Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Room, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not
because I put my hand on a book and made
a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness, truth, beausire,
and wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: The response to my recent quiz show was so good
and so many people ask for more. I am happy
to present for you today round two of Atheist Bible Trivia, because,
of course, if you want Bible literacy, if you want
to know what the scriptures actually say, you probably want
to ask somebody who left the faith of Christianity because
they read the Bible and they know what's in it. Now.
I'm not approaching these questions as actual history, like this
stuff happened. We're talking about stories as stories, the ones
that were written by anonymous men who likely thought that
the earth was flats that didn't know what the stars were.
They believed in unicorns, and they thought that God created
women to make sandwitches and ovulate. Okay, so let us
once again enter God's book of horror and occasional benevolence.
Let's find out how much we really know Question one.
We talked about this story in the previous broadcast, But
let's go back to the famous tale of Moses rescuing
the Israelites from Pharaoh in Egypt. His mission was to
convince Pharaoh to let my people go, and of course
God simultaneously made it impossible for Pharaoh to agree. So
the mission was convince Pharaoh. I'm going to make it
impossible to convince Pharaoh. Then, after Pharaoh's unchanging mind would
not change, here come the plagues. Now, the plague described
in Exodus chapter seven was a river turning to blood.
What was the name of the river? Was it the Jordan,
the Tigris, the Nile, or the Euphrates? The Jordan River,
the Tigris, the Nile, or the Euphrates, And the correct answer,
of course, is the Nile River. The Nihil is mentioned
throughout the Old Testament. It plays a pretty big part
in the Bible, including in the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible,
the first five books of the Old Testament. It's part
of the Joseph story, and the Nile is included in
various prophecies. Question number two. Still in the Old Testament,
the Book of Deuteronomy talks about a scenario where two
husbands get into a fistfight. Chapter twenty five, Verse one says,
when people have a dispute, they are to take it
to court and the judges will decide the case. But
we all know how guys can get when the testosterone
saturates their brains. After all, they are still male primates.
So verse eleven talks about two guys duking it out,
the fists are flying. It's on and there is a
command regarding this scenario, but it is not targeted at
either of the violent men. The command targets the wife. Quote.
If two men are fighting and the wife of one
of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant,
and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts,
the men are commanded to do what scream out in
great pain forgive the woman, demand a blood sacrifice, or
cut off the wife's hand. So scream out in pain
forgive the woman demand a blood sacrifice or amputate her hand. Well,
anybody familiar with God's tendencies in the Old Testament knows
that he hates passing up a good amputation. So somebody
takes a sword and hacks off the woman's hand. Deuteronomy
twenty five eleven goes on to say, show her no pity.
Women in the Bible fall into the category of pity free,
and as such low They have been warned that female
fingers should never tamp the tests. This one gets a
little complicated, but I think you'll be able to take
the journey with me. And yes, there is a trivia
question in here. It's a great story for the kiddies.
It's the story of Dinah, which few Christians know about.
A whole lot of believers have never heard of a
Dinah in scripture. All they have to do is open
the thirty fourth chapter of Genesis to hear this inspiring story.
One day, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, went
to visit some of the Canaanite women. So she traveled
to a Canaanite village, and the chief of that region
was a guy named Shechem. Shechhem was the son of
the even more powerful Haymore. Okay, so Shechem the Sun
saw Dinah and said, man, she's hot. And he decided
he was going to force himself on her sexually, and
so he raped Dinah. But after this horrifying act of
violation and trauma, Shechem thought to himself, you know, she's
so pretty, and she's so sweet and such a good candidate.
I think I would like to be her husband. How
do I win her affection, or more importantly, how do
I get her father's permission to marry her, since essentially
she doesn't have a say in the matter. In fact,
it's interesting that in the thirty fourth chapter of Genesism,
back in the entire Bible, Dinah, who's the subject of
the story, doesn't say a single word. Okay, everybody does
all the talking. All the guys are talking. Dinah, the
raped woman, doesn't utter a syllable. But Shechem went to
his father, Haymore, and he said, look, I want you
to go and talk to Jacob and get his permission
to marry his daughter off to me. But Jacob had
heard that his daughter had been raped, and he was
understandably put out. Jacob's sons were out working in the field,
so he couldn't just rally them all and go and
you know, protest or declare war or whatever. So he
waited for his sons to come back. And then there's
Shechem's dad who approaches Haymore talked to Jacob and said,
you know what, my son, the rapist and your daughter,
the rape victim, should get married. They wouldn't just make
a great couple. This would be a uniting of our tribes.
