Tag Archives: escape

The Story of Rehoboam and Jeroboam—
The Kingdom Splits in Two

January 6, 2024Bible storiesbaasha, betrayal, death, escape, evil, failure, foolishness, god, idols, injustice, israelites, jeroboam, jews, massacres, mind control, murder, obedience, prophecy, punishment, rebellion, rehoboam, reputation, scapegoating, self-defeating, slavery, solomon, suicide, temple, torture, wisdom, workR. A. Absalom

God wanted to punish King Solomon for worshiping other gods. But he liked Solomon’s dead father too much to do that. So he decided to wait until Solomon was dead and punish his son instead.

A prophet announced that God was going to let most of Israel be taken over by Jeroboam, one of Solomon’s officials. Solomon wisely attempted to hinder God’s plan by killing Jeroboam. But before he could, Jeroboam fled to Egypt, where he waited for Solomon to die. Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam.

The people of Israel told Rehoboam they would serve him, but only if he didn’t make them work as hard as his father had. Rehoboam wasn’t sure how to answer them, so he asked for advice. The elders he asked said he should give the people what they wanted. But the young men he asked said he should make the people work even harder. While torturing them with scorpions.

To punish Rehoboam for what his dead father had done, God made Rehoboam decide to follow the bad advice of the young men. This caused most of the Israelites to turn against him. Israel made Jeroboam their king instead of Rehoboam, but the tribes of Judah and Benjamin seceded from Israel. They became the kingdom of Judah, and kept Rehoboam as their king.

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The Story of King Absalom—
A Man’s Enemies Are the Members of His Own Household

July 25, 2023Bible storiesabsalom, amnon, animals, betrayal, curses, david, deception, destruction, escape, evil, failure, family, fire, food, foolishness, hair, homosexuality, illness, imprisonment, incest, infidelity, ingratitude, injustice, joab, judgment, marriage, mistakes, morality, mourning, murder, overreaction, polygamy, prayer, punishment, rape, rebellion, reputation, revenge, sabotage, sex, slavery, suicide, trees, violence, warR. A. Absalom

David’s son Amnon was obsessed with his beautiful sister Tamar. Amnon’s nephew advised him to pretend to be sick. Then he could request a meal to be served to him in bed by his sister. So he did. When Tamar went to Amnon’s bedroom and tried to give him some food, he wouldn’t eat it. Instead, he told her to get in bed with him.

Tamar said she couldn’t do that right now, because that would be foolish and wicked and disgraceful. They should get married first! She was sure their righteous father David would allow his children to marry each other. But Amnon ignored her proposal, raped her, and sent her away. Absalom, another son of David, saw Tamar crying, and he told her to shut up. He said she should stop taking Amnon’s actions so seriously, because he was just her brother.

King David was not happy with what Amnon had done. Two years later, Absalom had Amnon killed. David heard that all his sons had been killed, and he wasn’t happy about that, either. When he found out that only Amnon was dead, he was just slightly more happy. Absalom wasn’t allowed to see his father for two years. Then Absalom set Joab’s barley field on fire, which convinced him to let Absalom visit David.

Absalom became popular (despite his disgracefully long hair) by kissing all the men who came to see King David. Then Absalom was able to get the people to declare him king of Israel. When David heard that his son was trying to overthrow him, he and most of his household ran away. But he made ten of his girlfriends stay behind to take care of his palace.

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The Story of the Hunt for David—
David Joins Israel's Enemies

January 8, 2023Bible storiesbetrayal, caves, david, deception, destruction, escape, failure, foolishness, forgiveness, god, insanity, israelites, massacres, morality, philistines, pointlessness, prophecy, reputation, revenge, saul, secrets, sleep, theft, warR. A. Absalom

David went to the Philistine city of Gath to escape from Saul. But the people there thought they recognized him as a notorious Philistine slaughterer. So David pretended he was insane,¹ and then he ran away and hid in a cave.

Then he went into a city and fought the Philistines who were attacking it. But God told him that Saul was coming, and that the people of the city would hand him over to Saul to keep him from destroying their city. So David left the city, and what God predicted didn’t happen.

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The Story of the Priests of Nob—
David Gets Away with Lying, Sacrilege, and Reckless Endangerment

December 12, 2022Bible storiesanimals, betrayal, david, deception, escape, food, foolishness, injustice, massacres, mistakes, obedience, overreaction, philistines, priests, punishment, safety, saul, scapegoating, secrets, selfishnessR. A. Absalom

David went to Nob with his companions, whoever they were. Ahimelek the priest wanted to know why David had come there alone, and David claimed that Saul had sent him on a secret mission.

The priest gave David some bread that only priests were allowed to eat, and he ate it. David knew that Saul’s servant Doeg would tell Saul that the priests of Nob had helped David. So he ran away to the land of the Philistines, and left the priests to their fate.

