A collection of twisted Bible tales from the warped mind of J. R. Eldridge. Drawing from his fascination with religion and mythology, Eldridge takes the reader on a journey from the creation of the universe to the arrival of the Israelites in Egypt in this blasphemously funny retelling of the Book of Genesis.
A lonely deity creates the universe in his mother’s basement and makes a little clay man who falls in love with his own rib. After the humans engage in some freaky angel sex, God decides to flood the entire world, saving only a drunkard called Noah and his family.
Once the humans have repopulated the Earth, God chooses one man called Abram, drags him from his home in the middle of the night, changes his name, and then tells him to kill his son, forming an everlasting covenant with him and his descendants.
Later, Jacob steals his brother’s birthmark, boinks his cousins, and comes up with an innovative way to breed sheep. He fathers a dozen kids including Joseph, whose brothers get tired of his dreams of grandeur and sell him to some shapeshifting Ishmaelites who take him to Egypt.
The author invites readers to look up the original verses to see how much of the absurdity comes from his warped imagination, and how much comes from the original stories.
Targeted Age Group:: 18+
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
I've always been interested in the Bible despite being irreligious. For a laugh, I set up a Twitter account where I posted parody Bible verses and started to collect them in a Word document. I mentioned to a friend that I'd collected enough material to write full stories, and they thought it would be great if I did, so, as I've been writing stories since childhood, I decided I would write full parody stories.
I wrote stories from various books of the Bible, but I focused mainly on Genesis. When I had covered most of the stories of Genesis, I thought it would be good to collect them into a book, so I finished the Genesis stories, made sure that they all fit together logically, and compiled them into my book.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
I was using the original Bible stories, so the characters were already there. Their personalities, however, were either exaggerations of what was described in the original text, my impressions of how somebody would really behave in those situations, or based around quirks I thought would be funny.
For instance, my impression of Joseph is that he was always given special treatment by his father, so he has a chip on his shoulder; he thinks he's above his brothers and acts cocky. Due to his dream interpretation skills, he starts to think of himself as somewhat of a guru. By the time Pharaoh appoints him governor, he starts to think of himself as a celebrity.
Book Sample
There once was a god called God, who decided to write his memoirs using a series of ghost-writers, or prophets as he called them. He wrote about many things, from fanciful just-so stories to his ruminations on ethics.
Over many centuries, and a lengthy editorial process, he published many volumes of his memoirs in Hebrew. He later compiled many of these into an anthology called the Tanakh.
He took a brief hiatus of a few centuries, after which he began writing again. By this time, Hebrew had gone out of fashion, so he chose to write in the trendy new Koine Greek. As he had recently become a father, his new memoirs focused primarily on his son, Jesus.
Eventually, he collected enough material to compile a second anthology, a sequel to the Tanakh called the New Testament. This proved just as popular as his earlier work.
Many of his new readers wanted to read the Tanakh, as there were many plot elements in the New Testament that didn’t make sense in isolation, but they couldn’t read Hebrew. So, God decided to produce a Greek translation of the Tanakh, and he gave this new edition the name Septuagint. Again, this anthology was well received.
As the centuries rolled by, God published many editions of his anthologies, but the public started to complain that many of the volumes were offensive to their modern sensibilities. After much debate among his fans, God hired a team of highly skilled editors called the Council of Trent to select which volumes were of interest to the modern reader and which should be discarded. The result was a combined anthology he called the Bible, which contained both the Septuagint, now renamed the Old Testament and the New Testament.
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