Mosiah 11

So Noah took over. But not like his dad. He dumped the commandments, crammed all the sex and partying he could into his life. He lined women up to marry him, then had as many mistresses as wives. Maybe more.

He taxed a fifth of all the goods in the country: gold, silver, copper, brass, iron, calves, sheep, corn, wheat, and on and on. This was not for the public good, of course, but for the delight of his own massive ego.

He retired the old, good Yahweh priests and installed new, weird idolatrous ones—sycophantic yet self-serving, all of them craven, lustful, and addicted to leisure.

So the populace was sucked dry to fund a tyrant and his fake religion.

Oh, and then there were the architecture and building projects, all of which were strictly for him and his wives, who had wish lists as long as this book. He had to have huge throne rooms in every one of his palaces, of course. I won’t detail all the materials, but obviously precious metals were a big part, since those remained abundant and miners could be conscripted like soldiers. It’s the Egyptian way, and we had a lot of Egypt tainting our culture. (Even the language in which I’m writing is quasi-Egyptian.)

The priests got to sit on raised platforms and overlook the people—in all senses of “overlook”—an intimidation gambit, of course. Noah, meanwhile, built a tower, not an efficient one for public speaking so much as a voyeuristic one. He wanted to see everything, from the boundaries of his kingdom to the woman bathing next door.

He also had many new buildings erected for himself in Shilom—formerly a resort area—as well as a tower on the hill north of it. All this was funded by the new taxes.

Clearly, he loved money more than God or any other virtue in life. He spent it on prostitutes, feasts, wine, and pop music for himself and his priests. He did spend some money to plant vineyards. But this was not the jobs program he claimed it would be so much as a perennial well for his taste in alcohol, a taste to which he converted half the nation.

Lamanites started up their pasture raids again. Noah sent guards to sentry them, but far too few. They were sitting ducks for the well-organized and determined Lamanite marauders. These marauders stole whole flocks and occupied some farmland. Noah sent troops that got the land back. For awhile.

This minor victory pumped up the armies’ ego and inflated the hearts of the Noahic regime, who bragged of their military prowess in hyperbolic terms: fifty of ours could beat thousand of Lamanites, and so forth. Typical wine-fueled narcissism.

So, as often happened, a prophet felt pricked by God to speak up. This one was named Abinadi. His message? “God told me to tell you that if you don’t change your ways, I’ll show you how angry you’ve made me.” This was the usual prophet message, of course. Almost a script that kept being played like a long-running show.

More of his message: I, God, will hand the nation over to its cruelest enemies. That’s, however paradoxically, how they’ll remember I’m God and I don’t put up with garbage in national life or personal life. You’ll start throwing your hands up and wailing, as all middle-easterners do, and I won’t lift a finger for you. I’ll stop up my ears so I can’t hear you anymore. None of that “helping in battle” on which you used to rely and for which you used to thank me. And this time you’ll have to show me your sincerity about changing by wearing burlap with no underclothes and smearing ashes on your foreheads. (That was an old Jewish custom that had gone entirely out of favor.)

This, of course, would not fly. People plotted ways to, as we say, shoot the messenger. Noah took it especially personally. Which he should have. “Who is Abinadi and how does he think he can get away with this slander? And who is this God that dares to stick his finger in our eyes? If I wanted judges, I’d enslave my own.”

He then put out a wanted poster for Abinadi with the trumped up charge of “disturbing the peace”—always an easy crime to claim in a totalitarian society. But the poster was hardly necessary. Almost everyone wanted to kill him. He was an irritant they wanted to wash from their eyes for good, a stool they wanted to excrete and flush away.