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The Story of David and Jonathan—
The Gay Story

November 14, 2022Bible storiescircumcision, coercion, david, deception, demons, discrimination, envy, escape, failure, family, food, foolishness, gentiles, god, homosexuality, idols, in-law-cest, jonathan, love, marriage, massacres, michal, mistakes, moral influences, murder, music, nudity, overreaction, philistines, pointlessness, poverty, promises, reputation, rescue, reward, samuel, saul, self-defeating, tests, warR. A. Absalom

Saul hates David, Saul’s children love David

After David killed Goliath, women from all over Israel started singing and dancing and claiming that David had slain tens of thousands, but Saul had only slain thousands. This made Saul jealous and angry at David, and they became enemies.

The next day, Saul tried to kill David twice by throwing a spear at him, but he missed both times. Since Saul wasn’t able to kill David himself, he decided to let his other enemies do it for him. So Saul offered to let David marry his daughter Merab if David fought some more Philistines. But David didn’t think he was worthy of becoming the king’s son-in-law, because he wasn’t rich and famous enough.

(Even though women all over Israel were singing his praises. Even though he had been chosen by God to become king of Israel. Even though Saul had promised to give great wealth and his daughter to whoever killed Goliath.)

So Merab married somebody else. But Saul found out that his other daughter, Michal, was in love with David, so Saul offered to let David marry her if he killed 100 Philistines. So David forgot about his supposed unworthiness, and killed 200 Philistines and brought their foreskins to Saul,¹ and then David married Michal. Then Saul found out that Michal was in love with David. Again.

But David loved Saul’s son Jonathan more than he loved women. Jonathan loved David too, so he took off his clothes and became one with him. Jonathan informed David (who had already had to dodge Saul’s spear twice) that Saul was trying to get David killed. Jonathan knew this because Saul had told Jonathan to kill David. Then Jonathan told Saul that there was no reason to kill David for no reason, so Saul promised to stop trying to kill David.

Idol threats

But then God sent an evil spirit that made Saul throw a spear at David again, so David ran away from Saul’s house and stayed at his own house. Saul sent men to wait outside David’s house that night and kill him in the morning. When David realized that Saul’s men had come to kill him, he wrote a song about it.² Then he threatened to kill his wife if she didn’t help him escape, so she lowered him through a window, and distracted Saul’s men with a decoy made from an idol that she had handy for some reason.

Saul went after David so he could capture him and kill him, but when he ran into Samuel and some other men, God made Saul strip off his clothes and lie down with the men and spend the night with them.

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The Story of Samson and Delilah—
Brawn and No Brains

March 8, 2022Bible storiesbetrayal, blindness, bribes, buildings, coercion, deception, destruction, escape, failure, foolishness, fornication, god, hair, imprisonment, love, massacres, miracles, mistakes, nagging, philistines, revenge, samson, secrets, self-defeating, slavery, sleep, spying, suicideR. A. Absalom

Samson got a new girlfriend, named Delilah. Samson’s enemies, the Philistines, paid Delilah to figure out Samson’s secret weakness, so they could capture him. So Delilah asked Samson three times how such a strong man could be successfully tied up, and Samson gave her three false answers.

Each time, Delilah tied him up the way he suggested while he was sleeping, and then woke him up by telling him the Philistines had come for him, but Samson easily broke out of his restraints. Delilah kept nagging him every day, saying if he really loved her, he would tell her how to drain his strength and allow his enemies to capture him. So he did.

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The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat

February 9, 2022Bible storiesanimals, betrayal, blessings, coercion, death, destruction, discrimination, escape, failure, fire, food, fraud, god, hair, imprisonment, israelites, jealousy, marriage, massacres, miracles, mistakes, misunderstanding, murder, nagging, overreaction, philistines, promises, punishment, revenge, reward, samson, scapegoating, secrets, spying, teamwork, theft, wineR. A. Absalom

Samson was another judge, who saved his people when God let the Philistines take over Israel. Samson was a life-long Nazirite, which required him to abstain from wine, corpses, and haircuts.

While Samson was on his way to a Philistine city to visit a Philistine woman, he was attacked by a lion. God gave him the strength to easily kill the lion with his bare hands. Later, when he was on his way to the Philistine city again to marry the Philistine woman, he found that some bees had made a nest in the lion’s body. He took some honey out of the dead lion and shared it with his parents. But he didn’t tell anyone where the honey came from.

Samson challenged 30 Philistine men to try to solve a riddle by the end of his week-long wedding feast. They agreed that the losing party would have to give the winning party 30 sets of clothes. So Samson told them a “riddle” that they couldn’t possibly make sense of without knowing about the lion incident that no one but Samson knew about.

The Philistine men realized that Samson was unfairly trying to take their property. So they threatened to burn down his new wife’s house unless she told them the answer to the riddle. Samson’s wife cried constantly for the rest of the week until Samson gave her the answer. Then she told the answer to the men, and the men gave the answer back to Samson.

Samson knew those 30 Philistine men must have cheated, since there was no other way they could have possibly solved his “riddle”. But he gave them the promised 30 sets of clothes… which he got by killing 30 other Philistine men.

