Does every firstborn male belong to God?

Yes.

When God killed the firstborn of the Egyptians, he decided that the firstborn of the Israelites would be set apart to be his. So God commanded his people to consecrate every firstborn male to him. He said the first son of every female animal or human in Israel belongs to him. You can never choose to dedicate a firstborn animal to God, because the firstborn already belongs to God by default.

That means the people have to give all their firstborn males over to God. You must give him the firstborn of your sons, doing the same thing you do with the firstborn among your livestock: They can only stay with their mothers for seven days, then you hand them over to God. They are to be set apart and never put to work the way others would be. This is how God decided it will be, therefore this is how it will be forever, and it can never be changed.

No.

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Things the Bible doesn’t say

There are a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible, but for some reason everybody assumes they are.

Old Testament stories

The Bible doesn’t say Adam had another wife named Lilith. The only “lilith” mentioned in the Bible is some kind of creature that Isaiah said would haunt the ruins of Edom. Possibly a demon, or maybe just an owl. And the word Isaiah uses is plural, so it’s not an individual. The idea of Lilith being a wife of Adam seems to have come from an 8th-century work of satirical fiction.

The Bible doesn’t say Adam and Eve ate an apple. It just says they ate a certain kind of fruit that was forbidden. You don’t think eating apples is forbidden, do you? I’m not sure why anyone would assume the fruit that was forbidden was an apple, when they don’t regard apples as forbidden in any other context.1

It doesn’t say Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve’s only children. They were their first, but it says Adam had other sons and daughters. Noah, and therefore everyone after him, was descended from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, not from Cain. (At least not patrilineally.)

It doesn’t say the mark of Cain was a curse of any kind. It says God cursed Cain, but then agreed to also give him a mark that would prevent people from killing him. Having the mark was desirable for Cain. It also doesn’t say Cain’s mark was the origin of dark skin. The Bible never says what the mark looked like. It doesn’t say Ham or his son Canaan had dark skin, either.

The Bible doesn’t say the dove brought back an olive branch to Noah. It was an olive leaf. Only one English version I know of mistranslates it as a branch.

It doesn’t say Job was patient. In fact, Job specifically rejects the idea that there’s any reason he should be patient. His resolve to refrain from criticizing God lasts no more than the first two chapters. Then for the next thirty chapters or so, he does almost nothing but rant about how cruelly and unjustly God is treating him, and how he can’t wait to meet God so he can let him know what God has done wrong.2 I have no idea why people think of Job as patient. What could he have done that would show less patience?

It doesn’t say God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. The Sodomite men in the story do seem to be gay; they all want to have sex with the men visiting Lot, and they aren’t interested when Lot offers to let them have sex with his daughters instead.3 But the Bible never says that was why God destroyed Sodom.

There are two passages in the Bible that give specific reasons for Sodom and Gomorrah being considered evil. One is a list of failings that have nothing to do with sex. The other says they were punished for sexual immorality, but it doesn’t specify what kind of acts they were being punished for.

The Bible doesn’t say Joseph was the youngest son of Jacob. Benjamin was the youngest.

It doesn’t say God killed Onan for masturbating. It says God killed him for refusing to impregnate his brother’s wife. He could have completely avoided any kind of sexual act, and God still would have killed him. It doesn’t say Onan ever masturbated, and God never said there was anything wrong with masturbation anyway.

It doesn’t say Moses grew up not knowing he was a Hebrew. There is no scene in the Bible where he finds out he was adopted.

It doesn’t say the Pharaoh that Moses freed Israel from was Ramesses II. Most Pharaohs mentioned in the Bible, including that one, go unnamed.

It doesn’t say atheists are fools, or that they’re uncommonly evil. That verse in the Psalms says fools are atheists, which is not the same thing. If all fools are atheists, it’s still possible that most atheists aren’t fools. And it says everyone in the world is evil, not just the atheists.

It doesn’t say Jezebel was a prostitute. Apparently some people think she was because it mentions her putting on makeup once?? But in context, it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s trying to seduce anyone.

It doesn’t say Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Every translation I know of calls it a fish. Not that the ancient writers of the story would have even been aware of that distinction. And the mention of the fish in the book of Matthew does sometimes get translated as “whale”. But still, that’s not what the actual book of Jonah says. So why do people always call it a whale?

New Testament stories

The Bible doesn’t say anything about an “immaculate conception”. It does mention a virgin birth, of course, but the immaculate conception is something entirely different. Immaculate conception means being conceived without inheriting sin, which some Christians believe is true of Jesus’s mother Mary. But that didn’t become an official part of Catholic belief until the 19th century, because the Bible says nothing about it.

