Who does the Bible say you shouldn’t marry? Well, some parts of the New Testament say you shouldn’t marry anyone. But whatever, let’s ignore that for now.
Who does the Bible say you shouldn’t marry? Here’s a complete list:
Continue reading Marriage partners the Bible forbidsI’ve previously published a list of people the Bible doesn’t say you can’t have sex with. Since it’s possible to have marriage without sex and vice versa, I’m now also making a separate list of some of the people the Bible doesn’t say you can’t marry.
As before, please keep in mind that by including something on this list, I am not necessarily saying it should be forbidden, nor am I necessarily saying it should not be forbidden. I am including both acceptable matches and unacceptable matches in this list.
As far as I can tell, there are no rules in the Bible1 against marrying…
Continue reading Marriage partners the Bible doesn’t forbidThe 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.
Continue reading The Story of the Ten Plagues—Jacob ran away from his angry brother, and married his cousins Rachel and Leah and their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. They had twelve sons and a daughter named Dinah.
Shechem, the son of a ruler in the nearby city of Shechem, raped Dinah. When Dinah’s brothers heard about that, they were furious, because Shechem had sex with Jacob’s daughter. Nobody should have sex with Jacob’s daughter!
Continue reading The Story of Dinah and Shechem—Jacob and Esau were twin brothers, the sons of Abraham’s son Isaac and Rebekah, Isaac’s first cousin once removed. Esau, the firstborn, was red and hairy. His brother Jacob was notoriously deceptive; he was pulling Esau’s leg from the day he was born.
Continue reading The Story of Jacob and Esau—Abraham’s nephew Lot was a righteous man. He lived in the city of Sodom, where nearly everyone was so wicked that God decided to kill them all.1 So God sent two angels (who looked like men) to Sodom. Lot met them and convinced them to spend the night at his house.
Continue reading The Story of Sodom and Gomorrah—Ten generations after Noah, God promised a man named Abraham that he would have countless descendants through Isaac, the son of Abraham and his sister Sarah. But before Isaac could grow up and have children, the all-good God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. So Abraham lied to his servants and his son about what he was planning to do, so they wouldn’t interfere. Then he tied up his son, put him on an altar, and picked up a knife…
Continue reading The Story of Abraham’s Sacrifice—The Bible has a lot of rules about who you shouldn’t have sex with. There are whole chapters devoted to the subject. But there are also a lot of sex rules surprisingly absent from the Bible. In this post, I’ll be listing some of the latter.
Important note: By including something on this list, I am not necessarily saying it should be forbidden, nor am I necessarily saying it should not be forbidden. I am including both acceptable acts and unacceptable acts in this list.
The things that should be forbidden are interesting to note because you’d think a supposedly good and infallible God wouldn’t forget to include those things in his laws. There are some pretty important rules missing!
And the things that should not be forbidden are also interesting because there are probably a lot of people who think it’s wrong to do some of these things, but the only reason they have for that belief is the false assumption that those things are forbidden by the Bible.
So here’s the list. As far as I can tell, there are no rules in the Bible1 against having sex with…
Continue reading Sex partners the Bible doesn’t forbid