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The Story of the Levite’s Concubine—
The Most Pointlessly Evil Story in the Bible

January 10, 2022Bible storiesdestruction, discrimination, escape, evil, failure, family, foolishness, god, homosexuality, hypocrisy, injustice, israelites, kidnapping, marriage, massacres, moral influences, murder, overreaction, pointlessness, promises, punishment, rape, revenge, scapegoating, tribes of israel, violence, virginity, warR. A. Absalom

A Levite man’s girlfriend broke up with him and went back to live with her parents. But then he followed her to her parents’ house and took her back. On the way back to the man’s home, they stopped for the night in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin, and stayed in an old man’s house.

Some of the Benjamite men from that city came and surrounded the house. They told the old man to send the Levite man out so they could have sex with him. The old man said he couldn’t let them have sex with his guest, because that would be outrageous and vile. So he offered to let them rape his daughter and his guest’s girlfriend instead.

The Levite man thought that was a good idea, so he sent his girlfriend outside. The men of Gibeah spent the whole night gang-raping her to death. Then the man went home, and he chopped up his girlfriend into a dozen pieces and had them distributed all over the country.

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The Story of the Gibeonite Deception—
The Colonists Get Rid of the Natives

October 5, 2021Bible storiescanaanites, catch-22, deception, destruction, escape, failure, fire, fraud, genocide, god, israelites, joshua, massacres, morality, obedience, promises, punishment, slavery, theft, warR. A. Absalom

After destroying Jericho, the Israelites next went to the city of Ai, killed everyone there with swords, stole all their belongings, and burned down the city. When the nearby people of Gibeon heard about that, they figured out a way to keep the same thing from happening to them. They asked Joshua to make a treaty with them.

God had forbidden the Israelites to make a treaty with the people who lived in the land they were taking over, so when Joshua asked, the Gibeonites said they lived far away. So Israel made a treaty of peace with Gibeon and swore not to attack them.

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The Story of the Ten Plagues—
The Exodus from Egypt

December 3, 2020Bible storiesaaron, adoption, animals, blindness, circumcision, coercion, death, deception, destruction, disasters, discrimination, egypt, escape, failure, famine, fraud, genocide, god, illness, incest, israelites, massacres, mind control, miracles, moral influences, moses, murder, pharaoh, pointlessness, punishment, reputation, rescue, sabotage, scapegoating, self-defeating, selfishness, slavery, transformation, violence, weatherR. A. Absalom

The king kills countless kids

The Israelites (the descendants of Jacob) were getting so numerous that the new Pharaoh was afraid of them. So he decided to enslave them and have all their baby boys thrown into the Nile River.

Jacob’s great-grandson Amram and his aunt Jochebed had a baby boy, so they put the baby in the Nile… inside a waterproof basket, with their daughter watching over it. Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby in the basket while she was bathing in the Nile. She adopted the baby, named him Moses, and hired his mother to nurse him for her.

After Moses grew up, he was watching his fellow Hebrews working, when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. So Moses killed the Egyptian. When Pharaoh heard about that, he tried to kill Moses. The other Hebrews weren’t happy with what Moses had done, either. So Moses ran away from Egypt and lived in Midian until that Pharaoh died.

The Israelites were still slaves under the next Pharaoh. So when Moses was 80, God spoke to him from a burning bush and told him to go tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. On the way back to Egypt, the all-good God tried to murder Moses for some reason. But Moses’s wife touched his feet with their son’s foreskin, which convinced the never-changing God not to kill him.

Moses and his brother Aaron told Pharaoh that the God of Israel wanted his people to go out into the wilderness for a festival. But Pharaoh didn’t know that god, so he refused to let them do that.

God could have instantly overcome that obstacle in a peaceful way, like by making Pharaoh no longer want to keep his slaves, or by teleporting the people out of Egypt. But God cared more about showing off than about the freedom of his people and the wellbeing of all the innocent people of Egypt. So instead, God decided to cause a lot of unnecessary death and suffering, and to let his people continue to be mistreated in the meantime.

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Reductio Ad Absalom

For the message of the cross is foolishness.

Tag Archives: escape

The Story of Rehoboam and Jeroboam—
The Kingdom Splits in Two

The Story of King Absalom—
A Man’s Enemies Are the Members of His Own Household

The Story of the Hunt for David—
David Joins Israel's Enemies

The Story of the Priests of Nob—
David Gets Away with Lying, Sacrilege, and Reckless Endangerment

The Story of David and Jonathan—
The Gay Story

Saul hates David, Saul’s children love David

Idol threats

The Story of Samson and Delilah—
Brawn and No Brains

The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat

The Story of the Levite’s Concubine—
The Most Pointlessly Evil Story in the Bible

The Story of the Gibeonite Deception—
The Colonists Get Rid of the Natives

The Story of the Ten Plagues—
The Exodus from Egypt

The king kills countless kids