You can stay in our country, live wherever you want to,
you can trade freely, own property. We would all be
one big, happy family, and my son Shechem would get
to marry the woman that he wants. And to sweeten
the deal, hay More offered Jacob whatever payment he wanted.
He said, you name your price and I will pay
it gladly. Now the story has been pretty awful so far,
but this is just where it gets weird. Jacob and
his sons came up with a secret scheme to get revenge.
So the brothers looked at Haymore and said, we can't
let our sister marry within a culture of men who
don't do this. Practice? What practice? What thing did Jacob's
sons require as a condition for the marriage of Dinah.
The men had to cut their hair so they did
not resemble women. The men would not eat un clean
meat like pigs and horses. The men would have to
all get circumcised, or the men had to divorce all
but one of their wives. The answer the men would
get circumcised. Apparently, hey More just decided he was going
to go back to the village of the town he
was ruling over and command the men, Look, my son
really wants to marry this woman, and these people really
want to come and share our land and resources. But
there's just one little thing and it's on the tippy
or penis, and it's got to go. And all of
the men in the town agreed to this. Yes, yes,
sir Haymore, to facilitate your son's marriage and bring these
people into our lands. You may take your knife and
you may flay my flesh weasel. Then, according to the
Book of Genesis, three days later, three days after the procedure,
all of the circumcised men were sitting around soar from
having their foreskins removed. They were still in great pain,
and they were incapacitated. And at this point, while everybody
was sort of grabbing their crotch, or doing ointment or
whatever painkillers you know, extra strength, tailand all whatever they
were doing. Two sons of Jacobs, each carrying one sword,
went into the camp and managed to kill all of
the men. Two guys wiped out an entire army of men.
Apparently the males were so distracted by the pain that
they didn't hear the assailant coming, or they just weren't
able to get to a standing position for proper defense. Anyway,
they were all slaughtered, including Shechem and his father Haymore.
And then, because God is so just and moral and good,
he allowed his agents of righteousness to go in and
kidnap the women and children. Genesis does not specify what
was done with all the foreskins. Here is one that
is somewhat related. Traditionally, we know the Israelites as having
been divided into twelve tribes. The twelve tribes of Israel
descended from the patriarch Jacob, and one of those tribes
was the Levites Judges Chapter nineteen. A Levite and was
traveling with his concubine. Now, a concubine is a woman
who lives with a man to whom she is not
legally married, and she likely serves him both socially and sexually.
This makes no sense to me. Yahweh despises sex out
of wedlock, he condemns adultery, and yet he says nothing
in protest about his levite bachelor who had been porking
the help. Now how did he get the concubine? The
Bible says that the woman was taken from Bethlehem, and
taken's a weird word, like did she leave on her
own from Bethlehem or did he just like roper to
the donkey or toss her in a sack? The Bible
doesn't say, but uh oh. Verse two of Judges nineteen
says that the woman was unfaithful. Now this doesn't necessary
sarahly mean sexually unfaithful. It's possible she was just upset
and fearful and angry. She made the mistake of having
a mind of her own and demanded respect as she
shared a home with this selfish bastard of a man.
And so she walked. She left him, and she went
back to her parents' house in Bethlehem. Four months later,
the leevite man who suddenly in verse three is called
her husband. He traveled to Bethlehem to retrieve her, and
for five days he haggled with the father, because of
course the woman is under the dominion of men, and
her father was the one who would make that deal.
After five days, the leevite man left again with his concubine.
