahwists were also proscribing the traditional Israelite practice of blood drinking.'

'Christians pretend to drink the blood of Jesus, and their culture originated in Israel.'

'Precisely, Atrabilious Perspicacity: Christians ceremonially eat the flesh and drink the blood of the human sacrifice, Jesus the Christ. Some see it as symbolic, but others believe the bread and the wine literally transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of Jesus. However, Jesus is also believed to have been a descendant of the line of King David. I propose that the Davidians were the corrupt Elohists who insisted the common folk accept them as Sons of the Gods. I further propose that the Elohists engaged in the practice of human sacrifice, and of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their human sacrifices.'

'And Jesus' followers tried to regain the throne and re-establish these old practises by declaring the execution of their failed leader to be a human sacrifice for human sin.'

'Quite so, Mendacity: I see today's Jewish community as following the beliefs of the Yahwist reformers who viewed the old human-sacrifice practices as primitive and barbaric. The Christian Jews of Jesus' time – and subsequent Christians of all ethnic backgrounds – have inherited adaptations of the god-king, human-sacrifice, blood-drinking beliefs of pre-Reformation Jewish culture.'

'And some Christians prohibit blood-transfusions for their terminally sick children, yet continue to pretend to drink the blood of Jesus?'

'Only the 144,000 anointed ones who are bound for Heaven and eternity with Jesus may partake of the symbolic blood.'

Snikwad pulled a cloth bag over his head and placed a noose around his neck, and marched himself solemnly along the altar with the rope held high above his head.

'Capital punishment,' declared Hitch, once again grasping Snikwad's meaning. 'If ever Bible-following humans have qualms over the practice of capital punishment for murder, they need only come to Genesis Chapter 9, Verse 6: _"Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of the Elohim have the Elohim made mankind."._ '

'In the image of the Elohim, you say. But earlier you made the point that the Yahwists seem to tell us that their new mud-man Adam was deliberately NOT created in the image of Yahweh. Why, if the Yahwists re-wrote these allegorical myths, would they leave such a blatant belief in, Hitch? Your Reformation Hypothesis looks a bit threadbare right here.'

Snikwad pulled the bag off his head and glared at Hitch.

'Many times I ask myself these sorts of questions, Atramentous Lord: and sometimes I am at a loss to explain certain of the numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bibles. However, I speculate that the men of my Reformation Hypothesis were re-writing some very well-known myths for people of their own time. They were people who regarded Yahweh as one of the many Elohim deities. Yahweh – even without the Documentary or Reformation Hypotheses – was not God with a capital G for the Israelites in the way that he is for believers today. The Yahwist reformers would have had to run a campaign of compromise and syncretism over many generations to gradually bring about the eventual belief that Yahweh was the One True Creator God since The Beginning. The untidy mixing of Yahweh as the dominant deity into the familiar old Elohim myths and beliefs looks to me to be part of that process. Christians do precisely the same in mixing Jesus with "pagan" theology'

'You mentioned human sloppiness before ....'

'Yes, the Yahwists may not have considered Genesis and other re-written writings to be "Scripture" in the way believers do today. No one in Genesis claims that the book of Genesis is the word any of the gods. I mentioned too that the Yahwists had their own book, which we call Deuteronomy. This – the book of their possibly-fictional prophet, Moses – _was_ , in my mind, Scriptural to them. Deuteronomy contains almost nothing of this fantastical-yet-allegorical mythology we have been reading here. I suspect the Yahwists re-wrote Genesis and other early writings to promote Yahweh as the new Lord of the Elohim; provide allegorical narratives of their reformation; defame Jesus' corrupt ancestors; blame it all on women, and demonstrate just how primitive, superstitious and barbaric the old Elohist culture was. They may have been somewhat insouciant in their execution of the re-writing, because it didn't really matter greatly to them: Deuteronomy was where it was _really_ at.'

Snikwad perched himself on the top edge of the screen with his knees up by his ears and his substantial testicles left dangling.

'For fuck sake, Snikwad,' roared Satan. 'How many times do I have to tell you ...?'

