MOSES: Behind the Beard

Moses enjoyed his new life but it left him somehow unsatisfied. The most
exciting thing that had happened to him in the year or so he’d been in 
Midian was the birth of his son. And even that had been somewhat dampened 
by his new wife Zipporah circumcising the new born with a rock and waving 
the foreskin around in triumph. Moses wasn’t quite sure why she did this, 
but it was bound to be something obscurely Jewish and he was sure it wouldn’t 
catch on. Moses missed the times back when he had real excitement. Gone were 
the days when he ran around killing Egyptians, hiding in wells and floating 
down the Nile in flimsy rafts made out of reeds. Managing a farm and rearing 
children while his wife hacked off their foreskins with a rock was not really 
that exciting. What Moses needed now was an adventure so one day he sneaked 
out of the house while Zipporah was busy circumcising one of his farmhands and 
hid behind a bush in the furthest field from the house. He took a deep breath 
and whispered into the leaves. 
	‘I’ll sell my soul for an adventure.’
Moses looked around, expecting to see a hole suddenly open up in the ground 
behind him with fierce yellow flames licking at the edges but no such hole 
appeared. He sighed and lent against the bush.
	‘Funny,’ thought Moses, ‘the bush wasn’t this warm before.’ He looked 
over his shoulder and found to his astonishment that the bush was on fire but 
more to the point, so was his arm. Moses screamed and threw himself to the ground 
and rolled around screaming, trying to put out the flames. It was at that point 
that he heard a deep booming laughter coming from behind him. He beat the last of 
the fire out with his hat and turned to see where the laughter was coming from. 
Expecting some gruesome beast, Moses’ frightened appearance soon
turned to one of confusion. Inside the bush was the image of a laughing head but
it wasn’t this that was so confusing. It was more that it wasn’t a thin evil
looking face with horns and a goatee. In fact, it was the complete opposite,
more of an old man with a long flowing beard than a son of Lucifer. In fact, if
he didn’t know better, Moses would think it was the face of. . .
‘Hello, Moses. I am God. I believe that you wish to barter your soul for an
adventure, of sorts?’ Moses gasped. This was definitely not what he had
expected to happen.
‘Um,’ whispered Moses, ‘I kinda thought Satan would be the one coming
to trade an adventure for an eternity of servitude.’
‘What?’ bellowed God.
‘I said that I thought it would be the Devil that-‘ whispered Moses, louder this time.
‘What?’ screeched a seemingly irate Lord.
‘I said,’ yelled Moses, ‘That I-‘
‘I heard what you said,’ snapped the Lord of All Things Holy, ‘I may be
cursed with being all knowing but I’m not deaf. I was just making a comment on the 
stupidity of your statement.’
‘Oh,’ said Moses. ‘Sorry.’ There didn’t seem to be much else he could
say for this was completely out of his league.
‘You’re all the same, you bloody humans. Always complaining about this and worrying 
about that and completely ignoring the fact that I can’t be everywhere at once and 
then when I come to buy a simple soul what do they do? Complain because I’m not the 
bloody Prince of bloody Darkness! Well I’ve had it. Miserable bloody planet, I should 
have destroyed it the moment those two trouble makers ate that damn apple.’
	‘What? There are other planets with people on them?’ queried Moses. He was a 
bit startled to find that God wasn’t what he had thought, let alone that there was 
life on other planets.
	‘Oh please, I have a life outside of you, you know. Now do you want to sell me 
your soul or not?
	‘Well, yeah, I guess. But why are do want to buy my soul?’
‘Well,’ pouted God, ‘If Satan can do it, why can’t I?’
‘It’s just that selling a soul is meant to be a bad thing and being
sentenced to eternity in heaven doesn’t sound like much of a punishment for someone 
willing to undergo a soul-ectomy.’
The fiery apparition thought about this for a moment. ‘What about
masochists?’
	‘Oh, yeah, masochists sure but not for the common man you know?’
	God stopped to think again. Then all of a sudden the flames on the bush roared 
higher and God declared, ‘An adventure it is then! As it happens, I need a quest performed 
at the moment and I need you to do it. The children of Israel are being held captive by 
the Egyptians as slaves and, being their god, they want me to do something about it. So, 
if you could run up to the pharaoh and do some magic tricks in my name to see if he lets 
them go I’d be much obliged. In return I will grant you say, forty years of excitement 
leading the Children of Israel to freedom. What do you think?’
	Moses shrugged. The deal seemed good to him.
	‘Good then,’ said God, reaching a flaming hand out of the bush, ‘Now all we have 
to do is shake on the deal and we can get started.’
	Moses reached tentatively out to the hand and grabbed hold of it. It didn’t hurt 
and he sighed in relief. Then suddenly pain shot up his arm and it burst into flames again 
amongst bursts of laughter. When Moses finally put the flames out and turned back to the 
bush the flaming apparition was no more. The bush was merely a blacked stick. Moses sighed 
and picked up a sharp rock. He would have to tell Zipporah what had happened before he 
could plan his trip and she would almost certainly try to remove an inch of his penis for luck.