There are some absolutely crazy stories in the Bible! This isn't exclusive to Christianity, of course. Every religion has crazy, wild stories. But when you hear that the Hindu monkey god Hanuman leads his armies of talking monkeys against the demon king Ravana, it's very easy to laugh at. And honestly, fair enough. It does sound ridiculous. But when you open up the Bible to stories about Balaam's talking donkey, somehow this absurdity is lost on us. At least on me it was.
I grew up for over 20 years in the church, and after years of repetition, authority figures, and childhood indoctrination, they have a way of normalizing the absurdities. When you're told that Muhammad split the moon in half and flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, it's perfectly natural to laugh. But then don't get offended when the rest of us laugh at Elijah flying into heaven on a flaming chariot. When you're dripfed these absurdities from infancy, they cease to sound absurd at all. They simply become the wallpaper of the mind.
Today, I want to pop the bubble that many of us were raised in and hold up these beliefs to scrutinize them as though we're encountering them for the first time. Let's get weird, shall we?
1. God killed a guy for pulling out during sex
Genesis 38 tells the story of Onan. His brother Er dies, and according to custom, Onan is supposed to impregnate his brother's widow, Tamar, to continue his brother's lineage. Onan sleeps with Tamar, but he pulls out at the last minute and spills his seed on the ground. God considers this wicked and instantly kills him. Just like that.
For centuries, the Catholic Church used this passage to condemn not just contraception, but masturbation. The term "onanism" literally comes from this story and was used as a clinical term for masturbation well into the 20th century. All for a story about a guy who didn't want to get his sister-in-law pregnant. The sin, if you read the text in context, was actually about refusing a family obligation and potentially cheating Tamar out of her inheritance rights. But the church ran with the sexual angle and used it to shame millions of people for entirely normal biological behavior. Sounds about right.
2. Zombie saints were resurrected and wandered around Jerusalem
This one doesn't get nearly enough attention. According to Matthew 27:52-53, when Jesus died on the cross, the tombs of the dead saints broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection and went into the holy city, appearing to many people.
The Gospel of Matthew claims that a mass resurrection of dead saints happened in Jerusalem. Corpses climbed out of graves, strolled around the city, and appeared to their friends and family. And then nothing. No one else in the entire ancient world mentions it. Not a single Roman historian, not Josephus, not even the other three gospels. You would think that a zombie parade through the capital city during Passover might have made the news, but apparently it slipped everyone else's minds except for Matthew's.
3. A dude survived for 3 days inside the belly of a giant fish
In the book of Jonah, God tells his prophet Jonah to go preach to the city of Nineveh. Jonah doesn't want to go, so he hops on a boat going the other direction. God sends a storm. The sailors throw Jonah overboard in order to appease God, and a giant fish swallows him whole. Jonah then lives inside the fish for 3 days and three nights, praying the whole time before the fish vomits him out onto dry land.
Now, the digestive system of any large marine animal would kill a human in minutes. The gastric acids alone would dissolve flesh. There's no oxygen, and the muscular contractions of the esophagus and stomach would crush a person long before digestion even started. Whenever people would make fun of this story about Jonah and the whale, as a Christian we would always defend it by saying, "Oh, it wasn't a whale. It was a big fish." As though somehow that makes it more believable.
But for literalists, this is a real historical event, not a parable, because Jesus references it in Matthew 12:40. And the logic here is perfect. We know it's literally true because Jesus said it was. And we know Jesus is reliable because the Bible says so. And we know that the Bible is reliable because the Bible says the Bible's true. It's turtles all the way down.
These stories don't spread because they're believable, but because people are indoctrinated young, and churches are extremely efficient. They organize communities, manage events, track donations, coordinate outreach. They're basically a really well-oiled machine. If they didn't do this, they wouldn't succeed.
4. God wrestled a man and lost
Genesis 32 tells the story of Jacob wrestling a mysterious figure through the night. By morning, the figure can't overpower Jacob and resorts to dislocating his hip, which is kind of a cheap shot if you ask me. Still, Jacob won't let him go and demands a blessing. The figure renames him Israel, meaning "the one who struggled with God." And Jacob names the place Peniel, which means "the face of God," saying he has seen God face to face and lived.
Later translations tried to interpret this as an encounter with a man or an angel, but the Hebrew text is very clear. Jacob wrestled with God, and he overpowered him. If your deity can be taken into overtime by a Middle Eastern shepherd, he might need to hit the gym. Just saying.
5. A 600-year-old man built a boat and crammed every species on Earth into it
Noah was apparently 600 years old when he constructed an ark large enough to house two of every single one of the millions of animals on Earth. That's not even mentioning the millions of tons of food and fresh water, the ventilation, the waste management nightmares for a voyage lasting over a year, with polar bears chilling next to penguins and termites politely agreeing not to eat the hull.