Hitch didn't blink as Snikwad skittered away and hid himself behind a stack of mouldering hymn books. If it weren't for the risk of damaging the screen, Satan would have hurled the spittoon after him.

'What was the obscene little brute trying to tell us this time?'

'Testiculation, Cacodemonic Turpitude: he was referencing the ancient practice of testiculation when making a deal, or a covenant.'

'I'm not sure I want to hear about this ....'

'When certain men-of-old made a deal, they were known to seal it by either sucking each other's nipples or taking hold of each other's testicles. The word "testament", as used in relation to the Bibles, may possibly come from the time-honoured tradition of testiculation. To permit someone to take hold of your family jewels, or suck your nipple, demonstrates a very high level of trust, and/or demonstrates your superiority over them.'

'So for Christians, their Bibles are really made up of the Old Testiculation and the New Testiculation?'

'That's not how they like to see it, and they go to some lengths to demonstrate that they're not. But I like to think they really are. The word "testament" comes from the Roman language of Latin, and has a very strong link with "testicle" and "testify". Not only that, the popes – the leaders of the Christian Church of Rome – had one or more thrones called _sedia stercoraria_ , which were for all-the-world like large commodes, whereby the Holy Father's unrestrained stones may be permitted to swing freely. Numerous hypotheses have been put forward as to the actual purpose of these seats. Biblical-style testiculation may have continued in Mediaeval Christian Europe.'

'The Bibles are full of all sorts of icky things Christians don't like.'

'And there are many more to come, Iniquity. But Mr Snikwad has perhaps got a bit ahead of himself: testicles aren't directly mentioned until other covenants are made later in Genesis. The Hebrew word _berit_ is used here, and it means to "bind together". But if Noah and the Elohim did do something testicular, it would not have raised so much as an eyebrow back then.'

'So what's this Noahide testiculation/covenant/binding deal all about, Hitch?'

Snikwad slunk out from behind the hymn books to listen.

'Rainbows, Malfeasant Perdition: prior to Yahweh's punitive Global Flood, it had never actually rained inside the Dome of Heaven.'

'OK ....'

'There was only the mist from Creation Two, but no rain: and therefore no rainbow had ever been witnessed by any of the 137 billion Yahweh-rejecting, antediluvian inhabitants.'

'Right ....'

'Then the Elohim said, _"I am giving you a sign of my covenant with you and with all living creatures, for all generations to come. I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth. When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will appear in the clouds, and I will remember my covenant with you and with all living creatures. Never again will the floodwaters destroy all life. When I see the rainbow in the clouds, I will remember the eternal covenant between God and every living creature on earth."_ , Hitch read from the New Living Translation.

'This looks like another pre-scientific "God did it" explanation for ancient folks who had never heard of the refraction of light,' said Satan. 'And we're to take it that rainbows didn't exist before this event, because the absent-minded Yahweh latterly puts them in the sky to remind himself that every time he is overcome by jealousy and wrath and loses the plot and reaches for the window winder and bath plug again, he's supposed to remember his testiculation with Noah & Sons.'

'So the writers tell do us, Duplicitous Percipience. But I suspect the rainbows originally came from the Shaddai and the Elohim,' said Hitch. 'Yahweh isn't named in this passage.'

'Well God – whether it's the Elohim or Yahweh or the Tooth Fairy – isn't very omniscient if "God" needs to put reminders in the sky.'

'Back in Jesus' day and earlier, folks didn't think of Divinity as a single, distant, invisible, one-and-only, supreme-being-in-the-sky the way Christians do today. For them, the gods were often more like humans with superpowers. And like humans, they too were fickle and couldn't always be trusted. After all, we've just seen the psychologically unstable Jewish deity flip out and arbitrarily flood the entire dome and drown all the non-Jews who'd never heard of him. And when we read of Yahweh fluttering down from the clouds for a stroll in the Library of Eden; or conducting murder investigations; or we read of the Elohim walking with Mother No-Ah, we realise the ancients from the Middle East believed humans had a far closer and more intimate person-to-deity relationship with their Divinity concepts than believers do today.'

'Ah but sinners still love to get up close and personal with ME you know, Hitch, because I'm everywhere,' gloated the King of the Bottomless Pit.

