Friday 14 January 2022

Celebrating All Asses Today

It probably won't come as a surprise that the early Christians tagged their guy into most Roman Festivals such as Christmas and Easter and today is another where they saw the Pagan celebration of Cervulus where they would dress up as animals and dance through the streets and thought, we should have some of that so created the Feast of the Ass to celebrate all the donkey-related stories in the Bible.
Now you probably think there can't be that many donkey stories in the Book but there are 72 including the story in Genesis where Abraham asks two young men to keep an eye on his ass while he goes for a bit of a pray. Later they 'laded every man's ass' and then there is the story of Issachar who is a strong ass and Moses was no weakling in the ass department because he put his wife and his sons upon his ass
and took them to Egypt.
There is the famous bit in Exodus about not coveting other people asses and how anyone trespassing for ass 'shall come before the judges' so they were pretty strict on ass trespassing in those days although it does say later that you can rest you ass on the seventh day.
In Numbers Moses tells God that he has not taken, nor hurt, any ass although Balaam did, he smote it a few times with a firm stick but God wasn't so happy about that, Numbers 22:28 shows he sent an Angel to 'open the mouth of the ass'.
Deuteronomy asks that 'What shalt thou do with asses?' and then answers it own question by saying thou should  'lift them up again' but no plowing else the ass shall be: 'violently taken away' so leave the ass plowing to another day Christians.
The book of Joshua 6:21 is not so kind and tells of when all asses in the city were utterly destroyed but they get their own back in Judges when Samson and his ass slay a thousand men.
In Samuel, someone called Jesse took an ass laden with bread to Saul and one person in the book took his ass to the King for his lame servant although in Kings-1 13:13, a king told his sons to saddle his ass to ride and whilst out riding came across a lion who respectfully left his ass untouched.
Job shows that all the wild ass was let loose and in Hosea, Ephraim only has a wild ass for company but they had no problem in Zecharia, they had a plague of ass and in John, Jesus finds a young ass so there you have it, the Bible is full of asses so celebrate the Feast of the Ass, i am reliably informed that Sticky Buns are in order.

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