The Fascinating and More or Less True Story of the Bible: A New Translation and Commentary

By Jeffrey Kornegay

The Fascinating and More or Less True Story of the Bible is a hilariously candid and irreverent look at all of the Good Book's embarrassing and lesser known narratives that expound upon God's temper, volatility, regulation of prostitution and preferences concerning murder and such.
Recommended for anyone who prefers to take the story of Lot's wife with a grain of salt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359295104

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The Fascinating and More or Less True Story of the Bible:

A New Translation and Commentary

Jeffrey Kornegay

The Fascinating and More or Less True Story of the Bible:A New Translation and Commentary Copyright 2018 by Jeffrey Kornegay. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, email [e-mail].

Published 2018 by Lulu.com

Contents

Introduction

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

Joshua

Judges

Ruth

1 Samuel

2 Samuel

1 Kings

2 Kings

1 & 2 Chronicles

Ezra

Nehemiah a.k.a. Ezra part two

Esther

Job

Psalms

Proverbs

Ecclesiastes

Song of Solomon

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Lamentations

Ezekiel

Daniel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

The New Testament

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

Acts

Romans

1 Corinthians

2 COrinthians

Galatians

Ephesians

Philippians

Colossians

1 Thessalonians

2 Thessalonians

1 Timothy

2 Timothy

Titus

Philemon

Hebrews

James

1 Peter

2 Peter

1 John

2 John

3 John

Jude

Revelation (the last one)

Afterword

Introduction

As any student of the Bible knows, God’s word can be damn near impossible to understand at times. And if one does succeed in grasping its Divine precepts, the next task is to rectify one passage with another seemingly contradictory one. For instance, you may have heard that God rigidly disapproves of prostitutes. But did you know that He commanded a prophet to have sex with one? Yep. Sure did. That account is found in Hosea chapter 1, verse 2. Further, Jesus was constantly in the company of these ladies of the night, so it merits the question – how does God truly feel about prostitution?

Surprised? Unfortunately, modern churches have twisted and perverted God’s word into something they use to promote their own dumb politics. But I have endeavored to write this concise volume which will aid any serious Bible student in uncovering the true and unbiased meaning of God’s Holy Scriptures. For brevity's sake, you'll find that most of the trivial details are omitted, like what type of marinade God prefers on His animal sacrifices. You’ll find only relevant and meaningful Bible concepts that are critical to your life in this book.

Besides being miraculously and providentially entertaining, the Bible also provides us the way to never ending life – immortality in heaven with God. Maybe that’s why you picked up a Bible in the first place. Perhaps you realized that your soul was lost and needed saving. Although I’m not sure how the hell you would’ve realized that already. That part isn’t explained until much, much later.

In previous generations, one would have to shell out dozens, even baker’s dozens, of dollars to purchase multiple Bible translations (King James Version, New International Version, etc.), Bible commentaries, Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and lexicons and more in order to discover the Bible’s hidden gems of truth. At last, this work provides all of those things in one easy-to-read thing.

Lastly, this work uses colorful language because the Bible does too and we should try to mimic what the Bible says. For instance, piss is found in 1 Samuel 25:22; Damned in Mark 16:16 (spoken by Jesus, mind you); and whore in Leviticus 19:29; ass and cock too, but these are the animals. And I can’t even tell you how many times it mentions poop, semen and breasts, so let’s not get offended unduly.

Genesis

Before we start, just know that when the Bible says In the beginning, it doesn't mean the literal beginning. Because in the very, very beginning, I'm talking the very beginning of everything that ever existed, including time and space, God had already existed for billions of years and so did a lot of other heavenly creatures and some other things too. One of the creatures, whose name was Lucifer, told God, Ya know, I'd really like a turn at being God for a while. Well, God didn't like this very much because being God was the sweetest gig you could ever get. So God thought real hard about how he could discreetly take care of this Lucifer problem, so he created a new place called hell. On one hand, God really hated Lucifer, so he cranked up the thermostat as high as it could go and then broke it so Lucifer couldn't turn it back down. Many scholars today believe hell is a place where it's a constant 4,000 degrees year round, a lot like those natural springs where the water is a refreshing 68 degrees all year round, except hell is hotter and drier. In a way, it could still be considered a refreshing place, if you consider how alert you’d be being pan fried for eternity. But as we'll see throughout this work, Lucifer is able to hold all sorts of conversations and do all sorts of tasks without being distracted, which suggests that maybe he's not being perpetually tortured for all eternity after all. We may be able to infer that hell is simply a metaphor for a place you don't want to be. You know, like school or church. Or maybe Lucifer and his angels just have an extremely high pain tolerance.

