I’ve been avoiding the weekly torah stories recently because Devarim (Deuteronomy) is, as the name suggests, mostly redundant. Almost all of it is Moses-as-Castro, giving an endless rambling speech. Difference is that everything Moses is saying has smiting behind it, so you gotta listen up if you’re a Hebrew. But I thought that this week’s sedra, Ki Tietze (“When you go”) was a delightfully diverse collection of laws which cover everything from rape to haberdashery, and illustrate why the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian is totally wack. Disclaimer: there’s 74 laws laid out in this sedra, so no way I’m going through all of them. I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version, but it’s still going to be a halacha mash-up.

Moses begins this section of rattling on with a discourse on how to treat lovely women who are captured in the endless inter-tribal battles. Now those heathen tribes, they just went ahead and raped anything with a vagina who rated over a 5. But Jews have to do it better. The law here is that you have to pen her up for a month first, shave her head, let her grow her nails, and only then, once she’s been humiliated, uglified, and left to ruminate for a month about the upcoming horror and remembering the vision of you eviscerating her parents in front of her, you can give her that good raping she’s been waiting for. Much more civilized, dontcha think?

And being the kind and generous folk that (((we))) are, when you get tired of her shit, you have to let her go rather than sell her into slavery. Well, let’s be honest, once you drive them off the lot, they lose about half of their resale value anyway, and chances are that by then, there’s dents and scratches, further reducing the value. So no big loss.

Moving on, as someone who loves cultural fusion and who cheerfully married a shiksa (OK, well, three different shiksas), I am completely damned under the law of kilayim. Kliayim is the prohibition of various sorts of fusion- the called out examples are donkeys and oxen in the field, wool and linen in clothing, and co-planting in vineyards (Moses was unclear about whether having grenache and mourvedre grapes together is forbidden, but very clear that you don’t plant wheat or rosebushes among the grapevines). Rabbinical interpretation has used this as a metaphor for mixed marriages (as if the Phineas story weren’t explicit enough) and I’m sure there’s some Jew redneck out there who has used it to justify keeping separate from the coloreds. But basically, if your shirt is a cotton-polyester blend, be prepared for the stoning.

Now here’s something parents will love. Have a rebellious or otherwise shitty son? (((We))) have a solution for you! If mom and dad agree, the son is brought to the village elders. Once the parents declare that he’s an asshole, then… you guessed it, stoning! Think of it as retroactive abortion, and a precursor to modern Jewish thought that life begins when the child gets an MD or LLD.

There’s fun and games for the (((girls))) as well, but this one has to wait until marriage. Let’s say her hubby gets sick of her shit and decides he wants a divorce. In these pre-no-fault times, a common excuse was, “Slut wasn’t a virgin when we got married.” So, she’s ripe for the stoning. But wait. If her parents show up with the sheets off the marital bed having bloodstains (don’t even ask how they got them, it was probably a Linda Tripp “save that dress” deal), the guy gets a good flogging and has to pay her parents 100 shekels. That’s not the worst part- he also is forbidden from ever divorcing her. I may bitch about my alimony, but at least I don’t have to live with my ex.

Here’s one of the truly weird ones. Suppose you’re a married Jewess and your hubby gets into a fight with some other guy. Regardless of who started it, be careful about helping him out. If you help your hubby by grabbing the other guy by the nuts, guess what? Your hand gets amputated. They didn’t teach you about this in Sunday School? They should have.

I bet the Sunday School teacher didn’t tell you about this one, either: if your nuts get crushed or cut off, you aren’t allowed to enter the synagogue or the Temple. Nor can you be part of a minyan (the required ten (((men))) needed to have a prayer service). So remember to always wear your cup when you do sports, and give up that lifelong dream of being a harem eunuch.

Speaking of testicles, let’s say you have a wet dream. This does not make Yahweh happy, so if you want to avoid the stoning, you have to immediately get the hell out of the encampment (they were in the desert at the time), wait until late afternoon, take a ritual bath, then wait until sundown before you can return. Obviously, when one saw teenage boys running out of camp in the morning, the jeering would begin. And if one of the poor kids broke out in acne, he had to go to the priest for some folk remedy or other. Left untreated, this would lead to… stoning.

By the way, if you divorce some bitch and she remarries, if the new hubby gets just as sick of her shit as you were and tosses her out, don’t even think about trying to remarry her. If you do, yep, stoning.

OK, I saved the weirdest for last. Your brother gets married and they either have no kids or just daughters. He dies. Your duty, then, is to fuck the widow and knock her up. And keep doing so until she extrudes a boy-child. OK, nothing weird about that, it’s fairly common in tribal societies. But let’s suppose she’s an uggo, I’m talking a two-bagger, and you can’t imagine sticking your dick in it, much less be able to get it up in the first place. What then? This was desert tribes in like 1000 BCE, so turkey basters hadn’t been invented yet. Well, as you might expect, there’s ritual. The uggo pulls off one of your shoes, whacks you across the face with it, spits on you, and declares, “Thus be it to he who will not bang his brother’s widow and put sons in her belly.” And after that, the guy is referred to as “The guy who lost his shoe.”

Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.