Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Go Ask Moses

Friday, June 12, 2015

Go Ask Moses

with apologies to Jefferson Airplane and Jehovah

One plague makes Nile redder

And one plague makes frogs fall

And the calf that Aaron made you

Won't do anything at all

Go ask Moses

Of his ten great laws

And if you go chasing rabbis

And you know Eve's going to fall

Tell 'em an apple-toting evil serpent

Has made her drop the ball

Spare Isaac

When he was just small

When a man on mount Sinai

climbs up then tells you where to go

And you've just read some kind of midrash

And your mind is on the Law

Go ask Moses

I think he'll know

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the Torah is written backwards

Holferness off with his head

Remember what the Pagans said

"Round your head"

5 comments:

DB said...: This has a bit of klezmer feel to it http://matounoir.bandcamp.com/track/white-rabbit; 12:11 AM
Anonymous said...: This is why I try to read this blog religiously.; 5:58 PM
JimV said...: Pretty good, but it raises the subject of the Moses story, which I claim contains some things inconsistent with sense - aside from plagues and staffs changing into snakes and Red-Sea parting. I'm thinking of the Golden Calf bit. These people have seen all the plagues (including the murder of first-born sons in which the Angel of Death needed signs posted to tell it which homes contained Israelites) and the parting and unparting of the Red Sea, and still some 30-40% of them decide they can make a better god to protect them by melting some trinkets and casting them into the shape of a calf? Is that how gods were made in those days - you just make them up? Secondly, Moses gets back with some laws carved into stone (coincidentally the very technology of the time), which say among other things, "Thou shalt not murder," ... and his gang proceeds to murder all the GC worshippers.

Try telling that to the young people of today - they won't believe you! (Yes, I think this would make a good Monty Python bit.); 5:19 AM
Robert said...: I didn't actaully mean every word I typed in this post. Being an atheist, I have never been inclined to go ask Moses.

Actually, I think Moses managed his high point in the Koran. Story is Muhammad goes to talk with Allah who says people have to pray 30 times a day. Muhammad is horrified as as he is wandering down to earth he runs into Moses, who says no way people gonna pray 30 times a day, you gotta go back and tell that Guy to be Reasonable.

So Muhammad goes back and haggles Allah down to 9 times a day. He tells Moses who says now you have Him right where you want Him. Once he admits that this bit about praying isn't written in stone (you know prophet bragging) he won't be able to draw the line at 9.

So Muhammad goes back to Allah and (amazingly without even saying he's got to consider Shaitan's offer before signing anything) gets Allah down to 5.

I'm not sure I translated it from Arabic correctly, but I do think this is in the Koran unlike certain satanic verses.

Man made God in his own image and before he was a prophet Muhammad was a business man.

On the other hand killing the image graveners right after reading "Thou shalt not kill" was bush league, and I do suspect that the Angel of the Lord had co-conspirators. For more Moses snark, you might want to read "The Tables of the Law" by Thomas Mann. I has the additional advantage of being less than 1% as long as "Joseph and His Brothers."; 6:20 AM
lou said...: "Thou shall not murder" - the hebrew translates as 'murder', not 'kill' - was commandment number 6. Commandment #2 included "thou shall not make for yourself any graven image".
Moses had the monopoly on legitimate violence, and worshipping a god other than The God represented an existential threat to the moral and political order that was the product of the lawgiving. Not to mention that there was likely a political challenge to Moses latent in some of the calf worshipping clique. Those killed were a relatively small % of the population. The urgency with which the levites were commanded to fight shows that the goal was more a restoration of order and Mosaic leadership than a witchhunt for people who worshipped incorrectly.
Also if you don't think the masses can be quickly led to follow some new leader despite having been well served by the old leader, you haven't studied much history.; 3:18 PM