We're not told how koalas got from Australia to Mesopotamia, nor how they survived the journey back without a continuous supply of eucalyptus. Nor are we told which of Noah's family members had to host all of the parasites. And after the flood, all of these animals somehow repopulated the entire planet without the benefit of a viable-sized breeding population. They all branched out from a single point in the mountains of modern-day Turkey. Kangaroos hopping to Australia without leaving a single fossil along the way. Penguins waddling to Antarctica. Sloths alone, at their current land speed, would have needed about 500 years just to reach South America. But as Bertrand Russell once said, the point of theology is not to answer questions. It's to make the asking of them seem impertinent.
Genesis also claims that the flood waters covered every single mountain on Earth, including Everest at over 29,000 feet. That would require roughly three times the total volume of water currently on our planet. Where did it come from? Where did it go?
6. God sent bears to maul children for making bald jokes
In 2 Kings 2, a group of boys mock the prophet Elisha by calling out, "Go up, you bald head." Elisha, being a good representative of the omnibenevolent God of love and mercy, curses them in God's name, and two bears pop out of the woods and maul 42 of the little bastards.
Now, everyone I talk to wants to focus on the sheer horrific nature of this story, and I get that. But I think the most unbelievable part for me is that 42 kids got together to laugh at a bald man. I mean, I was a pretty social kid and I struggled to get 10 friends together to play soccer. Just how bald was this guy? And how fast were these bears? You would think that while the bears are chewing on two or three of the kids, the rest would have time to run off or something.
Some apologists try to soften the brutality of this by arguing that the Hebrew word for "boys" could potentially refer to "young men," as though somehow that makes divine bear attacks more proportionate. Oh, they weren't small children. They were teenagers. Totally reasonable. Sic 'em, bears.
There are so many absurd stories in the Bible to choose from. We haven't even touched on the time that God stopped the sun in the sky so that Israel could have a longer day to commit genocide in, or the time that the little gods in God's family decided to pop down and impregnate human women, just like the Greek gods do, and their offspring were demigod giants who were the reason that God sent the flood, but then somehow survived the flood. But I have two more for you.
7. A donkey had a conversation with its owner
In Numbers 22, the prophet Balaam is riding his donkey on a mission from God when God sends an angel of death to block the road and kill him for doing what God told him to do. The donkey can see the angel. Balaam can't. So the donkey keeps swerving to avoid the angel of death. Balaam beats it three times before God finally opens the mouth of the donkey and it starts speaking to him, in what one must assume was fluent Aramaic, to complain about being beaten.
And Balaam just answers it. No shock, no confusion, no "why is my donkey talking." He just starts arguing with the animal like it's a perfectly normal Tuesday. And we're supposed to accept this story with the same straight face as the Sermon on the Mount. Christians who find the monkey god Hanuman ridiculous will defend this passage without a flicker of self-awareness.
8. The time Jesus' prophecy failed
In Matthew 16:28, Jesus states plainly that some of those standing before him will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. The same promise appears in Mark 9:1. In Matthew 24:34, he assures his audience that this generation will not pass away until all of these things have taken place. These things include the darkening of the sun, the falling of stars, and his own triumphant return on the clouds of heaven.
Well, that generation did die, as did the next, and the next, and the next. Approximately a hundred generations since. We are now 2,000 years into what was supposed to be an imminent event, and the faithful are still watching the skies, interpreting every war, famine, and eclipse as a sign that this is finally it. Every single generation has been convinced that they are the last one. Every single one has been wrong.
This is, I should note, not some minor embarrassment. It is a blatant failed prophecy by the central figure of the religion, recorded in the canonical gospels. In any other context, a prophet whose most dramatic prediction failed within a single generation would simply be called a false prophet. But Christianity, with its genius for reinterpretation, has managed to transform this failure into a virtue. The delay is a "test of faith." The Millerites were so sure that Jesus was coming back in 1844 that they sold their homes and waited on hilltops. When nothing happened, they called it the Great Disappointment. And rather than concluding that maybe the whole prediction model was flawed, they just started a new denomination. That is literally how we got the Seventh-Day Adventists.
What are your favorite weird Bible stories? Are there any that I missed, or that you would have included?
Get Connected:
New to atheism? I'm here to help.
Enter your email to get my free infographic:
13 Things I Learned in my First Year as an Atheist.
Join our community Facebook group:
Science-loving Skeptics
Join our community of critical thinkers, skeptics, and humanists as we strive to create a better world. We're optimistic about the future, promote science education, and base our understanding of the world on empirical data.