'You continue to tempt men's hearts in every age, oh Great Prince of the Power of the Air, until the rainbow be gone from the sky, and famine and pestilence be upon the earth, and the Lord Jesus Christ returns with fire, and the angel binds you with a great chain for a thousand years?'

'Are you on drugs Hitch...?'

'No.'

'What was that?'

'Revelation from the Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith Jnr,' answered Hitch.

'Him again.'

'Jesus used to talk to him.'

'Of course he did.'

'Joseph Smith wrote in his Commentary on the Bible about the following conversation he had with Jesus: _I have asked of the Lord_ (the Lord means Jesus this time and not Yahweh) _concerning his coming, and while asking, the Lord_ (Jesus) _gave me a sign and said: "In the days of Noah I set a bow in the heavens as a sign and token that in any year that the bow should be seen, the Lord would not come; but there should be seed time and harvest during that year. But whenever you see the bow withdraw, it shall be a token that there shall be famine, pestilence, and great distress among the nations."_.'

'So Jesus told Joseph Smith that if you don't see a rainbow for a year, it means Jesus is on his way back to Earth with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the armies of angels to wipe out the non-Christians, while the born-again Christians are raptured up to Heaven to spend eternity with their Lord. And I get tied up with a big chain for a thousand years.'

'Yes.'

'Does Prophet Smith back it up with independently verifiable evidence?'

'Nobody ever does. That's not how people of faith do things when religious truths have been revealed to them,' answered Hitch. 'But by the same token, humans _can_ produce independently verifiable evidence that Joseph Smith himself did exist. They can't do that for either Jesus or Moses.'

'Maybe it's the Mormons who've got it right after all, Hitch. Do they believe in me ...?' the Son of Perdition enquired hopefully.

'Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan were BOTH Sons of God in The Beginning.'

'Yes ... yes ... yes ...!' shrieked Satan, taking to his wings and rushing out to howl and whoop through the caverns and torture chambers and set the demons off in a deafening frenzy of excitement.

He was gone for what seemed like an eternity, before he finally returned and settled himself on the comfy chair in front of the screen. 'I think we may be on a winner with the Mormons here, Hitch.'

Hitch knew better than to disagree.

Snikwad had managed to tip the bottle of wine he had been using for his blood transfusion onto its side, and was noisily slurping the contents.

'I thought you had more than your fill of that last night, Snikwad,' scolded the Prince of the Underworld.

Snikwad shook his head and pretended to pass out spreadeagled in front of the others.

'I hope Snikwad can still hear me,' Satan threatened loudly. 'Because Snikwad is going to end up like Hitch in about three fucking seconds if he keeps this up ...!'

Snikwad was no longer there.

'What was that all about?' demanded Satan.

'The very pinnacle of religious evolution,' replied Hitch mysteriously.

'Make it good, Hitch ....'

'Certainly, Mendacious Atrabiliousness. After the Flood, Noah became a man of the soil and planted a vineyard.'

'Nothing remarkable there.'

'Not on the surface, Acherontic Bleakness, but our old friend Barbara Thiering demonstrates that planting a Vineyard means starting a religious mission. The new "Noah" of a much later Circle of Time established a new religious order. The fruit of his – or their – labours was known as Wine.'

'Of course ...!' exclaimed Satan. 'Humans had evolved to where they could understand Flesh, and now they can comprehend Wine: the most complex scripture of all.'

'Only the higher-level priests were permitted to read Wine,' Hitch explained. 'Ordinary believers had to make do with the simpler Water.'

'And turning Water into Wine wouldn't be such a miraculous thing to do.'

'No magical-miracle at all, Tenebrific Lord: we have our feet very firmly planted in the soil of symbolism here. If the Noah character of this allegorical myth references a number of individuals or cultures living through repetitions of similar histories, we can see that Noah first evolved to the level of Carpenter, then to what I call Hunter, and now to what I term Vigneron.'

'OK, but the literal vision of Father Noah and his family living happily-ever-after in their vineyard on a freshly-cleansed Earth, sounds far too rustically simple and pleasant to be a Bible story. Something nasty is going to happen any minute, isn't it Hitch?'

'In the very next verse, Despondency.'