It doesn’t say how old Mary was when she married Joseph. Getting married at 12 wouldn’t have been anything unusual in the past, but the Bible doesn’t actually mention her age. Or his.

It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph were immigrants when Jesus was born. Some American liberals like to call them “undocumented immigrants” or “refugees” for some reason. They were not any of those things. At least not until they fled to Egypt a couple of years later, which I’m pretty sure is not what those people have in mind.

It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph had to stay in a stable because there was no room in the inn and they couldn’t go somewhere else because she was about to give birth. It just says she gave birth “while they were there”, not necessarily the night they arrived. And it doesn’t even mention an inn or a stable at all! All it says is that Mary put her baby in a manger “because there was no guest room available“. More likely, they were staying with relatives. With the livestock that the relatives had brought into their house, because people did that back then.

It doesn’t actually mention any animals being present when Jesus was born, though.

It doesn’t say Jesus was born on the 25th of December. Winter seems like an unlikely time for a Roman census. Or for shepherds to be out in the fields at night. Based on what the Bible actually says, it’s arguably more likely Jesus was conceived around that date, and born in September.4

The Bible doesn’t say three wise men visited baby Jesus, much less say what their names were. It just says the wise men (however many there might have been) brought him three gifts. It doesn’t say the wise men were kings. They were Magi, which might mean they were mathematicians, astronomers, priests, astrologers, alchemists, or magicians, but not kings. And it doesn’t say the wise men came on the night Jesus was born. It was more like two years later.

The Bible doesn’t say Mary was a virgin all her life. It says Joseph married her, and abstained from sex until Jesus was born. (The author wouldn’t have included that qualifier if he hadn’t mean that they did have sex after Jesus was born.) And later, it says Jesus had brothers and sisters.5

It doesn’t say Jesus had long hair.6 According to the Bible, long hair on a man is disgraceful. It doesn’t say Jesus dressed in white, either. The Bible doesn’t say anything about what he looked like. Unless you count the alleged Old Testament prophecies about him, which call him horrifyingly ugly.

It doesn’t say Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Just about all it says about her is that she saw Jesus die and she saw him after he rose and she used to be possessed by seven demons. So where did people get the idea that she was a prostitute? Well, Luke and John both have stories where a woman pours perfume on Jesus’s feet. Luke’s story describes the woman as sinful, and in John’s story the woman is Lazarus’s sister Mary.

But to conclude that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute based on that, you would have to make three questionable assumptions: that both of these stories are supposed to refer to the same event even though they take place in different locations, that Mary Magdalene was Lazarus’s sister (note that there are several different people named Mary in the gospels), and that the “sinful” woman was specifically a prostitute.

The Bible doesn’t say the Jews killed Jesus. At least not directly. It says they wanted to, but under Roman rule they weren’t allowed to execute anyone themselves. So they had to convince the Romans to do it.

It doesn’t say Saul of Tarsus changed his name and became Paul when he converted to Christianity. He just always had two names, a Hebrew name and a Latin name, because he was born both a Jew and a Roman citizen. He may have used the name Paul more often when he was traveling outside Judea to preach to the Gentiles, because he wanted to be relatable, but he never stopped being Saul.

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Who chose Saul?

The Bible says God is always the one who establishes who the authorities are. So naturally it was God who sent Saul to the prophet Samuel to be anointed king of Israel. When Samuel privately anointed Saul, he said it was God’s doing. After that, Samuel publicly cast lots as a way of letting God choose a king. They brought out Saul after he was chosen by lot, and Samuel described him as “the man the Lord has chosen“.

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The Story of the Exile of Israel and Judah
The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms

Where the Samaritans came from, according to the Jews

Jotham’s son Ahaz was an evil king of Judah, so God sent the kings of Israel and Aram to fight against him and defeat him after God had promised they wouldn’t defeat him.7 After God predicted Assyria would destroy Judah, Ahaz got the king of Assyria to instead help him attack Israel, by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God.

Hoshea, the next king of Israel, was an evil traitor. When the king of Assyria found that out, he took Hoshea prisoner and conquered his country, putting an end to the kingdom of Israel. The people of Israel were exiled to Assyria, becoming the Ten Lost Tribes. The king of Assyria sent foreign pagans to settle in the former land of Israel, becoming Samaritans.

How Hezekiah used the gift of success

Ahaz’s son Hezekiah was the most righteous king Judah ever had. So God made him successful at everything. Hezekiah successfully convinced God to let his people break God’s law by celebrating the Passover in any way they wanted.

