Have you ever noticed how the serpent in the garden of Eden didn’t actually tell any lies? Have you ever thought about the implications of God’s statement that Job had told the truth about him and that his friends had not? Did you spot the huge flaw in Joseph’s plan to save Egypt from the famine?

Have you noticed that despite how much the Bible tries to make him look bad, the guy with the talking donkey was a consistently obedient servant of God? Did you catch the fact that the story of Jonah is about God forcing someone to tell a lie? Or that when Daniel’s friends are disobeying the king so they won’t have to disobey God, the Bible suspiciously fails to mention what Daniel was doing at the time, and vice versa?

Probably not. Maybe you’ve never read the Bible. Maybe you’ve only read “sanitized” versions of the Bible that left out all the awkward parts. Maybe you’ve read the Bible, but you had preconceived ideas of how the stories were supposed to go and what the characters were supposed to be like, which got in the way of seeing what the Bible actually says.

Maybe you’re so familiar with certain passages that when you see them, you just recognize-and-ignore them, instead of thinking about what they’re saying. Maybe the relevant passages were just so far apart in the Bible that you forgot about one by the time you got to another, so you never realized what they imply if you put them together.

It’s easy to miss a lot of surprising things like these in the Bible, for one reason or another. In this monthly series of summarized Bible stories, I’m going to be making those things a lot harder to miss.

I will include a moral at the end of each story. Not all of them are good morals, and not all of them are ideas that Christians are likely to agree with, but they are all lessons that can be learned from the Bible’s stories. For the Parables, I will also include an interpretation at the end, so you can easily see what everything in the story represents.

Below is a list of the Bible stories I’ve published on this blog so far, as well as the rest of the stories I’ll be posting in the future. If you like these stories, you can subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get to read more stories as they come out each month. There are several ways you can stay updated, so find something that works for you:

• Get push notifications on this device by clicking the bell icon in the lower-right corner of the screen.¹
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• If you use a feed reader such as Feedly, you can get updates there.

Or if you don’t want to wait a month for each new story, you can read more of my Bible stories right now on Patreon.

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“History” Stories

These are the stories that the Bible presents as if they were true stories, as opposed to the Parables.

Pre-Settlement:

Stories from before the settlement of the ancient kingdom of Israel.

The Beginning

• Adam and Eve (The Garden of Eden)
• Cain and Abel (The Picky Eater)
• Noah’s Ark (The One Where God Decides to Kill Everybody)
• The Tower of Babel (Babble Babble Babble)
• The Torture of Job (The Truth About God)

The Patriarchs

• Abraham’s Sacrifice (Isaac and his Murderous Psycho Father)
• Sodom and Gomorrah (Lot’s Family’s Mostly Unsuccessful Attempt to Avoid Being Raped and Killed)
• Jacob and Esau (How to be Blessed)

Children of Israel

• Dinah and Shechem (Somebody’s in Canaan with Dinah)
• Judah and Tamar (Somebody Get Me Pregnant Already)
• Joseph and his Brothers (The Interpreter of Dreams)

Journey to the Promised Land

• The Ten Plagues (The Exodus from Egypt)
• The Golden Calf (Moses Receives the Commandments)
• The Offensive Offering (The Lord is Slow to Anger)
• The Plague of Quail (God Solves a Problem by Creating a Worse Problem)

Wandering in the Wilderness

• The Twelve Explorers (You Didn’t Tell Us There Would Be Giants)
• The Mutiny Against Moses (Bring it On, On)
• The Water from the Rock (Why Moses was Banned from the Promised Land)

The Conquest Begins

• Balaam’s Ass (God Can’t Make Up His Mind)
• The Moabite/Midianite Clusterfuck (The Origin of the Priesthood)

Joshua Takes Over

• The Battle of Jericho (Two Spies and One Hooker)
• The Gibeonite Deception (The Colonists Get Rid of the Natives)

United Kingdom of Israel:

Stories from when Israel and Judah were supposedly a single nation.