Now stick with me. These two arrived in the city
of gibbea nobody offered them any hospitality. They just stood
in the town square looking for options, a place to stay,
some food. Nobody until an old man showed up, and
he invited them to spend the night in his home,
and he treated them well. He gave them food and
water and care for their donkeys, etc. All of a sudden,
some men in the town surrounded that old man's house
and banged on the door, demanding bring out your guest
so we can know him. In other words, they wanted
to rape the man, but that would not do. In
Bible times, the value of a man was obviously so
much greater than the value of a woman, and homosexual
rape would be a particularly haus attack on male honor. No,
the host insisted the male guest stay protected inside, and
that leevite man then grabbed his concubine and threw the
woman out the door to be raped by the mob,
and that mob abused her all nights. The next morning,
that concubine was lying at the door totally unresponsive. The
Leevites took her body, put it on his donkey, and
rode home. And when he got to his house, he
decided that all the twelve tribes of Israel had to
be made aware of what had happened, this terrible act
of violence, this rape and murder of his woman. But
how was he going to get their attention so they
would agree to join him for war? Did he lay
her body on the mountain of Ephraim, chop her up
into twelve pieces, sound a trumpet twelve times, or burn
her body upon an altar of bronze. So lay her
body on the mountain of Ephraim, chop her up into
twelve pieces, sound a trumpet twelve times, or burn her
body upon a bronze altar. And the answer once again is,
let's chop up the woman twelve pieces, hacked off body
parts that would be separated and then each mailed to
a separate tribe of Israel. I have no idea how
this was done. You know, paper envelopes just don't seem practical.
I'd get all soggy boxes. Maybe did he sealed the
body parts and zip lock baggies, you know, freezer bags.
He put him in ice. I have no idea Each
of those twelve tribes received their package. Oh look, it
is a body part, presumably with a posted note from
the leevite explaining why he'd mailed it in the first place.
And instead of punishing that leevite man who tossed his
woman into a horde of crazed rapists to save himself,
they mobilized about four hundred thousand Israelite warriors ready to
slaughter the town where it all went down. After that,
there was some snarking within the tribes, taking sides between
this tribe or that tribe, but ultimately the Israelites did
what they so often did in the eyes of Yahweh.
They just slaughtered every and everything across the region, including
all the livestock, because you got to kill the cows
when the people have offended you. More trivia to come.
I'm going to talk about the end of Days, the Apocalypse.
I have End Times trivia next. I love doing Bible
stories when I get to pick them right when we're
not doing all the happy clappy, empty calorie stuff that
everybody knows or thinks they know. Oh, Adam and Eve
were frolicking around the garden, and somehow they didn't get
a rash while brushing up against the foliage, you know,
while they had no clothes on. And then look there's
Noah and all the camels and the penguins and the
fruit bats, the anacondas and the hamsters. They all went
up the ramp and they boarded his arc and there
was a dove and an olive branch and rainbows. What
a lovely story. They don't talk about the bodies banging
up against the hull of the boat. Moses held out
his staff, parting the Red Sea. The Israelites were saved.
The baby Jesus in a manger. I always think about
Talladega Knights starring Will Ferrell. You know, he's sitting at
the dinner table and he does that prayer, you know,
dear Lord baby Jesus, right, dear tiny Jesus and your
golden fleece diapers with your tiny little fat balled up fists. So,
dear eight pound six ounce newborn infant Jesus, don't even
know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly
but still omnipotent. That prayer always totally cracks me up.
But we're not talking about the sweet little baby Jesus
right now. We're going to do some trivia out of
the last book of the Bible. Let us for a
moment jump from the Old Testament to the New. Let
us talk about the apocalypse. The Book of Revelation describes
the end of days. Now, the author of this Bible
book had apparently just recently discovered that licking certain frogs
will make you hallucinate, because he was obviously on something right.
The shit written in Revelation can only be the result
of some kind of psychotropic compound. It's the only explanation.
Reading Revelation is kind of like watching Layer of the
whiteworm while spinning in a centrifuge. Even the apologist all
get together and they're like, whoo, you know, even the
Bible expert, many Bible believers are saying, okay, somebody inhaled
when they wrote Revelation. So of course this seems like
a great place for an interesting trivia question. At the
end of days, the whole planet is going to go
absolutely bonkers. Revelation Chapter seven has four angels and they
show up and they hold back the four winds of
the earth, so everything is perfectly still. And another angel
from the east will call out, okay, don't smite anybody,
don't destroy anything until we have had a chance to
go and identify God's people, the righteous people, and then
we're going to designate him by stamping a seal on
their foreheads. And these are the tribes of Israel, twelve
thousand people from the tribe of Judah, Semi and Benjamin, etc. Okay,
Then all of a sudden appears a great multitude in
white robes, and they are waving palm leaves, shouting salvation
belongs to our God, who sits on the throne. These
robed people will be those who survived the great tribulation.
