“Damn,” thought the god, smacking himself on the brow. “Pun intended.”
Tyre, December 16 – An ancient deity who exercised power over rainfall and related weather phenomena smacked his divine forehead today upon realizing he could have avoided tension in his relationship with the Levantine humans of antiquity by claiming the destructive deluges affecting them occurred not because of excess precipitation or inadequate drainage, but because Jews or Israelites had opened the walls holding in large quantities of water just to cause damage to natives.
Baal the Storm God performed the facepalm maneuver Monday morning upon encountering news coverage and rhetoric of various outlets throughout the region regarding drainage overflow and rising water levels, coverage that invoked a trope familiar to any modern anthropomorphic representation of natural forces: accusing “Zionists” of opening dams to cause misery downstream. Baal had the sudden, illuminating thought that he could have communicated the same message to his ancient prophets and priests, a message that might have helped expand the range of his worshipers’ feelings towards him beyond fear alone, which in turn might have forestalled or mitigated their utter rejection of him when other, more appealing belief systems came along.
“Damn,” thought the god, smacking himself on the brow. “Pun intended. I just realized I could have kept myself relevant longer if I had someone convenient to blame for all the destruction I wrought. And the proto-Zionists of the ancient world were right there the whole time, ripe for the blaming! Just goes to show you how one-dimensional we pagan gods tend to be. When you have a god for this and a god for that, none of them need to have much nuance, and that limits our thinking.”
The Canaanite storm god shared his discovery with his colleague and often-rival Asherah, mother-goddess and goddess of fertility, among other titles. The latter concurred, observing that blaming Zionists could have saved her cult significant trouble. “Imagine forgoing some sacrifices to appease us and instead letting farmers or herders keep more,” she suggested as a thought experiment. “Not taking absolute credit for everything that goes right, and not claiming vengeful responsibility for disaster, but labeling misfortune as the Zionists’ fault, thus leaving followers with more resources to enjoy, and leaving them freer to resist the Zionists. I understand that pursuit has become quite the preoccupation in the last century-plus, but I rather suspect that like my various identities throughout the region, it’s just a preexisting phenomenon repackaged as something else.”
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Took me a moment to find the pun. re-Levant – very clever!
We swear it was unintentional. Mostly.