since we're having so much fun with Abraham, I thought I'd toss in a story I wrote about the actual history of the BoA:
God Said to Abraham....
By the time God approached Abraham about killing his son Isaac He was beginning to wonder if He would ever find someone gullible enough to collude with Him on His next little project. He had tried it with a half dozen other would-be prophets but they all said, “hell no, do you own killing!” Abraham wasn’t His first choice mind you, but he was pleaser, and he had never once turned down a calling. A few days later Abraham led Isaac up the hill. You know the rest of the story. That evening God was replaying the whole narrative with the angel through gasps of laughter. “Did you see the look on Abe’s face when you popped in out of nowhere right at the last moment and grabbed his wrist?”
If you haven’t guessed by now, God is a bit of a joker. The only reason He did the Abraham thing in the first place was so someday Bob Dylan would write a song about it. Despite what you might have heard in church, God likes people, partially in spite of their gullibility and partially because of it. Even so, He is constantly amazed at how seriously they have taken Him over the millennia, and the degree to which they will go to cajole Him into helping them win a basketball game or obliterate an enemy. And the keys! For crying out loud people, just put them back on the damn hook!
A little background about God. He likes to call himself Elohim these days but if we could turn the clock back a million years or so we would see that he started his eternal progression as a mediocre middle manager in an O-ring factory on a now-obliterated-by-last-day-tribulations planet in a galaxy far far away. Back then he went by the name Tod McFomalhout, a dull but scrupulously religious man who dressed neatly, went to church every week, paid eleven percent tithing and, like Abraham, never turned down a calling. Basically, he did everything he could think of to not piss off his god and win the golden ticket. All of this eventually qualified him to become a god himself, once the smoldering apocalypse had cooled. Just like you will be if you do all of the stuff Tod...I mean… Elohim demands of you. Elohim’s friends Ashur, Zeus, Marduk and Osirus were also O-ring men on their respective planets of origin, who obeyed completely different sets of rules laid down by their various gods. That’s mainly why they hang out together; they have a lot in common. Oh, and they all share common interests in smiting and gay bashing.
So God needed someone like Abraham for a little practical joke, possibly his best one since He buried all of those phony dinosaur bones a few thousand years ago. Like the dinosaur bone thing, this would be a sort of a test of the credulity of humans. See, God had a little problem He needed to nip in the bud. If Satan continued to reign with blood, horror, and political correctness on this earth as efficiently as had been doing up to this point, God would eventually no longer going to be able test people by telling them to sacrifice their kids. Damn bleeding heart liberals. But, having had pretty good luck with books in the past (a surprisingly high percentage of people will believe anything if it’s in an old book), God decided to have Abraham jump into the literary foray to help Him craft an entirely new kind of loyalty test. It would work like this: give the people a book of scripture that was so obviously full of logic holes that they would have to completely give up on trusting their own critical thinking skills again. Total surrender. That would really make it easy to sort people neatly into either the whose-on-the-Lord’s-side-who bin or the stiffnekkid bin for the latter-day smiting.
So God taught Abraham “Egyptian.” But, joker that He is, what He really taught him was a bunch of bogus nonsense words that He claimed were Egyptian, even though He was just making them up off the top of His head. God gave Abraham hilariously wrong definitions for real Egyptian characters. For instance, He told him the characters that translate as “copulating bull without equal,” really mean "will be given in the own due time of the Lord". But Abraham was slow to catch on and seemed to be having a lot of fun with the project. God even won the bet with Odin who said Abraham would never fall for it, and who by the way, still owes God a Coke.
Believe it or not, Abraham was actually living in Egypt at the time, so he was surrounded by people who actually could read and write Egyptian. This was a bit of a problem. The pharaoh, who called himself King Pharaoh just to mess with Abe, pointed out that the “angel” Abraham had drawn was really the Ba of Horus, that those four figures along the bottom were not the corners of the earth at all, but were just jars are for storing a dead guy’s vitals. “This thing is pretty much gibberish front to back,” said King Pharaoh.
Deeply embarrassed, Abraham stomped out into the desert, where God usually keeps office hours, and yelled, “Geez, God, what’s the deal? You’re really making me look bad down here.” But God just said, “Don’t listen to that moron Pharaoh. For one thing, he only speaks ordinary pedestrian Egyptian. The stuff I’m teaching you is Reformed Egyptian. It’s not your problem that he didn’t pay attention in school.” That made Abraham feel so much better he completely forgot item two on his list, which was to complain to Elohim about all the time Pharoah has been spending with his wife. You might think that was entirely Abraham’s own fault for telling Pharaoh that Sariah was his sister, but it was God who told him lie about it, and could never quite figure out why, but he decided it would be best just to let it slide for now, considering how God gets kind of knife-y with your kids at the slightest provocation.
Whatever else you say about God you gotta admit that he has quite a sense of humor. You would probably enjoy hanging out with Him if you could overlook his darker moods when He does stuff like global genocide and creating creatures that can only survive by eating other creatures from the inside out. This Book of Abraham thing, for example, is chock full of jokes that went right over Abe’s head. Let me give you some examples. God told Abraham to write various pieces of the story on a bunch of different papyri, and to randomly mix hieroglyphic characters with hieratic. “It works because it’s Reformed,” He said. Then He dictated a lot of what Abram thought was “thus saith the Lord” stuff but it was really just boring prayers to some of Elohim’s pagan god friends. When Abe asked Him why some of those Reformed Egyptian words, like Kokaubeam, looked and sounded just like Hebrew words God just shrugged and said, “whatever.” And Abraham was a native Hebrew speaker!
