![\"\"](\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/files\/2012\/11\/slaughter3.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nDAGON<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Their high places are within shouting distance of each other\u2014shouting distance, that is, for deities capable of speaking in weather phenomena.\u00a0 Equidistant between them, spreading across a parched plain in a glitter of spearpoints, are two armies, each about seven thousand strong.\u00a0 Dagon’s Philistines are on the west, their backs to the water, flaunting the crested buzzcuts and crossed chestbands characteristic of the Sea Peoples.\u00a0 Jehovah’s Children of Israel are on the east with their backs to the hills, their eyes glinting fiercely through wildernesses of facial hair.\u00a0Battleis about to be joined.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jehovah shouts across to Dagon: \u201cHo, brother, wait a minute, I’ve got some good news for you today.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dagon’s fishtail twitches suspiciously.\u00a0 The bearded barbarian sounds far too cheerful.\u00a0 He shouts back, \u201cWhat do you mean, good news?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI mean, dear boy,\u201d Jehovah thunders in return, \u201cthat you’re not going to have to lift a fin today.\u00a0 My lads have been bad little humans lately, breakers of my commandments, defiers of my law, and I’ve decided they need to be taught a lesson.\u00a0 So the battle will go to your lads this afternoon, with my gracious blessing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dagon frowns, and the sky darkens over the sea.\u00a0 He says, \u201cDon’t do me any favours, brother.\u00a0 Since when have my boys needed your<\/em> blessing to whip the loincloths off the Children of Israel?\u00a0 Anyway, I haven’t been too pleased with the quality of the offerings they’ve been giving me lately, and I thought of administering a spanking myself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cCome, come, you can punish yours anytime, dear boy,\u201d says Jehovah.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cSo can you,\u201d returns Dagon, \u201cdear boy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cLook,\u201d says Jehovah, \u201cyou must admit I came up with the idea first.\u00a0 Why don’t you send down a famine or a plague, if you’re so keen on making your people miserable?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWhy don’t you?\u201d says Dagon.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A wind blasts across the plain: Jehovah’s vehement and losing-patience reply.\u00a0 He glares at Dagon, and lightning rips the clouds.\u00a0 \u201cListen, brother fishbutt,\u201d he says, \u201cif I permit my current collection of whiners and sinners to gain a victory today, it will send them a terribly misleading message.\u00a0 No, I insist, the battle must go to you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOh, you insist,<\/em> do you?\u201d\u00a0 Dagon’s vast two-pronged tail begins to thrash, sending great waves crashing into the shore behind the Philistines.\u00a0 \u201cYou don’t give a toss where that leaves me, do you, O Bearded Wonder?\u00a0 Surviving on mouldy loaves and diseased mutton, and adulterated wine reeking of vinegar, that’s where I’d be.\u00a0 No, my people have to be shown they can’t get away with that kind of cheapness, and the best way to do that is to withdraw my favour and let your army walk all over them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI will<\/em> lose the battle today,\u201d snarls Jehovah.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe sheol you will,\u201d Dagon snarls right back.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Out on the dusty plain, the priests have finished their respective sacrifices and augurings, and the battle horns of both armies blat the attack.\u00a0 The deities, startled, send a shock tremor down through the rock of their high places, causing minor damage along fault lines all the way to the dead Cities of the Plain.\u00a0 Dagon recovers first.\u00a0 He sees the left wing of his army sweeping forward in a clever feint that is, no doubt, the idea of excellent General Gahath, designed to draw the Israelite centre into a disadvantageous position.\u00a0 At a flick of Dagon’s tail, the General’s heart bursts and he topples off his horse.\u00a0 As a terrible wailing spreads through the Philistine left, the advance falters.\u00a0 The Israelites see the weakness and rush forward to exploit it.\u00a0 Sixty Philistines fall in as many seconds.\u00a0 Dagon\u2019s tail twitches with satisfaction.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jehovah shrieks his rage, at a frequency that can neither be heard nor felt by men, but which shivers birds out of the sky and causes a minor avalanche in the Taurus range, far to the north.