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

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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 Most Pointlessly Evil Story in the Bible →
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Who is God’s firstborn?

Contradictions, , ,

Of all God’s children, who is the firstborn? Paul says Jesus is God’s firstborn, having been there before he made anything else. But the gospel of John suggests that Jesus wasn’t created in the beginning, much less born. He was just always there. So the only way Jesus could be God’s firstborn would be if God had no other children before Jesus was actually born, 2000 years ago.

Is that really the case? The Bible says it’s not. Instead, it calls David God’s firstborn.

God also says Ephraim is his firstborn son, and Ephraim was born long before David. But wait, that same verse also says God is Israel’s father. And Israel was Ephraim’s grandfather. So Israel must be a son of God who was born before Ephraim, right?

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Does God listen to sinners?

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No.

We all know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but only to godly people who do his will. That’s what a man said in the gospel of John, when he was defending Jesus against the Pharisees.

There are several passages in the Old Testament that agree with that statement. A psalmist wrote that if he had cherished sin, God wouldn’t have listened to him. Solomon said God hears the prayers of the righteous, but is far from the wicked. He also said that if anyone ignored his moral instruction, their prayers would be detestable. When God’s people sinned, their prayers just made him angry, and he wouldn’t listen to them. He covered himself with a prayer-proof cloud!

If you half-heartedly engage in religious rituals, but your behavior isn’t actually good, you can’t expect God to hear you, because your sins separate you from God and hide his face from you. If you don’t listen when God calls, God won’t listen when you call. God doesn’t even want to let wicked people ask him anything in the first place.

Even just being related to a sinner was enough to keep Saul from getting an answer from God. God pretty much never listens to people at all, so of course he doesn’t listen to sinners. Or is it that he always listens to everyone, so he does of course listen to sinners…?

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The Story of Ehud and Eglon—
A Message From God

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In the early days of the land of Israel, there was no king to tell the people what to do. Instead, they were led by “judges”, but the people didn’t listen to the judges; they did whatever they wanted. God didn’t like what his people were doing, so he let Eglon king of Moab take over Israel. Then the Israelites asked God to deliver them from Moab, so Ehud, the judge of Israel, was sent to meet king Eglon. Ehud said he had a secret message from God for Eglon, so Eglon sent all his attendants out of the room for privacy.

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A Message From God →
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The Story of the Gibeonite Deception—
The Colonists Get Rid of the Natives

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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 Colonists Get Rid of the Natives →
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Did God only create good things?

Contradictions, ,

The Bible says when God finished creating the world, he saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Later on, it says his works are perfect, and everything he created is good.

But that’s clearly not true. If God made everything, and not everything is good, that means not everything God made is good.

What about that one tree? The Bible says God made a tree that would bring death to those who ate from it. What’s so good about that tree? It served no purpose but to tempt people to disobey God and bring a curse on the world. That tree is something God created that was not good at all.

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The Story of the Battle of Jericho—
Two Spies and One Hooker

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Because Moses did a miracle the wrong way once, God had decided not to let him bring his people into the promised land after all. So when Moses was 120 years old, God sent him to the top of a mountain, where he saw the land from a distance, and then died. God chose Moses’s assistant Joshua to replace Moses as the leader of Israel.

Joshua sent two men to spy out the land of Canaan. They stayed in the house of a prostitute named Rahab, in the city of Jericho. She told the spies everything they needed to know.

The king of Jericho heard that there were Israelite spies in the land. He sent men to tell Rahab to hand over those men who had come to her house. But Rahab hid the spies and told the king’s men that the spies had already left. So they went to look for the spies elsewhere.

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Two Spies and One Hooker →
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The Story of the Moabite/Midianite Clusterfuck—
The Origin of the Priesthood

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The women of Moab and Midian, following the advice of God through his prophet Balaam, invited the Israelite men to have sex with them and worship the gods of Moab. This made God angry, so he decided to kill all the Israelites yet again, and he told Moses, the leader of Israel, to kill all the leaders of Israel. So Moses told the judges of Israel to kill all the Israelites who had worshipped a Moabite god.

God had already killed tens of thousands of Israelites himself, when an Israelite leader brought a Midianite woman into his tent. When Aaron’s grandson Phinehas saw this, he followed them into the tent and killed them with a spear. This somehow turned away God’s anger and convinced him not to kill all the Israelites. God was so pleased with Phinehas that he made a covenant of peace with him and said the descendants of Phinehas would always be God’s priests.

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The Origin of the Priesthood →
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The Story of Balaam’s Ass—
God Can't Make Up His Mind

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The Israelites wanted to peacefully pass through the country of the Amorites on the way to Canaan. But the king of the Amorites wouldn’t let them, because God made him stubborn. So to punish the king for what God had made him do, the Israelites murdered all the Amorites, stole all their possessions, and took over their land. When Balak king of Moab found out about this, he was terrified of Israel. So he decided to hire Balaam, a prophet of God, to curse God’s chosen people. Great idea, Balak. /s

Balak sent messengers to Balaam to ask him to come and weaken the Israelites so Moab could defeat them, but God told Balaam not to do that, so the messengers returned to Balak without him. Then Balak sent more messengers to Balaam and offered him a large reward for cursing Israel. For some reason, “God” changed his mind and said Balaam should go with them this time.

So Balaam got on his donkey and started to go with the messengers to see Balak. But when God saw that Balaam was going with them after he had told Balaam he should go with them, God was very angry. So God tried to get Balaam to stop by putting an invisible angel in his way. Balaam’s donkey could see the angel standing in the road with a sword, so the donkey turned away from the road. Balaam beat his donkey to get it to get back on the road.

Then while Balaam was on a narrow path between two walls, the donkey saw the angel again, and it crushed Balaam’s foot against the wall. Balaam beat his donkey again, but there was nowhere the donkey could go, so it lay down, and Balaam kept beating it with his staff.

Then God enabled the donkey to talk, so it could tell him that it had a good reason not to keep walking, and that he had no good reason to beat it. God also enabled Balaam to see the angel. The angel told Balaam that he was being reckless by going down the straight and narrow path to meet Balak, and that if his donkey hadn’t turned away, the angel would have killed Balaam, but spared the donkey.

Balaam said he had sinned by going with Balak’s men when God had told him to go with Balak’s men. He was going to go back home, but the angel that had been sent to stop him from going to meet Balak told him to keep going and meet Balak.

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God Can’t Make Up His Mind →
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The Story of the Water from the Rock—
Why Moses was Banned from the Promised Land

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Moses brought the Israelites to a place called Meribah. They couldn’t find any water to drink there, because it was a desert, so they complained to Moses. The Israelites had been in the same situation here in Meribah before, and God had told Moses to hit a rock with his staff. When he did, water had come out of it.

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Why Moses was Banned from the Promised Land →
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