Days of the Judges

• Ehud and Eglon (A Message From God)
• Jephthah’s Sacrifice (The Stupidest Story in the Bible)
• The Levite’s Concubine (The Most Pointlessly Evil Story in the Bible)

Samson and the Philistines

• Samson’s Riddle (Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat)
• Samson and Delilah (Brawn and No Brains)

Transition to Monarchy

• King Abimelek (The King Who Wasn’t Killed by a Woman)
• Ruth and Boaz (How I Met Your Great-Grandmother)
• The Calling of Samuel (Why the Family of Eli Was Cursed)

Reign of Saul

• The Inauguration of Saul (Your Cattle or Your Eyes)
• Jonathan and the Cursed Honey (Saul Tries to Starve His Own Army)
• The Rejection of Saul (Not Evil Enough to Please God)
• David and Goliath (David Risks His Life for Nothing)

Saul vs David

• David and Jonathan (The Gay Story)
• The Priests of Nob (David Gets Away with Lying, Sacrilege, and Reckless Endangerment)
• The Hunt for David (David Joins Israel’s Enemies)

Rise of David

• David and Abigail (David Expects to be Treated Like a King Prematurely)
• The Witch of Endor (The Fall of Tall Saul)
• King Ish-Bosheth (The One Where Nearly Everybody Gets Killed, But It’s Not God’s Doing for a Change)

Wives of David

• The Lost Ark (God Gives You Cancer)
• David and Bathsheba (The Only Thing David Ever Did That God Didn’t Approve of)

Descendants of Kings

• King Absalom (A Man’s Enemies Are the Members of His Own Household)
• Mephibosheth and Ziba (A Lame Deal)
• The House of Saul (The Children’s Teeth Are Set on Edge)

Fall of David

• The Mighty Warriors (The Ungrateful Jerk)
• David’s Census (Morning by Morning He Dispenses With Justice)
• King Solomon (The Wisest Man in the World)

Divided Kingdoms of Israel and Judah:

Stories from when Israel and Judah were two separate kingdoms.

Kings of Israel

• Rehoboam and Jeroboam (The Kingdom Splits in Two)
• Elijah’s God Contest (The Gods Must Be Lazy)
• Ahab and Micaiah (God Admits to Inspiring False Prophecy)

Adventures of the Prophets

• The Two Prophets (An Expensive Meal)
• Elisha and the Mean Boys (God Rescues His Servant From Persecution)
• Jonah and the Fish (It was This Big!)

Kings of Judah

• The Evil Kings of Judah (David’s Dynasty Starts to Approach Hitler Levels of Evil)
• Queen Athaliah (Seven Year Bitch)
• The Good Kings of Judah (No Rest for the Righteous)
• The Exile of Israel and Judah (The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms)

Post-Exile:

Stories about the Jews after their kingdoms ended.

Pre-Roman Judea

• Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel (Daniel in the Lion’s Den)
• Queen Esther

Life of Jesus

• The Birth of Jesus (The Massacre of the Innocents)
• John the Baptist
• The Temptation of Jesus
• The Calling of the Disciples (Fishing for People)
• The Resurrection of Lazarus
• The Crucifixion of Jesus

Early Christianity

• Ananias and Sapphira
• The Martyrdom of Stephen
• The Circum-Schism (Paul Hijacks Christianity)

Parables

These are stories that are told by characters in the Bible to make a point using an analogy, and are not claimed to be true stories.

Old Testament Allegories:

These metaphorical stories from the Old Testament are told either by one man to another, or by God to his people through the prophets.

Man-to-Man Metaphors

• The Trees
• The Rich Thief
• The Thistle of Lebanon

The Father’s Fables of Flora and Food

• The Failed Vineyard
• The Gardening Eagles
• The Dirty Pot
• The Big Tree

The Lord’s Lewd Likenings

• The Nymphomaniac
• The Two Sisters

New Testament Narratives:

The remaining stories are all told by Jesus.

The Savior’s Stories of Sinners

• The Two Builders
• The Fishermen
• The Single-Minded Shepherd
• The Uninformed Servant
• The Lost Son
• The Rich Man and Lazarus
• The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Emmanuel’s Agricultural Anecdotes

• The Sloppy Farmer
• The Weeds
• The Two Sons
• The Violent Tenants
• The Ignorant Farmer
• The Fig Tree

Christ’s Kingdom Comparisons

• The Mustard Seed
• The Yeast
• The Buried Treasure
• The Pearl
• The Impulsive King
• The Tardy Bridegroom

The Messiah’s Money Myths

• The Unmerciful Servant
• The Selectively Generous Employer
• The Greedy Master
• The Cancelled Debts
• The Abundant Harvest
• The Lost Coin

The Lamb’s Lawless Legends

• The Burglar
• The Violent Servant and his Violent Master
• The Fraudulent Manager
• The Scary Widow
• The Good Samaritan