He successfully rebelled against the king of Assyria, so God told the king of Assyria to destroy Judah. But righteous Hezekiah kept the king of Assyria from conquering Judah by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God (which his father had already given to the king of Assyria). After Hezekiah successfully convinced the king of Assyria not to conquer Judah, the king of Assyria continued to try to conquer Judah, as God had commanded him, until God got him killed.

Hezekiah got sick, and God sent a prophet to tell him that he would never recover. But Hezekiah successfully convinced the never-changing God to change his mind, and so he recovered anyway.

Men from Babylon came to visit Hezekiah, and he showed them all the treasure and stuff he owned. The prophet told Hezekiah that now that the Babylonians knew about all that treasure, they were going to steal it all some day. And they would kidnap and castrate some of Hezekiah’s descendants. Righteous Hezekiah said he didn’t mind that, since he wouldn’t be around when it happened.

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The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms
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Did God allow a census of Israel?

The Bible says when David took a census of Israel, that was Satan’s idea. Joab couldn’t believe David wanted to do such a repulsive thing, and he only helped because he had to. David was conscience-stricken afterward, and believed he had done a very foolish thing and sinned greatly. And God agreed that there would have to be a severe punishment for this evil act.

But the Bible also says that census was God’s idea! David was just doing what God wanted him to do, as he always did, so why would God have a problem with that? There was never any law against taking a census. On the contrary, God had commanded his chosen leaders to take a census of Israel multiple times in the past, and it was not a problem. God had also made laws about how to do it properly, which implies that taking a census was going to be a regular occurrence.

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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 9: Answers to questions in Psalms

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from the Psalms.

A king asks: Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? Answer: It probably has something to do with how tyrannical you and your God are being.

Someone asks God: Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Answer: Because he doesn’t exist.

He asks: Why does the wicked man revile God? Answer: Because God’s even more wicked?

And he asks: Why does he say to himself, “He won’t call me to account”? Answer: Experience?

Ethan the Ezrahite asks: Who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings? Answer: Does Satan count? He and God have a lot in common.

Ethan asks: How long, Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? Answer: Yes, God never listens to humans. Other than that one time.

He asks: Who can live and not see death, or who can escape the power of the grave? Answer: Enoch and Melchizadek and Elijah.

He asks God: Where is your former great love, which in your faithfulness you swore to David? Answer: He broke his promise to David, but what’s it to you, Ethan?

Moses asks: How long will it be? Answer: How long will what be? How long will our lives be limited to around 70 or 80 years? It’s still about like that over 3000 years later. Maybe we’ll be able to do something about that eventually, but not by waiting around for God to do something.

Someone asks some fools: When will you become wise? Answer: The Bible claims it’s impossible, but the Bible’s wrong, as usual.

He asks: Does he who fashioned the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see? Answer: The blind watchmaker does not hear or see.

Then he asks: Does he who disciplines nations not punish? Answer: Judging by what the Bible says about God, it seems like he mainly just punishes people who don’t deserve to be punished.

And he asks: Does he who teaches mankind lack knowledge? Answer: Yes.

He asks: Can a corrupt throne be allied with you—a throne that brings on misery by its decrees? Answer: You mean evil kings like David? Apparently yes.

Someone asks: Had the Egyptians not rebelled against God’s words in Moses’s time? Answer: No, the Egyptians had done exactly what God made them do.

Someone asks: Why was it, sea, that you fled? Why, Jordan, did you turn back? Why, mountains, did you leap like rams, you hills, like lambs? Answer: Because your author is insane?

Someone asks: Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?” Answer: Because you don’t use idols to represent your god, like they’re used to.

Someone asks: How long must your servant wait? When will you punish my persecutors? Answer: Never.

Someone asks: What will he do to you, and what more besides, you deceitful tongue? Answer: He won’t do any more to you than what he does to you, you deceitful tongue.

Someone asks: Where does my help come from? Answer: Helpful people.

Someone asks God: If you kept a record of sins, who could stand? Answer: Poor people who hate their unpleasant lives, but still dress right and get places on time. And rich people with lots of friends. And people who live with Christians, but don’t care about evil, and then get destroyed by Satan. And whoever else God randomly decided he wanted to save.

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Does the Law give you freedom?

Yes.

The longest chapter in the Bible is all about how great somebody thinks God’s Law is. One of the things he says about it is that he can walk about in freedom as a result of always seeking and obeying the law.

Paul says being under the law kills you… but dying frees you from the law. So the law does give you freedom. From itself. Paul also says the law of the Spirit sets you free from the law of death. That seems to contradict what he said about the law killing you, unless “the law of the Spirit” is something different from the Law from God that he was talking about before… but either way, he is still saying the law frees you. And James too says the law gives freedom if you follow it.

