The 14 Weirdest Moments In the Bible

Tom Chivers

1. You asked for 100 foreskins? Here are 200, hope that’s OK.

David wants to marry Saul’s daughter Michal. Saul doesn’t want David to marry his daughter, so he demands as a bride price 100 foreskins of his enemies the Philistines, hoping that David will get killed fighting them. But instead, David goes and kills 200 Philistines, cuts off their foreskins, presents them to Saul, and marries Michal.

From 1 Samuel 18:25-27.

2. You call me bald, I will have you killed by a bear.

Some children mock a bald man. He curses them, and two female bears come out of the woods, killing 42 of them. He continues on his journey. No one seems to think this is disproportionate.

From 2 Kings 2:23-24.

3. Noah gets hammered and behaves weirdly.

In which Noah gets extremely drunk on wine from his vineyard and passes out naked outside his tent. One of his sons sees him and tells his brothers, who drag him into the tent and cover him up. Noah then exiles his grandson, who hasn’t been mentioned so far, apparently for no reason whatsoever.

From Genesis 9:20-28.

4. God says he doesn’t want any sacrifices from people with damaged testicles.

God tells Moses that he is very particular about who can offer food at his temples. No one with a “defect” is allowed. That is, “no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores, or damaged testicles”.

From Leviticus 21:17-24.

5. Take that, fatty.

Ehud, an assassin, stabs a king called Eglon. Eglon is extremely fat, so the whole sword, up to the handle, is lost within his rolls of flab. Eglon then shits himself and dies, and Ehud leaves without his sword.

From Judges 3:12-23.

6. Lie down on your side for one year, and eat bread baked with human poo!

God tells Ezekiel that in memorial of the siege of Jerusalem, he needs to build a model of the city. Then he needs to lie down on his left side for 390 days, then his right side for 40 days. During this time he is only allowed to eat bread which he has baked over a fire of human shit.

Ezekiel protests at this last bit, so God lets him use cow shit instead.

From Ezekiel 1:1-16.

7. Abram pretends his wife is his sister, so Egypt gets punished with the plague.

Abram’s wife Sarai is seriously good-looking, so Abram is worried that the Egyptians will kill him to steal her. He asks her to pretend that she’s his sister instead.

The Egyptians do indeed think she’s very good-looking, so they tell the Pharaoh, who gives Abram “sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels”, and takes Sarai into his household. But this annoys God, who punishes the Pharaoh’s family with “serious diseases”.

From Genesis 12:10-20.

8. God decides not to kill Moses after seeing some foreskin blood on his feet.

Moses is walking back to Egypt after spending some time in Midian. God decides to kill him. But Moses’s wife takes a flint knife, chops off their son’s foreskin, and dabs the blood on to Moses’s feet, saying, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” God changes his mind.

From Exodus 4.24-26.

9. No, don’t rape those guys, rape my daughters instead.

Two angels visit a guy called Lot in the town of Sodom. Every single man living in Sodom turns up on Lot’s doorstep demanding to be allowed to rape the two angels. Lot asks the men if they would rather rape his two young daughters instead.

The crowd say they would not, so God strikes them all blind and tells Lot and his family to get out of the town without looking back because he is going to destroy it. Lot’s wife disobeys the instruction and looks back, so, for reasons that are not adequately explored, God turns her into a pillar of salt.

From Genesis 19:1-26.

10. Fancy a drink, Dad?

Lot and two daughters have fled Sodom, and are hiding in a cave. His daughters worry that there aren’t any men around. So they take it in turns to get their father drunk and have sex with him. They both get pregnant, and their sons each start great dynasties.

From Genesis 19:30-38.

11. In which Jesus reminds us of the real enemy – the trees.

Jesus is hungry one day. He goes to grab a fig off a tree. The tree has no fruit, only leaves, so Jesus loses his rag and curses it. “May you never bear fruit again,” he says. The tree dies. His followers look surprised, so Jesus tells them that that’s nothing and he could totally make a mountain jump in the sea if he wanted to.

From Matthew 21:18-21.

12. I am the Lord your God, and if I want to make donkeys talk I bloody well will.

A man called Balaam beats his donkey for stopping. God gives the donkey the power of speech, and the donkey complains about being beaten. Balaam is apparently unfazed by the talking donkey and threatens to kill it. Then an angel comes along and tells him that actually the donkey is doing God’s work.

From Numbers 22.28-29.

13. Pay the tax with magic fish!

Jesus and his disciples are asked to pay some tax. Jesus says that they’re exempt, but out of politeness, he agrees to magically make a four-drachma coin appear in a fish’s mouth so that his apostle Peter can pay with that.

From Matthew 17:24-26.

14. God gets beaten up by a guy with a dislocated hip.

Jacob is moving house. His wife and 11 sons have gone ahead of him. Suddenly, without any explanation, he’s wrestling with a man. The fight goes on all night. The man knows he’s losing, so he somehow magically wrenches Jacob’s hip out of place. Jacob says he won’t let go until the man blesses him, so the man does that, and then admits that, in fact, he’s God. “Therefore to this day,” says the Bible, “the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.”

From Genesis 32:22-31.

SUBMITTED BY JEFFREY DAUGHERTY (www.jeffreydaugherty.com) THE CHRISTIAN WHISTLEBLOWER