Chapter 9 brings out an aspect to Kovacs I don’t think I had expected—he appears to be humored by hemorrhoids. He focuses in on a story recorded in 1 Samuel following the capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines. After bringing the Ark into one of their cities, the Philistines began to suffer from several plagues—one of them being hemorrhoids.

Kovacs quoted 1 Samuel 5:12 and followed it with a statement—here is what he wrote, “‘And the men that died not were smitten with the hemorrhoids; and the cry of the city went up to heaven’ (v.12 Darby). This was likely the worst case of hemorrhoidal hysteria in history, with people shrieking so loudly from pain that their voices were heard in heaven.” Apparently, Kovacs takes the phrase “and the cry of the city went up to heaven” as a literal statement and not a figure of speech. This is interesting because he didn’t take the similar phrase “because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great” literally when he was addressing “gay sex with angels” in his chapter Let There Be Sex. If one looks up the other places in Scripture where this phrase is used, it becomes clear that it is a figure of speech. That it addresses people praying to God, not their literal crying out in a loud voice—so loud that it is heard in heaven.