God felt at least a little bad that Lucifer didn't get to sit in the captain's chair, so as a consolation he made Lucifer king and ruler over all hellish things like 5:00 traffic, pop music and organic quinoa.

After God took care of all the insubordination, he created these two creatures named Adam and Eve. Man did they fork it up for the rest of us! In a nutshell, God said If you eat this one tree, I will destroy everything you love. This is my award-winning fruit tree and I only have one, so don't blanking touch it. At this point most people are shouting at their Bible as if it were a TV soap opera, trying to keep Adam and Eve from eating God's sweet, juicy fruit. Predictably, they went ahead and ate it anyway. 

As both Bible and horticultural scholars know, if there's anyone's fruit in the world that you should NOT eat, it's God's because God is a jealous God and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH! (You read phrases like this throughout the Bible, so I pepper them throughout this work so you get an authentic feel for the scripture). So they ate God’s fruit and to make things worse, they did something even more offensive - They put on clothes! (They had been naked up until this point). So next time you're thinking of how much you’d like to see someone naked, just know that if it weren't for Adam and Eve, we'd all be naked right this very second. WAY TO GO FELLAS. We can understand why God was so upset.

Anyway, God didn’t like this one bit because God is a jealous God and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH. So he evicted them from their home and, of course, he kept their deposit. They knew since the very, very beginning of time that they weren't getting their deposit back. 

Well, they left their home and their kids committed a lot of incest. A LOT. And we should be thankful for it, by god. A lot of us- I daresay, all of us…wait, no..I mean, none of us- would be alive today if not for all that incestuous love making. They were the only humans on the planet, so obviously that was the only way to populate the place. It's not considered gross if you're populating the planet and furthering the human race. Grow up.

One day, God got a hankering for some steak. Cain offered God a salad with his steak, then God said salads are for losers, one thing led to another, and Cain's brother ended up getting murdered! Later on, I think God expressed some guilt and assumed some responsibility for the steak and salad incident, because these four guys refused to eat steak, so God miraculously made them big and strong by eating only salads. That was God's way of saying My bad about the whole steak and salad incident (For that story, please see my section on the Book of Daniel).

This is as good a place as any to briefly mention that the water cycle didn't work back then like it does now. See, back then, there were rivers just like today, and there was evaporation, but there was no rain. It just plain and simple didn't rain, OK? Don't try asking why there was no rain because I'll be darned if anyone gives you a straight answer. The thing is, God just didn't feel like making it rain yet and it's likely that the first rain didn't come until that one chunk floater with all the animals. Side note- Some Churches will try to teach you that the Bible lines up with science, and it does! It's just that science back then worked a whole lot differently than it does now. That’s what they leave out.

The Bible slips in something about these giant superheroes whose fathers were sons of God and whose mothers were human women, so they’re best described as a race of Herculeses. Scholars are bummed that there aren’t more cool stories about them in the Bible.  

Well, after a while, along comes Noah. Everyone on earth except Noah was a horrible person. They would get wasted and try to drunk drive their camel while simultaneously chiseling a letter to their bro which led to a lot of unnecessary camel fatalities. One day, God got to thinking, ...Heeeyyy....wait a second…everyone's so evil...what if I destroyed everyone and started over? Sometimes God would start a project and it wouldn't turn out so hot, and it took him a few tries to get it right. Then some wise ass angel would say, Ya know God, I notice you keep doing the same thing and expecting different... when God would interrupt and say, Listen Bucko I don't need your insubordination because I am a jealous God and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH The angels hated when God spoke in third person, even though it was hilarious. No one wanted to end up like Lucifer so they all pretty much kept those types of comments to themselves. There was a rumor that hell was so hot that ole Lucy had to use oven mitts when he pissed.