Snikwad poked his nose out from under the Bone Throne where he had been hiding. He didn't want to miss any of the adventure.

' _Noah drank some of the wine, got drunk, and lay down naked right in the middle of his tent,_ ' Hitch read from the International Standard Version.

'OK ... OK ... I see what you were telling us a moment ago, Snikwad,' called Satan, pointing up to where he knew Snikwad had been hiding. 'You were simply witnessing to the Word of God, so you cannot possibly have been doing anything disgusting. Come back down here.'

In three bounds the sprite was at the bottom of the stairs and back up on his master's left shoulder.

'Christian kiddies in Sunday school put on nativity plays about Jesus, and they cutely re-enact the David and Goliath and the Moses in Egypt stories for their elders and peers. How are they with this one, Hitch...?' beamed the Prince of Darkness.

'Not part of the curriculum I strongly suspect, Risible Damnation,' answered Hitch, returning the expected smile. 'What the Yahwists seem to be telling us here is that the "Noah" of the Circle of Time prior to their reformation had overindulged and become corrupt. In the surface story here however, Noah's son Ham saw his father's nakedness, and went and reported it to his brothers Shem and Japheth who were outside the tent.'

'Ah, Nakedness, Hitch: you suggested Nakedness could mean a lack of religious knowledge ...?'

'Precisely what I think is going on here. The Ham character in our story represents a later religiopolitical faction known as the Hamites. The Yahwists were pro-Hamitic, and they are telling us that the Hamites revealed the corruption and Nakedness of Jesus' ancestors.'

'And what do folks who take this tale as literal history make of it?'

'An absolutely enormous amount of speculation has gone into interpreting the story. One idea that was particularly popular amongst Jewish rabbinic scholars and early Christian fathers, was that Ham had either sodomised or castrated Noah.'

Snikwad crossed his legs and once again brought up on the screen, for the purpose of review, one of the numerous faithful photographic reproductions of a two-dimensional work of art from the Sistine Chapel.

'For God's sake,' exclaimed Satan in frustration. 'We've got four full sets of male genitalia on open display once again from the boys at the Vatican. Their celibate Holy Eminences are obviously demonstrating that in their ecclesiastical opinions, all the males from the Ark remained "complete", because Noah has not been castrated here. More than half the Roman Catholic priests in the 21st Century are understood to be homosexual, so I'm sure I don't want to know what their predecessors fantasised about Ham sodomising his father. Snikwad, turn that thing off and LEAVE IT OFF ....'

'Another explanation,' Hitch continued cautiously. 'Is that Ham had snuck into the tent while his father was sleeping off the wine, and got to know his mother biblically. Or then again, it has been speculated that maybe Ham had spied Noah having it away with someone other than Mrs. Noah.'

'And because the only righteous human in the dome was monogamous, this "someone other" could only have been one of his daughters-in-law,' Satan put in.

'Quite so, Flagitiousness. But Shem and Japheth had a clever solution to the delicate problem they faced. In fact they didn't face it all, and unlike the full-frontal display at the Vatican, they simply took a garment and laid it across their shoulders and walked backwards into the tent. With their gaze averted from the horror that was their drunken naked father, they covered him until he sobered up.'

'So if the Ham faction had revealed the corruption and religious Nakedness of the Noah Vineyard, we can infer that the Shemitic and Japhethite factions turned their backs and covered it up.'

'It's common or garden human politics we're looking at here, Baneful Nefariousness. Not as gripping as fantastical myths of wrathful deities and magic boats and global floods perhaps, but fascinating in their own right nonetheless. When Father Noah finally woke up from his stupor, he had a particularly foul hangover and cursed Ham's son Canaan.'

'What had Canaan done?'

'Nothing as far as we know. But, it is speculated by those who love to speculate on the sins of others, that Ham may have had sex on the ark. Because it was a biblical Ark, the sin of sex was forbidden. If Canaan was the product of Ham's sin, Canaan had to be cursed.'

'That's unjust ...!'

'It's the Word of God.'

'Ah... now you also said the Yahwists may have used the old scriptures to demonstrate just how primitive and barbaric and unjust the old cultural beliefs were. Perhaps that's what we're seeing here.'