\u00a0 He growls a word<\/em>, and the water table undergoes a miraculous percolation, turning the stony soil under the Israelite chariots into an instant morass.\u00a0 Several dozen chariots run themselves violently axle-deep into the muck and send their occupants tumbling across the rocks, breaking necks and heads.\u00a0 The Philistines cut down the survivors.\u00a0 Honors are about equal at this point.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jehovah does not wait for Dagon’s riposte, but brings up a sudden bank of mist on the Israelite left, which allows a small and rather surprised force of Philistine skirmishers to reach the Israelite line undetected and start wreaking a decent bit of havoc.\u00a0 Ignoring that as an insignificant engagement, Dagon directs his efforts toward the centre of the battle, where thirty royal princes from all five cities of the Philistine Confederacy, mounted on fine stallions, are hacking a great bloody swath through Jehovah’s bearded foot soldiers.\u00a0 One after another, the princes overbalance as if dizzy and are pulled into the mass of swarming Israelites, who literally rip them to pieces.\u00a0 Dagon’s strategy is at once to dishearten his troops and punish his aristocracy, by striking down the flower of the Philistine leadership.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jehovah understands that concept on some level, but he has always scorned subtlety.\u00a0 Blood, blood, blood<\/em> is his motto, and morale will look after itself.\u00a0 He weakens the Israelite knees and strengthens the Philistine sword-arms along a fifty-cubit stretch of the main battle front, and watches with grim satisfaction as a hundred or more of his erring children are disembowelled, dismembered, or otherwise sliced into bleeding shreds.\u00a0 Dagon, noticing, snaps his webbed fingers: the iron of the Philistine swords (much envied by the Israelites, who are still lingering in the Bronze Age) turns porous with rust, and begins to break against the leather body armour instead of slashing through it.\u00a0 One hundred and forty-seven Israelites, astonished but pleased to find themselves alive, hack back at their assailants while the latter are still gawping at their broken blades.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The battle rages all through the long hot stinking afternoon, until finally it peters out for want of enough able-bodied troops to carry on.\u00a0 The battlefield is carpeted with body parts and serpents of gut, awash in a general bog of blood.\u00a0 Of the Philistines, some two and a half thousand are wounded, and at least three thousand are dead.\u00a0 The Israelite casualties are on roughly the same scale.\u00a0\u00a0 Shocked survivors limp away from the site of the bloodbath, both sides too dazed to wonder who won.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the gods know.\u00a0 They slump exhausted in their high places.\u00a0 Jehovah yawns, and an evening breeze springs up and wafts across the battlefield.\u00a0 A fine grey rain moves inland from the sea and patters on the faces of the dead.\u00a0 Jehovah, noticing this, calls across, \u201cHo, brother Dagon, you’re not weeping, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cNo anthropopathy, if you don’t mind,\u201d Dagon shouts back.\u00a0 \u201cIn fact, I thought it went rather well today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jehovah yawns again.\u00a0 \u201cYou’re right, it did work out for the best.\u00a0 By the way, that was a masterful stroke of yours, my good Dagon, setting a flight of my boys’ arrows on fire in mid-air.\u201d\u00a0 He gestures towards a biggish burnt patch on the battlefield, littered with a few dozen pugilistic Philistine corpses.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI was pleased with that,\u201d Dagon agrees.\u00a0 \u201cBut you, Jehovah, blinding your own reserves with a localized dust-storm\u2014that was artistry, pure and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The sky reddens with Jehovah’s modest blush.\u00a0 \u201cNow, now,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so night falls.\u00a0 The two deities retire to rest in their high places, content in the knowledge that each has accomplished his mission for the day.\u00a0 The poor sods who worship them have been duly punished for their transgressions and second-rate muttonchops, and have been taught a valuable lesson as well: when the gods win, the gods win; and when the gods lose, oddly enough, it still seems to be the gods who win.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0Note:\u00a0 I remember the exact\u00a0date when I started this story:September 10, 2001.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t work on it the next day,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-fic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}