“As far as I can make out, there’s a war going on, and someone used a big weapon – that’s fine, we all want a battlefield edge, be it with chariots, giants, the Hand of YHWH, or the curses of some prophet pronounced against one’s foe.”
Divon, April 16 – The ruler of this tribal kingdom east of the River Jordan voiced puzzlement today at the unusual and rampant invocations of his realm in the news, following the first combat use of the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan last week.
Balak, King of MOAB, noticed last Thursday that his kingdom’s mentions on Twitter and other social media began spiking, immediately following the use of a GBU-43/B weapon on an Islamic State cave and tunnel complex. While he has yet to determine why people are connecting his kingdom’s name with that event, he remains of two minds about the impact of the burst of popularity on MOAB.
“Western media tend to take a negative view of our policies, given the roots of that society’s intellectual tradition in the scriptures of the Israelites, a longtime enemy of ours,” Balak related in an interview. “For the same reason, the term ‘Philistine’ refers in English to an uncultured person. But here we have the use of my people’s name in a context so completely unrelated to who we are and what we do that I wonder whether there must be some mistake.”
“As far as I can make out, there’s a war going on, and someone used a big weapon – that’s fine, we all want a battlefield edge, be it with chariots, giants, the Hand of YHWH, or the curses of some prophet pronounced against one’s foe,” he continued. “So on the one hand it’s great to have us associated with this dramatic development in military history, but on the other, I’m not so sure I want to be remembered for posterity as the king of a country most closely linked with the first combat use of a 21,000-pound bomb. We have so much else to offer civilization, including our attractive daughters.”
King Balak did offer that he respects any party to a war who holds nothing back on the battlefield. “You have to be ruthless if you want to have any hope for victory, regardless of whether the god Kemosh has favored you – everybody knows that,” he added. “Totally ruthless. Not an ounce of ruth can remain in you. If you have any ruth inside, you have to get rid of it before you go to war. Send that ruth to your enemies, because they’re the ones you want to soften up. So I guess there is some connection between my Land of MOAB and this event everyone’s talking about.”
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