'Perhaps indeed, Vituperativeness,' Hitch agreed. 'Noah's curse on Canaan is also said to be a prophecy.'

'It's fortune-telling ...?'

'Not if it's in the Bible. If it's in the bible it's prophecy.'

'OK.'

'When we look at the New Revised Standard Version, we find that Noah says: _"Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers." He_ (Noah) _also said, "Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.",_ ' Hitch read.

Snikwad leapt down from Satan's shoulder and flipped open numerous versions of the Bible to the passage in question.

'Hmm... looks like some translators are squeamish about this "slave" business. They choose to use the word "servant" instead,' Satan noted as he moved from text to text.

'Biblical slavery is another of the many, many things certain believers wish weren't actually in the Bibles,' said Hitch. 'But the prophecy right here isn't really a prophecy at all. The enslavement of the unfortunate Canaan had quite literally happened by the time this was written, and the Yahwists were once again putting genuine human history into an allegorical myth.'

'Go on ....'

'In real Middle East history, the Canaanites – or Phoenicians – of whom the Israelites were almost certainly a sub-group, were conquered and turned into slaves by people from the East. In the surface story this myth, the people who spread out after the Flood to repopulate the eastern part of the dome were the descendants of Noah's son, Shem. They became known as Shemites, or Semites. By the time of the Yahwist Reformation, and the re-writing of this allegorical myth, the Canaanites had been slaves of the Semites for quite some time.'

'Are Chinese people Semites?'

'No. The biblical dome did not extend as far as China,' Hitch explained. 'The descendants of Noah's son, Japheth, on the other hand, spread out to repopulate the Northwest of the dome, in what we now think of as Europe.'

'Are European people Japhethites?'

'Yes they most definitely are believed to be,' Hitch assured him. 'Certain Christians will quite gladly tell you they are directly descended from the biblical Japheth. Later in real history, however, people we may think of as Japhethites extended their territory to conquer the old Semitic empires, and turn the Semites into slaves. The Canaanites then became, quite literally, slaves of slaves, just like it says here. It's not prophecy, it had already happened. Remembering that the oldest texts we have of these allegorised myths are from about 150 years before Jesus, we may offer that the Yahwists were simply using the allegories to explain to their fellow Canaanites in the Jordan River region the reason for them having just been conquered by "Japhethites".'

'Are Africans the sons of Ham, Hitch?'

'Umm ... yes. That is also believed to be true.'

'And for centuries, good God-fearing Biblicists of many persuasions have used this passage as righteous justification for enslaving African people?'

'This passage – together with the passage where Yahweh supposedly zaps the evil Cain and turns him black – make powerful biblical arguments for the enslavement of black people. Arguing against the slavery of black people would be going against the Word of God. While Christianity held a vice-like grip on so many human minds, very few were willing to do that. The Bible-obsessed Confederate States of America and the United States of America fought a civil war largely on the issue, with casualties as high as 850,000 dead.'

Snikwad clattered away on the keyboard until he came across a site quoting some very interesting Mormon doctrines and discourses from the USA.

Satan immediately lost his recent fervour for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

'Look at this,' he bellowed. ' _"But let them apostatize, and they will become gray-haired, wrinkled, and black, just like the Devil"_ , wrote someone called Brigham Young. How dare they say I'm wrinkled!? I'll make it their latter days alright ...!'

'And how about this little gem,' he sputtered. 'Apostle Bruce R. McConkie tells the faithful in his Mormon Doctrine: _"Cain, Ham, and the whole negro race have been cursed with a black skin, the mark of Cain, so they can be identified as a caste apart, a people with whom the other descendants of Adam should not intermarry."_ '

'And this Brigham Young – the second President and Prophet – further informs us in the Journal of Discourses: _"Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which was the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race – that they should be the "servants of servants;" and they will be until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree."_ '

'He also writes: _"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so."_ And they went and named a university after this Brigham Young person.'