Then things go crazy. Verse six of chapter seven in
Revelation says there are seven angels that will sound big trumpets,
one at a time, and every trumpet will unleash a
fresh horror upon humankind. In fact, things are going to
get so bad that people will beg to be killed.
Please kill me. I would like to die rather than
endure what you're sending down from heaven. The first angel
trumpet will bring hail and fire mixed with blood. The
second trumpet turns all the waters to blood. The third
trumpet brings a giant, flaming star crashing down to poison
one third of the water on Earth. Now, your question is,
what is the name of that falling star? Is it wormwood?
On Taris Dionysus or Magrithea? Wormwood and Taris Dionysus or Magrithea.
The correct answer here is wormwood. And it's interesting that
this falling star, filled with horrors, is poisoning one third
of the water on Earth. But the second trumpet had
previously turned the waters to blood, which I it assume
already made the water undrinkable. So you're poisoning blood water.
I don't know. It's weird. Revelation eight ten through eleven
says that a third of the waters become wormwood. Now
this is interesting because there's a Greek word for wormwood.
It is abscynthus, which may refer to a plant, a
bitter tasting, dark green plant. And if that's the case,
Revelation might be attempting to say that a third of
the waters on planet Earth would simply taste like the
plant too bitter to drink. And a quick piece of
trivia regarding wormwood. We all remember, surenoble, the big nuclear
meltdown in the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty six. This
power plant produced the worst nuclear disaster in history. And
there's radiation damage and poisoning. It's just awful. Okay, Well,
there are some who have said that Chernobyl actually links
to the worm wood of revelation and that star falling
down and contaminating the waters. This has been interpreted as
the fallout that toxified the lakes and the rivers and
the entire region. Wormwood poisoned that land. And if you
go to the Chernobyl Town Center, there is an actual
memorial there. It's the Wormwood Star Memorial. It depicts an
angel blowing a trumpet, that third trumpet which brought the
deadly star out of the sky to land on humankind.
Now you might be wondering about the other trumpets. I
gave you three of the seven. The first was hail
and fire mixed with blood. The second, the waters became blood.
The third was wormwood. Trumpet number four. This will make
the sun and stars go black. Trumpet five brings a
plague of locusts now. According to the scriptures, these aren't
just locusts that come down and become an annoyance or
eat your crops or whatever. These are gonna be little sadists.
And these locusts will torment the wicked. So I don't
know if it's like I will taunt you a second time.
I don't know if that's gonna be what you or
are they going to eat people. I don't know, but
they're gonna torment the wicked. Let's see Trumpet number six.
It releases four angels which bring two hundred million horsemen
that execute most of the planet. And these horsemen are wild.
They cough up plagues of fire, smoke, and sulfur out
of their mouths. And the horses aren't even horses. They've
got the heads of lions and the tails of snakes.
And finally, the seventh trumpet kicks off the next series
of jaw dropping horrors known as the Seven Bowls. These
bulls are loaded with all kinds of nastiness and they're
poured out on us, oozing sores, blood rivers, earthquakes, lightning,
that kind of thing, including a heat wave so intense
that it will cause people to spontaneously combust it. Just
standing there, the Angel pours out his bowl of fire.
You literally catch on fire and burn to ash where
you're standing. What a great story for children's pastors to
bring the Sunday school for all the little nine year
olds sitting in their colored plastic chairs. That's right. Revelation
has so many good children's stories. But if you're teaching
this stuff to kids, you might want to speak nice
and loud so you can be heard above all of
the screaming by the horrified children. Also related to the apocalypse,
Revelation Chapter seventeen talks about a woman sitting on a
scarlet beast, a beast that had seven heads and ten horns.
She is adorned in scarlet and wearing a whole bunch
of ornate jewelry. The Bible calls her the horror of Sodom, Egypt, Babylon,
or Nineva. Was she the horror of Sodom, the horror
of Egypt, the horror of Babylon, or the horror of Nineva?
And the answer is the horror of Babylon. By the way,
Babylon is referenced two hundred and eighty times in the Bible,
Old Testament and New Testament. Babylon, the city was noted
for being just a sinful place, and yet even in
all of its iniquity, Babylon became one of the most
advanced civilizations in the world. I'm sometimes amused by the
name of the guy who founded Babylon. According to Genesis
chapter ten, his name was King Nimrod. Nimrod's just a
funny name. I mean, how could you take King Nimrod seriously?
