The Bible’s questions, answered—part 14: Answers to questions in the prophets

The bad book

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 books of the prophets after Ezekiel.

Hosea asks Israel: What will you do on the day of your appointed festivals, on the feast days of the Lord? Answer: I assume they will feast.

Joel asks: Who can endure the day of the Lord? Answer: The author of Revelation seems to think a lot of people can. While writing about the events associated with that day, he keeps forgetting that he already said everybody died, and having something kill everybody again. Also, Jesus says whoever loses their life will preserve it, so I guess everybody can endure it?

Amos claims that for some reason, people who oppress the poor ask: When will the New Moon be over? Answer: In a few days or less.

Micah asks: Should it be said, “Does the Lord become impatient?” Answer: No, you’re right, Micah, people should not say that, if they mean to imply that God doesn’t become impatient, because God does very often become impatient and unreasonably violently angry.

He asks: With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Micah’s answer: No, God just wants us to be just and merciful and humble and stuff. Alternative biblical answer: Yes, he would be pleased. Not satisfied, maybe, but those sacrifices certainly are the sort of thing that God demands.

Then he asks: Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Answer: Nah, God probably wants your second-born. Well, he might not mind having your firstborn too… Better kill both.

And he asks: What does the Lord require of you? Micah’s answer: Justice and mercy and humility. Alternative biblical answer: To kill anyone who does any work on the wrong day of the week. To never let your sex slaves go free. To destroy entire nations if they’re in your way. Etc.

Nahum asks: Where now is the lions’ den, the place where they fed their young, where the lion and lioness went, and the cubs, with nothing to fear? Answer: I’m guessing it’s in Nineveh, since that’s what this book of the Bible is about.

Nahum asks the king of Assyria: All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty? Answer: Everyone who doesn’t live in your little corner of the world.

Habakkuk asks: How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Answer: Until you realize that he’s not your friend.

Habakkuk asks God: Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Answer: Because God is an unjust wrongdoer.

Zechariah asks an angel with horses: What are these, my lord? Answer: Horses.

Zechariah asks the angel again: What are these, my lord? Answer: These are trees, and a lampstand.

Malachi asks: Do we not all have one Father? Answer: Yes, we each have one father.

Malachi asks his people: Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another? (By which he apparently means “unfaithful to Jewish women collectively“.) Answer: Because God never actually said you couldn’t marry foreigners in general. He just said you couldn’t marry Canaanites.

Malachi asks: What does the one God seek? Answer: An all-knowing God would not seek anything, because he would already know where everything was.

Malachi says the people of Judah have wearied God with their words, and he says they ask: How have we wearied him? Answer: With your words.

Malachi asks: Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? Answer: Probably depends on which coming you mean. God makes plenty of appearances in the Bible without anyone dying.

God accuses his people of robbing him, and he says they ask: How are we robbing you? God’s answer: You’re robbing God when you give him gifts, but you don’t give him quite as much as he would like. Real answer: You’re not robbing him. Giving gifts is the opposite of theft.

Amos’s questions

Amos asks: Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so? Implied answer: No. Real answer: Yes.

He asks: Does a lion roar in the thicket when it has no prey? Does it growl in its den when it has caught nothing? Implied answer: No. Real answer: Yes, lions do roar for reasons unrelated to hunting.

Then he asks: Does a bird swoop down to a trap on the ground when no bait is there? Answer: Depends on what you mean by “bait”. Birds can be attracted with things other than food. Including sounds.

And he asks: Does a trap spring up from the ground if it has not caught anything? Implied answer: No. Real answer: Yes.

He also asks: When a trumpet sounds in a city, don’t the people tremble? Answer: No, not anymore.

And he asks: When disaster comes to a city, hasn’t the Lord caused it? Answer: No, and I’m not sure why you would want to blame all disasters on your god anyway.

Then he asks: The lion has roared—who will not fear? Answer: Samson.

And he asks: The Sovereign Lord has spoken—who can but prophesy? Answer: Non-prophets.