'The founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jnr. is reported to have written: _"Had I anything to do with the negro, I would confine them by strict law to their own species, and put them on a national equalization."_ He was not only President of the Church, he was also Mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois USA, commander of the Nauvoo Legion state militia force, a justice of the peace, a university chancellor, and allegedly husband to many wives – some of whom, it is said, were already married to certain of his closest followers. He is also reported to have written: _"Thursday, 8 – Held Mayor's court and tried two negroes for attempting to marry two white women: fined one $25, and the other $5."_

'Will my Crepuscular Master perhaps not be joining the Latter Day Saints in these the latter days of the world ...?'

'Don't push it, Hitch.'

'Forgiveness, Perfidy. This might be a good time to point out, however, that the Saints of the Latter Days believe it was actually your very good self who flooded the biblical dome.'

'What ...?'

'It wasn't the Elohim, or Yahweh, or even Jesus. One John Taylor, the third President and – of course – Prophet states: _"When he [Satan] destroyed the inhabitants of the antediluvian_ (there's that word again) _worlds, he suffered a descendant of Cain to come through the flood in order that he might be properly represented upon the earth."_

'So it was _me_ who opened the windows of the dome and released the fountains of the deep. And I also let the black-skinned Ham onto the ark to properly represent my Satanic evil amongst good white Christians. This stuff is just imagination piled on imagination, Hitch. The reason nobody ever offers a shred of good hard evidence is because there ISN'T any good hard evidence for any of the magical, miracle, supernatural "revealed" delusions of credulous human minds.'

'Imaginings piled upon imaginings are how religions work, Equanimous Rancour. And if you're amongst fellow believers, and you're telling them what they want to hear – especially if they believe you're having direct conversations with someone like Jesus – they will willingly accept whatever embellishments, interpretations and revelations you apply to the existing texts. And they'll even go so far as to accept it if, like Joseph Smith Jnr., you find golden plates with new texts written on them in a language only you can read with your magic spectacles. Did you know Yahweh created and destroyed other worlds before he created and nearly destroyed this one?'

'No.'

'As far as I can tell, we first hear about it in the Jewish _Bereshit Rabbah_ "The Expansion on Genesis".'

'By an "expansion" – you mean an expansion in the way Joseph Smith and company expanded the Bible without direct authorisation from either Yahweh or Jesus?'

'It looks that way, Crepuscularity,' said Hitch, reading the screen. 'Commenting on the first creation myth, Rabbi Judah b. R. Simon wrote approximately: _"_ Let there BE evening _" is not written here, but_ "And there WAS evening" _is what's actually written \- hence we know that a time order existed BEFORE this world was created._ The emphasis is mine. Rabbi Abbahu then wrote approximately: _This proves that the Holy One (Yahweh), blessed be He, went on creating worlds and destroying them until He created this one and declared,_ "This world pleases Me; those other worlds did not please Me." _._ '

'So Rabbi Abbahu puts words in Yahweh's mouth in much the same way Joseph Smith and countless other "prophets" put words in Jesus' mouth, and this is perfectly legitimate because it's religion?'

'If you stick to the rules that is indeed how the game is played. You just need to figure out what the rules are at any particular time, because the rules change according to human fashion,' said Hitch. 'Aha, I see the trolls arriving with supper, Narcoleptic Malfeasance: I wonder if we might conclude today's biblical adventures with an item of poignant irony?'

'Supper ... brilliant stuff ... but just a quiet one tonight Snikwad,' Satan called. 'I've seen rather too much of you already today.'

Snikwad smiled affectionately and rubbed himself into his Master's cheek.

'Irony away,' commanded Satan, harpooning a devil on horseback with the talon of his left forefinger.

'The Creation Museum in Kentucky has been described some as a "monument to ignorance",' said Hitch, reaching for a shiny hardcover book from Columbia University. 'It not really a museum as such: it's a biblical theme park masquerading as a scientific institution, in my view. The stance is biblical literalism to the letter, coupled with the usual complete absence of independently verifiable evidence for creationism. Fossils, creationist belief generally has it, were all formed in a single year, during the catastrophic, geology-shifting, 10,000 cubit, dome-filling flood sent by Yahweh at the end of the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty. Donald R. Prothero writes in this book I have here "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters", that _"In a supreme twist of irony, Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky is built upon the famous Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati Arch, which span millions of years of the later Ordovician. If you poke around the slopes all around the area (as I have often), you will find hundreds of finely laminated layers of shales and limestones, each full of delicate fossils of trilobites and bryozoans and brachiopods preserved in life position that could never have been disturbed by flood waters—and each layer of hundreds represents another community of marine organisms that grew and lived and then was gently buried in fine silts and clays. There is no possibility these hundreds of individual layers of delicately preserved fossils were deposited in a single Noah's flood"._ '

'Amen, brothers and sisters,' pronounced Satan in benediction to the assembled multitude.

