God: MOSES! HEAR ME!

Moses: I hear you, oh Lord! Actually, I can really hear you. Can we tone it down?

God: Oh, sorry. Is this better?

Moses: Yes, thank you.

God: You are here, Moses, to learn the truth about the history of your world, and to receive my laws. So prepare! You’ll probably want to grab a few extra scrolls, there’s a lot to cover.

Moses: Yes, oh Lord.

God: In the beginning, there was nothing. Neither space nor time existed, and all the matter in the universe was packed into a thimble-sized area. And then, thirteen and a half billion years ago, I caused a quantum event which led to…

Moses: Sorry, could we back up a second? I’m not sure I know what that word means.

God: Quantum? Well, it specifically refers to the ordinal nature of…

Moses: sorry, before that. What does that “beel-yun” word mean?

God:… It’s a number. It means a thousand times a thousand thousands.

Moses:…

God: What’s wrong?

Moses: Well, you see, the Hebrew numerical system doesn’t really have anything that I can use to denominate millions. You see, we have this letter, taf, which means four hundred, and I can use the word elef to indicate that a number is to be multiplied by a thousand, but to write a billion, I would have to write two hundred fifty thousand taf‘s followed by the word elef. I don’t think I brought enough parchment. Come to think of it, I don’t think I would have enough parchment if I skinned every goat we have.

God: Seriously? How do you people get anything done down there?

Moses: Uh, lord we use our numbering system mainly to make change and count goats in the evening to make sure none got eaten by lions. I’m fairly certain that none of the refugees down there fled their life of servitude carrying a billion goats or enough spare cash to round down to the nearest million while tipping.

God: Well, you were an Egyptian once. Couldn’t you use their numerals?

Moses: Firstly, I don’t think the people just freed from half a millenium of service will be too happy seeing their oppressors’ numerals in their holy text, and secondly, it only goes to a million, and the numeral for a million is kinda a pain in the ass to write.

God: Fine! Fine! Have it your way! We’ll skip the billions! Hell, we’ll skip the quantum tunneling! See if I care. Anyway… Too long ago for your crapass mortal numbering system to comprehend, there was nothing. And I looked at it, and did some magical God stuff that you wouldn’t understand, and said “Let there be light!” And there was light. You getting this, or do I need to use smaller words?

Moses: Yes, I got it. Go on

God: And then another really long span later I created a stable lagrange point in the dust cloud surrounding your sun…

Moses: Uh…

God: It’s like a center of gravity, but for a spherical cloud like a planet.

Moses: What does this have to do with the Earth? The planet’s flat.

God: No it’s not.

Moses: What?! When did that happen? How close are we to falling off?

God: No, it’s… You know what? Never mind. First I said let there be light, then I said let’s make some f***ing oceans, and then I made plants and then fish, and birds, and animals, and apparently what I should have invented first is standardized testing, because you people are utter crap at math!

Moses: Hey!

God: No, seriously, I can’t even articulate the time frame that all of this crap happened in, and here I was ready to explain how the human race evolved? Seriously, all of you have a lot of remedial work before we get to things like evolution.

Moses: Evo-what?

God: You’re descended from apes.

Moses: Is it okay if we skip that part?

God: Knock yourself out.

Moses: Actually, could we skip most of it? I can see them doing something with a golden cow down there, and I don’t like the look of it. Maybe we skip to the parts about not eating shellfish or cheeseburgers?

God: Fine. So there’s this thing called food-borne contagion…