Amos asks: Won’t the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness? Implied answer: It will. Alternative biblical answer: It will not.

When he sees God preparing to unleash devastating swarms of locusts on Israel, Amos asks: How can Jacob survive? Answer: Same way Egypt survived the worst plague of locusts ever.

Sailors’ questions

The captain of the ship asks Jonah: How can you sleep in this storm? Answer: By going below deck.

The sailors ask: Who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? Answer: God.

The sailors ask Jonah: What have you done that has angered your God? Answer: Refused to tell a lie.

They ask him: What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us? Answer: You should take him back where you found him, rather than try to kill him. But of course, God isn’t going to let you do the right thing.

Kings’ questions

Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel: Are you able to tell me what I saw in my dream and interpret it? Answer: Yes.

Nebuchadnezzar asks: Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire? Answer: Yeah, just three. What’s up with that? Why didn’t you put Daniel in there too? He didn’t worship your statue, did he? Did he??

He asks: Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty? Answer: I guess so.

The king of Nineveh asks: Who knows if God will be willing to relent? Answer: God knew all along that he wasn’t actually about to have Ninevah overthrown. So he had no excuse for making Jonah (who also knew it wasn’t going to be overthrown) say that it was going to be.

Angels’ questions

An angel asks Daniel: Do you know why I have come to you? Answer: No.

An angel asks God: How long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with these seventy years? Answer: Probably about 70 years.

The angel asks Zechariah, who has just asked him what these are: Do you not know what these are? Answer: Obviously not.

The angel asks: What are you, mighty mountain? A mountain’s answer: I’m a mountain!

The angel asks Zechariah again: Do you not know what these are? Answer: Dude, he already told you he doesn’t know, in addition to asking you three times.

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Can idols eat?

Contradictions,

No.

Moses warned the Israelites how God would punish them if they ever made any idols. He said God would kill most of them and send the rest to live in other nations where there would be more idols for them to worship. And he described those idols as “man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell“.

Yes.

Moses also said that when God was done punishing his people for idolatry, God would gloat about the gods they used to worship, and would call them “the gods who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings”.

And through Ezekiel’s prophecies, God said his people had given their children as food to their idols.

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The Parable of the Big Tree

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A certain cedar of Lebanon was the biggest and most beautiful tree around, even bigger and more beautiful than the ones in God’s garden. But God thought it was wicked for the cedar to stand so tall and proud, so he let a ruthless emperor cut it down. He warned the other trees not to grow taller than the rest, or they would die too. Then all the other trees in Lebanon died too. (Presumably because there was always a tallest remaining tree.)

The end.

The moral of the story

Don’t be tall and beautiful.

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Who saw Jesus first after the resurrection?

Contradictions,

Two Marys

According to Matthew, Mary Magdalene and another Mary were the first to find out that Jesus had risen. And then they saw him, before they got a chance to tell the disciples what they’d heard. So none of the disciples even heard that Jesus was alive before the Marys saw him. And I think we can assume they hadn’t independently seen him yet either, or the angel wouldn’t have told the Marys to tell the disciples that Jesus was alive.

One Mary

According to Mark, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene first. It doesn’t mention any other Mary. And it says when she told the others that Jesus was alive, they didn’t believe her. So that’s further confirmation that no one else had seen him yet.

John agrees with Mark that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the resurrected Jesus. John also says that when Jesus first appeared to some of his disciples after the resurrection, it was to ten of them at once.1

Two disciples

According to Luke, some women found out that Jesus was alive, but they didn’t see him (which contradicts Matthew and Mark). The women told the disciples, who didn’t believe them. Then Peter went to look at the tomb himself, but he didn’t see Jesus either, and he wasn’t sure what had happened to Jesus. So at this point, no one has seen Jesus alive yet.

Then it says Jesus appeared to two disciples, who were seven miles away from the others at the time. When they got back to Jerusalem, they told the other disciples about it. Then Jesus appeared to all the disciples there, and they were shocked, because the disciples in Jerusalem hadn’t seen him alive yet. So when some of the disciples first saw Jesus resurrected, it was only two of them, not ten, contrary to John.

