Subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find your favorite podcasts!
Letters From The Earth, Letter 10: Satan Goes To The Window, To The Wall! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 722

Letters From The Earth, Letter 10: Satan Goes To The Window, To The Wall!

Letter Ten skips Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob entirely and goes straight for the Old Testament body count. Satan’s thesis: the old testament shows us the Deity before he got religion, the new one shows him afterward. The first time he came down to earth he brought life and death. The second time, he brought hell.

Death, Satan argues, was a mistake — not because it was cruel but because it was insufficient. It inflicted misery beautifully on the survivors, but it let the dead escape into the blessed refuge of the grave. A way had to be found to pursue them beyond the tomb. The Deity worked on this for four thousand years without success, then came down, became a Christian, and his mind cleared. Everyone believes he was harsh in heaven and became gentle as Jesus Christ — whereas it was as Jesus Christ that he invented hell.

Then Satan starts quoting Numbers, and the rest of the episode is us reading the Midianite massacre out loud and reacting in real time. Kill every male among the little ones. Keep the rest for yourselves. Seventy-two thousand beeves. The biblical law says thou shalt not kill; the law of God written in the heart of man says thou shalt kill; and if God himself wrote the commandment, then plainly he can’t keep it.

And then there’s the wall. Satan speculates the Midianites must have done something trivial to earn extermination — maybe someone had been pissing against the wall. A person could piss against a tree, piss on his mother, piss on his own breeches and get off, but he must not piss against the wall. We assumed Twain invented this. He did not. It’s First Kings 14:10, word for word. We also work out what it actually means, which reframes the massacre passages completely.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”