The Bible is full of puzzling passages — some of them written in the Stone Age, so we have no idea what they meant to their
original audiences. Here's a list of the passages that I find the most puzzling.
Genesis 4:1-16: There are three men alive on Earth: Adam, Cain, and Abel. Why did Cain kill his younger brother? God preferring a herdsman over a farmer seems a pretty flimsy
reason to reduce the gene pool by 33 percent.
Genesis 6:1-4: Who were the "godlings" who intermarried with human women? Why didn't human men have any objections?
Genesis 32:22-32: Jacob spent all night wrestling with "a man" who in 32:28 calls himself God before merging the Northern Kingdom (whose folk hero was Ish-ra-El)
with the Southern Kingdom (Judea, whose folk hero was Yah-Khov). God ended the wrestling match by dislocating Jacob's hip. Why did God cheat like that?
Exodus 4:24-26: Why did God commission Moses and then instantly try to kill him? Whom did Tsipporah circumcize: Gershon, Moses, or Yahweh? Why does this Midianite priestess perform a Jewish religious ritual upon her Hebrew husband, how does she know about it, and why does a ritual performed by a mere, lowly Midianite woman appease Yahweh? Given that they have been married "a long time" (Ex. 1:22-23), why does Tsipporah call Moses her "bridegroom of blood"?
Exodus 17:8-13: Moses had body odor so strong it could literally kill at 100 paces.
In three "rebels" say to Moses, "You have gone too far! All the congregation is holy, every one of us, and God is with us. Who are you to exalt yourself over the assembly of God?" In return, God sent an earthquake that swallowed up the "rebels," 250 of their followers, all of their wives, all of their children, all of their servants, and all of their domestic animals. "So they and all who were with them went down alive into Sheol." Not content with killing about a thousand people, plus their domestic animals, sent a plague to kill "14,700" innocent people. So, God killed roughly 16,000 people because three "rebels" told Moses he wasn't hot shit./li
Ruth 3:1-5: Why does Naomi give her widowed daughter-in-law instructions on how to
seduce a man she just met that morning, after a long, hard day of work for both of them?
2 Kings 2:23-25: A crowd of boys or young men was taunting the prophet Elisha for being bald (in other words, potentially diseased), so God sent two she-bears to "maul"
forty-two of them. Seems a little extreme to me.
Psalm 137:9 ends with, “Happy/blessed is the one who seizes your [Babylonian] infants and dashes them against the rocks.” "God is love"?<
Isaiah 6:9-13: Why does God want 90 percent of God's worshipers to die ignorant, obtuse, dimwitted, and "utterly desolate"?
Daniel 9:24-27: What the FRACK? The author appears to be prophesying that the end of the world will come around 53 BCE or so, assuming that all those numbers work out to 483 years. We can only be sure the world will absolutely end, beyond all possibility of doubt, approximately 2,000 years ago.
The Christian Testament provides two different genealogies for Joseph, Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38. Many Christians believe that Jesus's biological father was God, so why no genealogies for Mary?
Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:13-17, Luke 8:26-27: Jesus cast some demons out of a possessed man, and the demons possessed a herd of up to 2,000 pigs instead. Why didn't the
owner of the pigs sue Jesus's divine behind?
In Matthew 21:18-22 and Mark 11:12-21, Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. Apologists
explain that the tree's instant death was symbolic of the future death of
Judaism (ha!), but that doesn't explain why Jesus killed an innocent tree.
In Matthew 27:9-10, Zechariah magically becomes Jeremiah.
Also in Matthew 27, verses 50-53, at the moment of Jesus's death there is a massive earthquake, the curtain of the Temple — 60 feet high, 30 feet wide, and 4 inches thick — was torn in two, and there's a zombie apocalyse that Matthew says "many" people saw ... and no one except Matthew even noticed.
Luke 16:1-12: Why does Jesus recommend lying, cheating, and stealing so that you will be "welcomed into an eternal home"?
2 Thess. 2:3-12: Who is the "Lawless One"? Who is rebelling against the Lawless One? Who is the Rebel whom Christ will defeat through the power of bad breath (2:8)?
... writing in September 2025: Is Despicable Donnie the "Lawless one"?