Just Peter

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Religion is irrational

Atheism,

Where do religious people get all the weird beliefs that make up their religions? Well, according to their own scriptures, it seems that a lot of those beliefs came from prophets, who claimed to speak for God. But according to how their own scriptures describe them, the prophets seem to have been insane.

Prophets were known for acting like maniacs, going naked in public, and intentionally getting people to injure them. They would elaborately attack inanimate objects, cook with turds, and claim to see bizarre things that no one else saw. Why would anyone believe anything that these madmen told them?2 In the Bible, God describes his own messengers as metaphorically “blind” and “deaf”. So why would anyone expect them to have any special insights?

Since the biggest religions are centuries old, they tend to incorporate a lot of the ignorant beliefs that were common back then, when people were even more likely to fall for superstitious ideas than they are now. These religions were developed in times when most people couldn’t even read, science hadn’t really been invented yet, and all the ordinary phenomena of nature that we now understand so well were seen as inexplicable magic and the work of invisible spirits.

Most of the things that come to mind when you think of “superstitions” originated from religious ideas. Christian religious ideas, as often as not.

Religion involves belief in highly desirable things, like miraculously answered prayers, universally enforced justice, and immortality. But these things are how we wish the world was, not how we observe the world to actually be. This sounds like the result of wishful thinking, rather than the result of any kind of thinking that reliably produces true beliefs. And if people have beliefs based on wishful thinking, that means they have these beliefs for reasons unrelated to whether these things are actually true.

One way religion irrationally manipulates people’s beliefs is by promising them endless bliss if they believe certain things, and threatening them with endless torture if they believe certain other things. Can you imagine a worse obstacle to true belief than that?

To varying extents, religious people tend to completely ignore large portions of their own religion’s teachings. The actual requirements and claims made by religions are so unreasonable that most people manage to convince themselves that a lot of those parts of their scriptures don’t mean what they say. Or that those disagreeable parts don’t matter, for some reason. And they also convince themselves that rejecting those things somehow doesn’t constitute disagreeing with their religion.

Because religious beliefs are mostly false, incoherent, or mutually inconsistent, people have to adopt all kinds of irrational thinking habits if they want to preserve their belief. Which is something religious people will tend to want to do, as a result of another irrational thinking habit which religion directly promotes: Faith.

Faith is unquestioning belief in a particular thing, regardless of evidence. Faith is a mix of gullibility and closed-mindedness and other forms of stupidity, which religion pretends is somehow a virtue. This kind of mindset will generally lead to false beliefs and bad consequences. A lot of people have died because they had faith that talking to their imaginary friend would save their lives, so they didn’t bother to get any real help.

Faith means you have no real reason for what you believe, and it means you refuse to change your mind for any reason. Faith-based beliefs are by definition completely disconnected from reality. So if you want to have true beliefs and not false ones, having faith is the worst possible way to think.

The fact that religious beliefs are based on blind faith is one good reason to think that those beliefs are most likely false. If people believe something on faith, there is no reason to think it’s true, since they would believe it whether it was true or not. A true belief wouldn’t need to rely on faith, because people would be able to arrive at that belief by following the evidence. And also because the belief wouldn’t be threatened by people considering the evidence.

Most people believe in a particular religion just because they were born into it, which is clearly not a very good reason to believe something. You would likely have different religious beliefs if you had been born in a different time or place. Even worse, religions have often been enforced by law or spread through violence, leading to people believing arbitrary things for non-truth-based reasons.3

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Will God destroy all living creatures again?

Contradictions, , ,

No.

After God flooded the whole world, he famously gave us the rainbow as a sign that he would never destroy all life on earth in a flood again. But that’s not all. In the chapter before that, God went further, and declared that he will never again destroy all living creatures. So that even rules out the possibility that he’ll do it by some method other than a flood.

Yes.