The best parts though were the pictures. In one of them God had Abe draw men dressed in drag just to embarrass the pretentious 21st century so-called intellectuals who would certainly mistake them for women. He had Abe put his buddy Anubis in there too, knowing full well that Abraham would jump to the conclusion that Anubis was a servant of some sort just because his skin was black. That really pissed Anubis off, as you might guess, because Elohim had actually been one of Anubis’ servants for a couple of centuries while he was eternal-progressing His way up the ladder. And then, just to see how thin he could stretch it, God sprinkled the Reformed Egyptian language with a bunch of words that were just so incredibly palm-facingly made up, like Zub zool (the first born), Zi oop hah (a young virgin), and Hoe oop hah phat heh (patriarchal government). Comedy gold.
God actually told Abraham to draw a self portrait in which he was just about to get stabbed by imaginary priests of imaginary gods just before the Ba of Horus showed up at the last moment to save him (God just couldn’t get enough of that narrative). And then… you’re gonna love this ... God tore out all of the important parts so Abraham’s scoll, after all his hard work, would look just like any other run-of-the-mill Egyptian magic scroll. You kind of feel sorry for Abraham.
Best of all was when God himself posed for one of the pictures and insisted that Abraham draw him with an enormous erection, and then he totally gaslighted Abe and for disrespecting The Great Architect of the Cosmos and made him push a rock up a hill in Hell for a hundred years as punishment. That one went over particularly well at poker night. Osiris laughed so hard he sprayed nectar through his nose.
Whenever Abraham would start to feel like something wasn’t quite right God would just stroke his ego by telling him stuff like how he had been one of the Great Ones before the world was, that He was going to hand over the deed to all of Mesopotamia to Abraham if he played his cards right, and how he was going to get so much sex that his kids would outnumber the grains of sand in the whole world. Stuff like that.
All in all Abraham did a pretty passable job with the book. Have you ever tried to write on papyrus with an egret feather? God sealed the deal by getting Abe’s great-grandson Joseph in on the joke to write a companion volume, also in “Reformed Egyptian.” Later, after Abraham had done his time in hell for the boner thing, he got wind of the Joseph book and went to God to respectfully point out some issues he was having with this. For one thing, anyone could see that Joseph’s book was nonsense. God hadn’t even torn out anything to hide that little fact. It was going to make it that much easier for those really smart people who were being saved for the Last Days to find fault with Abraham’s humble tome. What really bothered Abe though, that he wouldn’t admit out loud, was that Joseph’s penmanship was really good, and Abraham’s looked kind of amateurish by comparison.
“Listen Abe,” said God,”this thing isn’t just a test for those people, it’s a test for you too. You’ve done pretty well on tests before, so just trust me and bide your time here in the spirit world for another four thousand or so years until your book gets “translated” (God actually made air quotes with his fingers) by this ignorant plow-boy-slash-occultist I’m saving up for it. Just you wait and see, Abe, millions of people are going to give your book massive ratings.” So Abraham took up some hobbies and waited.
In the meantime God had really been messing with Abraham’s book. He stopped entropy on the papyri for a while to slow down their aging by 2000 years, he broke them into pieces, buried them with someone else’s mummy, let them get discovered by a treasure hunter to sell to the highest bidder, let the plow boy’s mom make some money off off them, put an intact copy in the Louvre, etc, etc. He even let them get lost in the Chicago fire to stall for time while someone figured out how to actually read Egyptian and then, ta da!, they turned up just in time to really embarrass a bunch of suits in Salt Lake City (of all places) who fancied themselves His mouthpieces on earth.
And yeah, a lot of people fell for it. To be honest, even after all of His work and planning, God felt a little bit guilty about that. In fact, he more or less lost interest in the whole project and walked away when those Salt Lake guys went soft on him and decided to let Cain’s kids in the club. Earthlings can find their own damn keys from now on! These days God hangs out on the far side of the moon wearing a spaghetti suit. Like I told you, this guy is really a lot of fun.
This just in! The real story behind the Book of Abraham
This just in! The real story behind the Book of Abraham
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” -Mark Twain
Jesus: "The Kingdom of God is within you." The Buddha: "Be your own light."
Jesus: "The Kingdom of God is within you." The Buddha: "Be your own light."
Re: This just in! The real story behind the Book of Abraham
In some impossible parallel universe a rogue hacker deep was deep in the bowels of the Church Office Building. In that universe, this fantastic story was inserted in the Gospel Topic Essays as an update to the Book of Abraham essay. Unfortunately, we don't live in the universe. I'm pretty sure at least.
Re: This just in! The real story behind the Book of Abraham
This should be in the next Ensign if I'm being honest... or maybe a new web series on the church's youth sites and have it narrated by Brother Jake?
- RubinHighlander
- Posts: 1906
- Joined: Tue Nov 08, 2016 7:20 am
- Location: Behind the Zion Curtain
Re: This just in! The real story behind the Book of Abraham
Put this up on ExmoReddit and see how viral it goes! Of course, you don't want to end up on the on the naughty list like Salman Rushdie.
I'd also like to see a narrated animated version with Brother Jake!
I'd also like to see a narrated animated version with Brother Jake!
“Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever.”
--Douglas Adams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzmYP3PbfXE
--Douglas Adams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzmYP3PbfXE