David sent messengers to a rich man named Nabal, asking him to give David and his men something, anything he could find. David thought Nabal owed him something in exchange for not harming Nabal’s employees. But Nabal chose not to give David anything, since he didn’t even know who David was. So David took 400 men with him and went to attack Nabal and murder all the men who worked for him.
Continue reading The Story of David and Abigail—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.
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.
Continue reading The Story of David and Jonathan—Goliath, a Philistine who was almost ten feet tall, challenged Israel to choose a man to fight him one-on-one. The losing nation would then become subject to the winning nation. David was told that King Saul would give great wealth and his daughter to the man who killed Goliath. So David told Saul he would fight Goliath.
Saul thought David was too young and inexperienced to do that, but David pointed out that as a shepherd, he had plenty of experience killing things. Saul let David try on his armor, but David (Saul’s armor-bearer) wasn’t used to bearing Saul’s armor. So he went to fight Goliath with no armor and no sword.
Continue reading The Story of David and Goliath—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 forbidsRuth was a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man named Mahlon, whose parents, Elimelek and Naomi, had moved to Moab from Judah because of a famine. Naomi’s and Ruth’s husbands both died. When the famine was over, Naomi moved back to Judah, and Ruth chose to go with her, rather than looking for a new husband in Moab. In Judah, Ruth met a man named Boaz, who was a relative of Naomi’s dead husband. Boaz had heard that Ruth was good to Naomi, so he was good to Ruth.
Naomi wanted Ruth to remarry, so she told Ruth to go sneak up on Boaz and lie down with him while he was sleeping. That night, Boaz woke up and found Ruth lying there with him. This was a pleasant surprise, because he was so old. But he said there was another man Ruth should marry rather than him, because that man was more closely related to her first husband. Boaz told Ruth to stay with him for the rest of the night, and then hurry home before anyone saw them together.
Continue reading The Story of Ruth and Boaz—I’ve been cataloging everything the Bible has to say about various forms of discrimination. One type of discrimination that gets a lot of attention in modern times is racism. And the version of the Bible I’m working with does appear to use the word “race” in that sense a couple of times. But back in biblical times, they didn’t really have the same concept of “race”. So rather than write about “racism” in the Bible, I’m going to discuss the closest thing the ancients actually did have: Discrimination by nation.
Let’s look at the least discriminatory parts of the Bible first. It says Israel isn’t the only nation God cares about; the nations are all the same to him. He cares about what people do, not who their ancestors are. God loves foreigners and wants his people to love them too. He says his people shouldn’t mistreat or oppress foreigners. They should judge everyone fairly and justly and treat the foreigners among them the same as the native-born Israelites, because they once lived as foreigners in Egypt.3
In fact, there’s one passage that just assumes Israelites want to help foreigners in need, and encourages them to help each other the same way they would help foreigners. (That’s not going to do much good in the cases where that assumption is wrong.)
Sometimes the Bible says its laws should be applied equally to Israelites and foreigners living in Israel. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, though. Mostly what that means is that people will get stoned to death if they don’t follow the rules of the religion of the people of the country they happen to be in. But if foreigners do worship and obey him, then God will… allow them to worship and obey him.
God did occasionally disapprove of his people oppressing foreigners. (At least when they did it without fearing him.) But that didn’t do much good when he was telling them to oppress them most of the time. Foreigners were amazed and confused on the occasions when Israelites actually decided to be nice to them.
An angel who was the commander of God’s army said he was not on Israel’s side or on their enemies’ side. God thinks all nations are worthless and just wants everybody to die.4 Equality! David once entrusted the ark of the covenant to a Philistine, and later he allowed hundreds of Philistines to join his army.5 That’s quite a difference from how he normally treated Philistines. Solomon asked God to answer the prayers of foreigners, though I’m not sure it says God agreed to that part.
When Ezra said all the Jews should disown their foreign wives and children, there were about four people who disagreed. Jesus once healed a girl even though she was a Canaanite, though it took some convincing. There was one Samaritan who was willing to help a Jew… in a story Jesus made up.
After Jesus died, Peter convinced himself that foreigners could be saved, which his peers thought was a pretty weird idea. He decided he should preach to Gentiles even though it was against God’s law to associate with them. Paul, too, thought God now judged people according to their actions, their beliefs, or his own whims, and not by their nationality.
Sometimes the Bible says things about certain nations that I’m not sure whether to classify as favorable or unfavorable treatment.
It says God gave his laws to Israel, and not to any other nation. Some of those laws suggest that being a foreigner living in Israel automatically makes you disadvantaged and unable to provide for yourself somehow. But to make up for that, God’s law says Hebrews have to give foreigners free food. It says Hebrews aren’t allowed to eat animals they found already dead, but they can give them to foreigners to eat.
It says every seven years, an Israelite has to cancel any debts that another Israelite owes them. But they don’t have to do the same for a foreigner. And an Israelite isn’t allowed to charge another Israelite interest. But they can make a foreigner pay interest.
Jesus told his followers to only preach their message to Jews, at least at first.
The Bible says God had his people wipe out a lot of other nations and steal their land. But it says God didn’t want them to invade the land of the Ammonites.
The Moabites and the Midianites both led Israel into sin in the Peor incident. God told Israel to go to war against Midian because of this. But he told them not to go to war with Moab, even though they did the same thing.
The Romans thought it was okay to violently punish people without a trial, as long as they weren’t Roman citizens.
Continue reading Discrimination by nationSamson 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.
Continue reading The Story of Samson’s Riddle—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.
Continue reading The Story of the Levite’s Concubine—The people of Israel angered their God again by serving other gods. So God let the Ammonites take over Israel, and he said he would never save his people again. But his people insisted on being saved, so the never-changing God, who never listens to sinners, changed his mind and appointed a new judge to save Israel: Jephthah, the leader of a gang of scoundrels.
Jephthah asked the Ammonite king why he was attacking Israel. The king explained that the Israelites had stolen the Ammonites’ land, and the Ammonites wanted it back. Jephthah was like, that never happened, what would you know about that? The king ignored him.
So Jephthah went to attack the Ammonites, which God had forbidden the Israelites to do. He promised that if God helped him disobey God in this way, he would give God whatever met him at the door when he came home, as a burnt offering. The all-knowing God knew what would happen if he did this, but he wanted that burnt offering. So he helped Jephthah destroy twenty Ammonite towns, and he didn’t warn Jephthah’s family to stay indoors.
Continue reading The Story of Jephthah’s Sacrifice—I’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 Bible6 against marrying…
Continue reading Marriage partners the Bible doesn’t forbid