God told Nahum that he would leave the lions of Ninevah no prey on the earth. What does that entail? Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that absolutely all animals on earth will die out, but it sure doesn’t sound promising. Even if he doesn’t mean actual lions, God is saying the people of Ninevah will have no more people on earth left to kill. Which means God must be planning to at least kill all the people on earth.

Which God confirms in Isaiah, when he says he will totally destroy all nations. Or maybe he just means he’ll destroy their armies? No, Zephaniah says God is going to consume the whole earth with fire and make a sudden end of all who live on the earth. So God is definitely going to destroy all the people on earth. And it sounds like he’s going to destroy all the animals too.

Which God confirms in that same chapter, saying he’ll sweep away everything from the face of the earth, man and beast, when he destroys all mankind on the face of the earth. And the New Testament agrees that the earth will be laid bare on the day of the Lord, when everything will be completely will be destroyed by fire.

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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 13: Answers to questions in Ezekiel

The bad book

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 book of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel asks God: Are you going to destroy the entire remnant of Israel in this outpouring of your wrath on Jerusalem? Answer: No. As he just said, the killers won’t touch anyone who has the mark. Weren’t you listening?

God expects that the Israelites have asked Ezekiel: What are you doing? Answer: Ineffectively trying to tell the people something by sort of acting it out, because his God won’t let him communicate normally.

God says his people ask: Why does the son not share the guilt of his father? Answer: Because they’re not the same person?

Ezekiel says the people ask: Isn’t he just telling parables? Answer: Ezekiel does tell quite a few parables, but that’s not all he does. So no.

God expects that his people will ask Ezekiel: Why are you groaning? Answer: Because his God couldn’t think of a better way to get his message across.

God expects sailors to ask: Who was ever silenced like Tyre? Answer: Plenty have been, I’m sure. Especially if by “like Tyre” you mean “unsuccessfully“.

God tells Ezekiel to inform the Israelites that the Israelites are asking: Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live? Answer: By not doing that?

God expects Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish and all the villages of Tarshish to ask Gog of Magog: Have you come to plunder? Have you gathered your hordes to loot, to carry off silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods and to seize much plunder? Answer: Yeah, that’s pretty much what he just said he was going to do.

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Should female slaves be freed in the seventh year?

Contradictions, , ,

In the book of Exodus, God’s law says when you buy a male Hebrew “servant“, you have to free him in the seventh year of servitude, unless he doesn’t want to be free. When you buy a female Hebrew servant, on the other hand, you don’t need to free her in the seventh year.4

But when the law is repeated in the book of Deuteronomy, this time it says you do have to let your Hebrew servants go free in the seventh year, whether they’re men or women.

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The Parable of the Dirty Pot

Bible stories, , , , , , ,

Someone cooked meat in a pot. But some food got baked onto the pot and wouldn’t come off. Not even when he set the pot on fire.

The end.

The moral of the story

After you set the pot on the coals, don’t forget to pour a little water in, to soften the baked-on food, and then scrape it off with a spatula.

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How many generations were there between David and Jehoiachin?

Contradictions, , ,

The gospel of Matthew claims that there were 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile to Babylon, and 14 from the exile to the Messiah. There is some ambiguity in that statement: When you say there were N generations from X to Y, are you counting both X and Y as part of those N generations, or are you counting just one of them, or neither of them? Matthew does list the generations he’s talking about, though, so we can look at his list to get a better idea of what exactly he means.

Looking at that list of ancestors, it seems like the author intends to count both the first and the last person as part of the group of 14 generations. We can also see that he is including the last generation in one group of 14 as the first generation in the next group of 14. And that when Matthew talks about the generation of the exile to Babylon, he’s talking about Jeconiah, AKA Jehoiachin.

But there’s a problem with Matthew’s list: The second group actually contains 15 generations, not 14. You could count it as 14 if you interpret that number as a difference between generations, rather than inclusive of both the first and last person listed, but then you would have to say the other groups were just 13 generations each. Whichever way you count them, Matthew’s second group does not have the same number of generations as his first and third, contrary to what he claims after listing them.

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