'Amen ... Amen ... Amen,' the thrice-blessed throng responded.

Hitch placed "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters" prominently on the altar, and once more loaded an abundant platter with choice delicacies, and retired to set his mind to the Fourth Revelation.

Finis

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Further SGB Revelations

A seriously humorous review.

Satan's Guide to the Bible is new; it's unique: nothing remotely like it exists.

Satan and his minions, Hitch and Snikwad, begin at the Beginning and embark on a journey that takes them through fantastical tales that include: _Light of the Elohim; Yahweh's Re-Creation Day;_ _Eve and the Talking Serpent; Mother No-Ah's Ark; Father Noah's Hangover; The Wicked Sodomites Go Blind; The Scandal in the Cave; Tamar Turns a Trick; Holocaust of the Hivites; Joseph's Magic Wine Goblet_ and all the sex, drugs, money, murder and mayhem that somehow never quite make it into the weekly sermon.

On the way they discover that the Jewish deity Yahweh is as mythological as the Greek Zeus, the Norse Thor, the Hindu Brahma and everyone else's concept of what God may possibly be. Not only is the biblical Yahweh not God with a capital "G", the genocidal old man in the sky is an interloper and very much a newcomer to the business of being an imaginary, lowercase "g" ethnic god. Certain senior priests and pastors and rabbis know this perfectly well – they just keep it to themselves.

Under the fictional fables of angels and virgins and talking donkeys, however, lie what appear to be layer upon layer of ingeniously allegorised human history – genuine history from long before the time of the new Yahweh. The males-only priests of the male Yahweh look to have used well-known myths as cover stories for their Yahwist Reformation: when they evicted Jesus' corrupt, human-sacrificing, blood-drinking, god-king ancestors from the temple in Jerusalem; blamed women for the corruption, and rewrote many of the biblical writings as political slander... and gave them a curiously anti-Semitic overtone.

The growing ebook series features the Reformation Hypothesis, the Circles of Time, the Bastard Kings of Israel and other exclusive new propositions.

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**Revelation 2** takes Satan, Hitch and Snikwad back to way before the Beginning and into the religious evolution of the dark, water-filled, pre-Creation biblical universe, and the mysteries of the two highly contradictory versions of intelligently designed biblical creation science mythology.

Did the ancient Elohim deities create everything in six days? Did the misogynous new Yahweh deity re-create everything in a single day? Did Jesus – or even the Holy Ghost – play any part at all? Were multiple humans who looked like gods the very last living things created? Was a lone male mud-man who maybe _didn't_ look like a god the very first living thing created? And was the planet's first Homo sapiens female created from one of the mud-man's ribs in an act of divine surgery about 6,000 years ago? Was the mythological Middle East Garden of Eden actually in Jackson County, Missouri? So many questions...!

Our adventurous boys from the Sacred Grotto answer with the proposition that fantastical tales like _Light of the Elohim;_ _Yahweh's Re-Creation Day; Two Magic Fruit Trees_ ; _Adam's Good-Servant-Rib-Wife_ , and _Eve and the Talking Serpent_ were literally true only for quaint folk. The Jewish and pre-Jewish priests who wrote and re-wrote them didn't take them literally. They look to be ingenious historical allegories that are cover stories for some very real human politics and history... and downright personal slander that has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's version of "God".

The Diabolical Trio also find that to decode the enigma of why the trees were created before the sun, it is necessary to first recognise why Tyrannosaurus rex were vegetarian; fish didn't eat porridge until they evolved into sheep, and the Adam Family looked like Jesus... but fire-breathing biblical leviathans didn't.

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