Kellemes Karacsonyi Unnepeket!

Wishing you a merry Christmas in Hungarian can only mean one thing: The Brick Testament: The Story of Christmas has now been published in Hungarian! This new release brings the total number of languages in which Brick Testament books have been published up to seven! Congratulations to publishers Cinelink BT and Elefant es Kastely for this fine-looking addition to the Brick Testament canon, and for bringing holiday cheer to people from Koszeg to Debrecen.

War and Dismemberance

You may remember from the stories about King Saul how God had ordered Saul to commit a complete genocide against the Amalekite people. In fact, it was for the sin of sparing a single man from that total genocide that God rejected Saul as king.

So one can hardly blame Saul for having tried to be a little more thorough in his next genocide. But in our latest installment of stories, we find out that instead of being pleased by Saul's genocide of the Gibeonites, God is furious about it. How furious? Furious enough to wait until many years after Saul's death to suddenly start starving the Israelite masses to death with a terrible three-year famine.

And what does it take to appease God enough to end the famine? As you would no doubt guess, it takes the death and dismemberment of seven of Saul's children and grandkids on a mountainside.

Hard to think of a more appropriate story to celebrate as we head into the holiday season. Well, actually, there's also the story of God telling David to take a census and then killing 70,000 Israelites for David having taken a census. If that one doesn't fill you with holiday cheer, you are truly a Scrooge, my friend.

David, King Of Israel

A brand new section of the website launches today called King David, covering the stories from the biblical books of 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles concerning David's reign as king of all Israel.

Join along for our first installment as David disenfranchises the original inhabitants of Jerusalem, expresses his hatred for the blind and lame, impregnates many different women, and exposes himself before God. While God, for his part, demands war on the Philistines and kills a man just for touching the ark.

The Last Supper - Leonardo Da Vinci style

I was prompted to take a new go at building a LEGO Last Supper this week when I was interviewed about The Brick Testament by my local paper. They had asked if they could get a photo of me posing with a construction from The Brick Testament in hand.

I immediately thought of using The Last Supper since it’s iconic, relatively portable, and one of the few scenes from The Brick Testament that I’ve kept intact over the years. Trouble was, I’d just sold it as an art piece to someone who had seen it on display at the art gallery in Bratislava, Slovakia that I was invited to last Spring.

I began working on a "replacement" Last Supper, but since this was going to be a stand-alone piece, I decided not to merely replicate the Da Vinci-inspired version found in The Brick Testament's Last Supper story, but to try for something that is even more closely based on the original Da Vinci version. Because hundreds of years of deterioration and poorly executed "restorations" have left it uncertain exactly how the original once looked, I ended up basing my version most closely on an early 1800s life-size mosaic copy from the Church of the Minorites in Vienna.

For those interested, I've made this new version is available as a desktop wallpaper on the Brick Testament's desktops page.