We'll cross that bridge when we get there, God said and on he went with destroying the earth with flood damage. And there was much mold damage and weeping and brushing of teeth or something. Back then they didn't have restoration companies so it was easier to destroy the earth with water. Nuclear warheads wouldn't be available for several thousand years.

Meanwhile, Noah had built a boat and was riding it out in style. He had all sorts of exotic pets like the kinds that drug lords have, but he looked out the window and expressed his regret to himself yet out loud: I could probably pick up so many ladies with these cool animals I have. But all the women got drowned. Noah cried until God made him a rainbow. It didn't help much but Noah thought that it was a nice gesture.

After a while, mankind discovered a wonderful thing called teamwork. Teamwork is when you realize that when you work together, everyone benefits because your total productivity is better than everyone's individual productivity combined. That's why the world we live in is so great. Some people think the world is getting worse, but boy are they wrong. There's teamwork on a global scale and things are just going super for the most part, barring all those violent deaths we hear about on the news.

Anyway, there was some great teamwork back at this place called Babel. Everyone wanted to build a huge tower because us humans love to build things. But God thought their teamwork was getting kind of edgy and don't forget that God is a jealous god and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH so God played Jenga with their tower because back then he hated teamwork. Although, I think he eventually assumed some responsibility and experienced some guilt about the teamwork incident because later he helped a bunch of people learn new languages like French with a little help from his magic ghost version of himself. (For that story, please see my section on the Book of Acts).

One day there was a new guy named Abraham. He was a coward so he told everyone that his wife was his sister just so, in the event anyone wanted to sleep with her, they wouldn't feel compelled to kill him. By this time, the whole incest fad had died out for the most part. There were hipsters back then though, just like now, and sometimes they'd try out a little retro incest. For instance, Abraham once admitted to King Abimelek, Well, technically, my wife is my half sister, so our marriage is a little incestuous after all, so yeah, you’d still see it from time to time.

Although Abraham was initially a coward, boy was he a trendsetter. He was getting his slaves pregnant way before Jefferson made it cool. Also, he started this cool new thing called circumcision. Although - to God be the glory - that was actually the Lord’s idea. 

Since God and Abraham were new best circumcision buddies, God let Abraham in on a secret- that He was going to destroy a city called Sodom because they were evil and God was a jealous god and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH. Abraham said, But I thought you just destroyed everyone with the flood? And God's voice boomed down from heaven, I DIDN'T DESTROY IT GOOD ENOUGH! 

Abraham's nephew, Lot, was in Sodom, and he definitely was evil. On one occasion, he was playing host to some male angels, and the Sodomites started trying to break down the door so they could have sex with the angels! I've never seen an angel, but come on, let’s be real - if you saw a perfect, heavenly, beautiful, lusty angel-creature, don't kid yourself- you'd probably covet it’s butt a little too. Although, the bible says somewhere that the angels are neither male nor female, so that makes it confusing. Anyway, here's how evil Lot was: He says Hey fellas, how about you don't rape the angels? Even though they could whip your asses because they're angels, how about I just give you my daughters to rape instead? So Lot did not have the best judgment when it came to angels and rape. 

Well, to be fair, a muddy situation like that can seem kind of grey. You start to consider- How short were the angels’ robes? How much had Lot been drinking? It's hard to exercise clear judgment at a time like that, so God did what any of us would do- He rained fire down from heaven onto Sodom and burnt up the whole town in a conflagration worthy of a Disney fireworks show because God was a jealous god and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH. 

After the carnage, God said, don't look at Sodom ever again or I'll turn you into salt. Well, Lot's wife immediately looked at Sodom and she turned into salt. Sometimes when someone says 'don't do something' we just do it real quick as a reaction before we can even really process it. Because bad things kept happening to his creations, God began to think, Maybe they're just incapable of listening.." 

