About this time, Abram discovered a small flaw in God’s divine plan to make his offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth: his wife was sterile. So when God came to him in a vision with more promises of greatness and plentiful offspring, Abram pointed out that Sarai’s advanced age and well-documented sterility could present a problem.

But God assured Abram that he would have a child of own. To illustrate the point, He took Abram outside to count stars and promised that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars. This was not very reassuring to Abram, who grasped the concept of numerous offspring but couldn’t figure out how he would get from no offspring to numerous offspring given the physical deficiencies of the offspringer.

So God said, “Bring for Me a prime heifer, a prime goat, a prime ram, a dove and a young pigeon.”

Commentary: Why a young pigeon?

Abram did as he was told, and he sliced the animals in half but not the birds.

Commentary: This is important for some reason that we will never know.

Then Abram fell into a trance and God revealed to him that his descendents would be enslaved in a foreign land for 400 years before they would be allowed to return. At dusk, a flaming torch passed between the split animal halves, and God promised to give Abram’s descendents all the land between the Nile and Euphrates, including territory belonging to various ites and ims.

Commentary: The fancy light show with mutilated animals sounds like a hoot, but I’m not seeing how it answered Abram’s question.

The Heretic's Bible is a translation of a recently discovered commentary by a notorious first century heretic, Joseph the Latriner. The commentary is presented in italics with footnotes by the translator.

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