Two hours before last May’s The Tao of Poo, I walked into the Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia for the first time and beheld a sculpted Jesus hanging from a cross twelve feet above the stage, his face twisted in the eternal agony that can only be understood by someone nailed to a crucifix and forced to listen to two hours of people talking about poop. This holy setting (the Fleisher is actually a converted church) inspired me to include in my remarks an excerpt from Poop Culture cataloging the appearances of poop in the Bible. Among the passages I discussed was Malachi 2:3: “Behold, I will rebuke your seed, and will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your feasts.”

The Book of Malachi is the last of the Old Testament. In it, God, speaking through His prophet Malachi, chastises the people of Judea who have turned away from Him. While He’s angry at pretty much everyone, He’s particularly upset at the priests who aren’t properly glorifying His name. His warning of feces face painting is aimed directly at these priests:

“And now this commandment is for you, O priests. If you do not listen, and if you do not take it to heart to give honor to my name,” says the lord of hosts, “then I … will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your feasts.”
– Malachi 2:1-3

Reading the passage that night in Philadelphia, I thought I’d spotted a typo. Surely God was referring to the dung of their beasts, right? But a post-event glance at an online Bible showed I got it right the first time: “dung of your feasts.” God is not just brandishing a celestial fistful of random gutter poop — no, He has some very specific poop in mind.

Dung of your “feasts”? Wondering if there was another meaning to the word “feast”, I compared the passage reprinted in Poop Culture (the American Standard Version of the Bible) with some other translations. In the New American Standard Bible version, it’s also “feasts.” In the King James Version, it’s “solemn feasts.” In the God’s Word Translation, it’s “festival sacrifices.” Further cross-referencing brought me to Ezekiel 45:17, in which the word ASV translates as “feasts” is rendered by GWT and others as “annual festivals.” So there’s little ambiguity to God’s threat: God will reach His divine hand out of the heavens, gather the priest’s morning-after pile into His divine palm, and shove it down the priest’s blasphemous gullet.

Which begs the next question: why is this poop different from all other poops?

The answer can be found in a fast-growing diet fad that lies at the intersection of America’s spreading evangelism and America’s spreading waistlines: bible diets. You can lose weight, these diets claim, by eating what Jesus would eat: natural and unprocessed foods like vegetables and whole grains. (The historical claims of these diets appear to be supported by biblical record.) From a weight-loss standpoint, these diets seem promising — they’re light, wholesome, and free of the corn syrup that’s fattening Americans like geese bound for foie gras. These diets are full of fiber and complex carbohydrates — which means that from a pooping standpoint, they’d be fairly unstinky and relatively easy to pass.

In Malachi 2:3, God very deliberately contrasts a priest’s everyday poop with the “dung of your feast”, implying that festival poop is a whole lot different. I know from the few fragments of Bible still floating around my head that feasts were an occasion for a lamb to be slaughtered and roasted up for the whole village to enjoy. If the typical diet was high in fiber and complex carbs, this sudden infusion of fat and protein must have been like our experiences during the Summer Stoolstice. For some priests, the “dung of your feasts” produced massive sixteen-inch scepters with which God could smack them upside the head; for others, it produced squirts and splatters that God could apply to their face with a paintbrush.

What’s most interesting about this passage to me is not God’s dung cannon loaded with festival bullets; rather, it’s the symbolic implications of His statement. To contemporary readers, having poop smeared on your face is bad because poop is gross and because poop has extreme symbolic negativity. Malachi 2:3 implies that poop inspired the same physical and symbolic reactions 2,500 years ago as it does today.

What’s more, Malachi 2:3 implies that people were probably joking about their poop back then, just like we do today. When God said “dung of your feasts,” the priests He was yelling at probably didn’t turn to one another and wonder what the hell He’s talking about. No, God’s threat had to be one with immediate comprehension — which means “dung of your feasts” was a concept with which they were intimately familiar. The ancient Israelites probably laughed and bragged about their post-Hanukkah poops the way we laugh and joke about the aftermath of Thanksgiving.

From Malachi 2:3, we can infer that the people of Bible times believed that poop is gross, and that poop is funny, and that having poop smeared on your face is a very bad thing. Twenty-five hundred years later, we believe the exact same things. When I go to museums, I have a trouble identifying with living, breathing humans who painted the pottery upon which I dumbly gaze; but through this passage I can immediately connect with my ancient ancestors. It’s through poop that I can understand others — across language, across religion, and across time.

“I think we should have a facility, but not necessarily on one of the prime corners,” says jewelry store owner Stephan Sternat, summing up the attitude of the majority of the shopkeepers in downtown Santa Cruz. There aren’t enough toilets in the downtown area — but while none of the store owners are clambering to open their bathroom doors to shoppers in need, neither are any willing to volunteer the sidewalk in front of their store for the city to install a self-cleaning public toilet unit.

It’s a debate we’ve seen over and over again in American cities, a problem caused by a lack of foresight in whatever zoning scheme has brought identical Baby Gaps and J. Crews to hundreds of city centers across the country: while shoppers have all the Cinnabons and Mrs. Fields they can handle, there are precious few locations for when the buns and cookies become too much to bear. And even when respite is provided, public toilets quickly become havens for drugs, prostitution, and other evils in which people like to partake behind doors nobody wants to open anyway.

Like Santa Cruz, a number of cities have considered those fancy self-cleaning robotic toilets, but the cost of those can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, aside from traditional bathrooms that janitors have to clean and cops have to monitor, there are only a few alternatives. China is catering to Beijing poopers through economies of scale with a new facility putting a thousand toilets under one roof. Unlike the deserted nighttime city center toilets in many American cities, this giant bathroom will have around-the-clock traffic, ensuring that too many eyeballs will be around for the kind of vices that thrive in deserted areas to crop up.

The city of Portland is trying a more progressive route: they’re bringing the toilets under the watchful eye of the city government by opening City Hall’s bathrooms to late-night users. These toilets will presumably be adequately monitored and staffed; better yet, there’s probably some law banning turd terrorism on government property with a punishment stringent enough to discourage even the most dedicated shitman. With maintenance and cleaning, Portland’s program will cost $46,500 over six months — more expensive, in the long run, than Santa Cruz’s robocrapper, which cashes in at $250,000 for the unit and $70,000 for the yearly maintenance. But why invest in a cyber facility when all you really need to ensure safe pooping are a few bored security guards and a few nearby mops?

Back in Santa Cruz, though, the city has turned down the high-tech fix for the age-old problem in favor of the age-old solution: no bathroom at all.