No.

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Did Satan tell Jesus to jump off the temple before or after he told him to worship him?

The gospel of Matthew has Satan take Jesus to the temple roof and challenge him to jump off. Then it has him take Jesus to a mountain and offer him the world in exchange for worshiping him.

The gospel of Luke has Satan take Jesus to a mountain and offer him the world in exchange for worshiping him. Then it has him take Jesus to the temple roof and challenge him to jump off.

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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 8: Answers to questions for Job

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions that Job was asked.

Eliphaz’s questions

Eliphaz asks Job: If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient? Answer: Yes. I don’t know why people think of Job as patient.

Eliphaz asks: But who can keep from speaking? Answer: Elihu can, for a while anyway.

Eliphaz asks Job: Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope? Answer: Apparently not. They clearly didn’t do him any good.

Eliphaz asks: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Answer: Who hasn’t?

And he asks: Where were the upright ever destroyed? Answer: On Earth.

He asks: Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker? Answer: lol that doesn’t sound hard

Eliphaz asks Job: Call if you will, but who will answer you? Answer: God will. Sort of. Eventually.

Eliphaz asks Job: Are you the first man ever born? Answer: No.

And he asks Job: Were you brought forth before the hills? Answer: No.

He asks Job: Do you listen in on God’s council? Answer: No.

And he asks Job: Do you have a monopoly on wisdom? Answer: No.

He asks him: What do you know that we do not know? What insights do you have that we do not have? Answer: He knows his own past better than you do.

Then he asks him: Are God’s consolations spoken gently to you not enough for you? Answer: Maybe they would be if God had actually said anything to him…

And he asks him: Why has your heart carried you away so that you vent your rage against God? Answer: Because God is torturing him and ruining his life.

He asks: What are mortals, that they could be righteous? Answer: If a perfect God made them, they must be perfect.

Eliphaz asks: Can a man be of benefit to God? Can even a wise person benefit him? Answer: No, that’s why he… didn’t create us?

Eliphaz asks Job: What pleasure would it give God if you were righteous? What would he gain if your ways were blameless? Answer: He wouldn’t be affected at all.

He asks Job: Is it for your piety that he rebukes you and brings charges against you? Answer: It’s not really a reaction to Job’s behavior at all. It’s just a test, that God failed.

He asks him: Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless? Answer: Yes, they are not.

Eliphaz asks: Is not God in the heights of heaven? Answer: Apparently not. Why would God say he was lifting his hand “to heaven” if he was already in heaven? Why would the Bible say his judgment “rises as high as the heavens” if that was where it was coming from? How could Jesus go to heaven when he died and then come back without having returned to God, if that was where God was? It’s not even possible for God to be in heaven. The heavens can’t contain him.

Eliphaz imagines Job asking: What does God know? Answer: Little enough that he feels the need to perform unethical experiments on people in order to learn more about them.

He imagines Job asking: Does he judge through such darkness? Answer: The Father judges no one.

Eliphaz asks Job: Will you keep to the old path that the wicked have trod? Answer: No, you can’t stay where you’ve never been.

Eliphaz imagines the wicked asking: What can God do to us? Answer: See preceding verse.

Bildad’s questions

Bildad asks Job: How long will you say such things? Answer: 20 chapters.

Bildad asks: Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? Answer: All the time.

Bildad asks Job: Will former generations not instruct you and tell you? Answer: No, no one from an older generation participates in this conversation. (Unless you count God.)

Bildad asks Job: When will you end these speeches? Answer: Chapter 31.

He asks Job: Why are we considered stupid in your sight? Answer: Because you have faith in the goodness of God, and that’s stupid.

And he asks him: Is the earth to be abandoned for your sake? Or must the rocks be moved from their place? Answer: No, God mainly just needs to stop actively tormenting innocent people.

Bildad asks: Can God’s forces be numbered? Answer: Let me see… Zero. Yeah, that wasn’t so hard.

He asks: On whom does his light not rise? Answer: “Rise”? Are you talking about the sun? Then some possible biblical answers are: Pharaoh, the wicked, Israel, prophets, and Paul.

Bildad asks: How can a mortal be righteous before God? Answer: I already answered that when Eliphaz asked it.

Zophar’s questions

Zophar asks: Are all these words to go unanswered? Answer: No.

He asks: Is this talker to be vindicated? Answer: Yes.

Zophar asks Job: Will your idle talk reduce others to silence? Answer: No.

He asks him: Will no one rebuke you when you mock? Answer: No, no one will not rebuke him.

And he asks: When God sees evil, does he not take note? Answer: If he does, he must not care much. Most of the time he does nothing about it.

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