With their mother gone, Lot's daughters got real curious about incest so they got their dad real drunk and they both slept with him and got pregnant. God seemed to be pretty OK with that for the most part. Here's the thing about being friends with God. The angels and humans were always kind of on edge with God because you never really knew what he was going to freak out about or when he'd be cool. As an example of his unpredictability, one day he up and told Abraham randomly, Abraham, take your son and set him on fire. Abraham showed tremendous nerve because, while most of us would have said something like GOD, WHAT THE FUCK! he kept his composure because he knew not to F with God when he was in one of his moods. His cold steely nerve paid off because right as he was about to knife his son, God goes AAAAAAAHHHH GOTCHA! Ohhh I'm just kidding Abraham. Abraham thought to himself Jesus Christ what is wrong with this guy but at the end of the day, he and his son were alive. Abraham, like all of us, seemed to grow more courageous as he grew older. 

Abraham had two grandsons - Jacob and Esau. And man did Jacob like playing pranks on Esau. One time, Esau went out hunting for so long that he almost starved to death. He came back home and Jacob would only give him some soup if Esau promised to give him all his inheritance! What a jokester! So he traded his entire inheritance for a bowl of soup. Jacob was always getting Esau like that. Another time, Esau went out to provide food for his family by hunting again, because he was big and tough and they didn't have guns back then, and while he was gone, Jacob and his mom found out that he had a little bit more inheritance left, so he stole that from Esau too! Oh the pranks they would come up with! 

Before Jacob's dad died, he told Isaac Don't marry those Canaanites - I don't like them. They sure didn't like mixing cultures back then, no sir. They were very prejudiced. But one thing they did love is polygamy. You weren't any kind of man unless you had a bunch of wives. Name one patriarch that didn't get it on with a bunch of ladies and I'll eat my cat's litter. Oh, you say Adam, because he only had one wife? Well, mathematically, he had sex with 100% of earth’s female population, so there goes that argument, dummy.

As an added tidbit, Jacob used to do magic with sheep - he could make them change colors. Also, on one historic night, God deigned a trip to earth so he could have a wrestling match with Jacob and there was no clear winner, which is not something a lot of people can say- I wrestled God and it came out a draw. Pretty f---ing impressive!

Jacob had a daughter named Dinah. When Dinah was raped by this guy, Shechem, Dinah's brothers told Shechem that he and his family should be circumcised and that would smooth everything over. Boy did that confused Shechem. Here he is, offering to pay any amount of money to right the thing he had done, and they tell him they'd rather he be circumcised in exchange for rape! Must've been a pretty strange sounding deal. But Shechem loved Dinah, which just sounds pretty traumatic and weird for Dinah, to have this rapist fall in love with you and then hearing your brothers say that it will all be made square if they get circumcised. But again, he loved her, so he and all his family got circumcised. Well, it was a trick. After Shechem and his family got circumcised, Dinah's brothers went all Texas Chainsaw Massacre on them while they were recovering, and started cutting and hacking until everyone had been finely chopped. Then they looted the city! Take that, rapists! But dang - think about Shechem's family for a moment. Your brother comes to you and says I raped someone and now YOU have to get circumcised with me. Sucks right? Then they get murdered. Talk about a raw deal.

So Jacob had a bunch of sons, the youngest of which was Joseph. What a spoiled, bratty punkass Joseph was! His brothers would be working their asses off and Joseph would tell his dad, Hey dad, they're all just goofing off. And then he'd say to his brothers Hey fellas, I had this dream where you all were a bunch of crap and you losers had to worship me because I'm awesome and screw you guys and then had the nerve to wonder why anyone would sell him into slavery, which is exactly what his brothers did. 

The Bible often has little parallel side stories here and there. Here's a bizarre tale that doesn't get a whole lot of airtime in sermons these days. It's weird and confusing but hang in there. It’s worth it: 

While Joseph was being sold into slavery, his brother, Judah, had some kids named Er and Onan. Er grew up and God killed him because God is a jealous God and MIGHTY IS HIS WRATH. So Er is dead. So Judah tells Onan (the brother) to marry his sister in law so Er would have a son. It doesn't really make sense, but the son would've been considered Er's, even though Er was dead. Well, Onan didn't want to give his dead brother a