In truth, it was King Hamarabi that founded the Old
Babylonian Empire in the eighteenth century BC. Babylon would grow
to become the largest city in the world in its day.
Babylon traces back to Latin and Greek, the name meaning
gait of the gods. Okay, for the next series, we're
going to speed things up a bit, a series of
rapid fire Bible questions that are just a bit more
mainstream of What kind of wood was Noah's arc constructed?
Was it gopher wood, a Kadia wood, the cedar of Lebanon,
or the wood of an olive tree? Gopher wood, a
Kadia wood, cedar of Lebanon, or olive tree. The answer
is gopher would. By the way, nobody knows what gopher
wood means. It's not a thing like there's no such
thing as a gopher tree. Apologist speculated might have just
meant timber, but that seems kind of In Mark chapter one,
Jesus was speaking to Simon, Peter, and Andrew, saying that
he would make them what of men, comforters of men,
judges of men, fishers of men, or rulers of men? Comforters, judges,
fishers or rulers. Jesus told them, I will make you
fishers of men. And I find this an interesting metaphor
for making converts. You know, with fish, you set the
hook and then you reel them in against their will,
and then you eat them. In the Book of Genesis,
God promised a man that his children would number like
the stars in the heavens. Which man was he talking to?
Was it Moses, Abraham, Isaac or David. God made that
promise to Abraham Genesis chapter fifteen, verses five and six.
And he brought him outside and said, look toward heaven
and number the stars. If you are able to number them,
then he said, so shall your offspring be. And it's
for this reason that believers reference Father Abraham, who is
the cornerstone of the Abrahamic religions. There are two books
in the Bible that do not mention God anywhere in them.
Now this is a tough one, but take a guess
and pick two out of these four. Was it hagi
Ruth Song of Solomon, Esther, hagi Ruth Song of Solomon Esther.
One book that never mentions God is the Song of Solomon,
which is a creepy sex poem where a hot couple
talks about body parts using descriptors like honey, blossoms and stag.
And then the Book of Esther Esthers the story of
a Jewish woman who becomes the queen of Persia and
prevents the genocide of her people. Next question for Samuel
sixteen tells the story of David in King Saul's court.
Saul had been afflicted by an evil spirit. He was
in a very bad way, and so David calmed Saul
by playing music. What in instrument did David play? Was
it a harp, a flute, a liar, or a gibson
flying the electric guitar, harp, flute, liar, gibson And the
answer is the harp. In fact, this story is where
Saul is first introduced to David. God had abandoned Saul
because he was wicked and full of evil and just
not a good guy. So Saul had no God, there
no goodness there, and he was all agitated with evil.
And he told his minions, go out and find someone
who will play a harp for me. This ought to
make me feel better. And there was a man named
Jesse from Bethlehem. He raised up his hand and he said, hey, King,
my son is a she herder. He's brave, and he's handsome,
he's articulate, he's favored by God. And man can he
wail on the harp? And that is where the Saul
David friendship began. If we use the ten Commandments from
Exodus chapter twenty, what is the very first commandment given?
Is the first commandment? Thou shalt not take the name
of the Lord thy god in vain. Thou shalt not
make idols, Thou shalt have no other gods before me,
or remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Was the
very first commandment in Exodus twenty. Don't take the name
of the Lord in vain, don't make idols, have no
other gods before me or remember the Sabbath. And the
answer is thou shalt have no other gods before me.
And I find this first commandment telling because the Book
of Exodus was written during a time of the Near
Eastern religions, which were often polytheistic, so the idea that
there were many gods out there that were actually gods,
and so you had to pick one. The author of
Exodus was saying, Okay, we got some options here, but
Yahweh is the one, and you won't put any of
the other gods before Yahweh. I find that extremely revealing.
Matthew chapter three, Jesus had just arrived from Galilee at
the Jordan River, and he insisted that one of the
disciples baptize him. Which disciple baptized Christ. Was it Matthew
Luke James or John Matthew Luke James John. The correct
answer is John, John the Baptist. To be specific, Matthew
chapter three, verse fourteen, I need to be baptized by you.
Do you come to me? Jesus said to him, Let
it be done. Now we should do what his rights.
John agreed and baptized Jesus. In the Book of John
chapter eleven, there's the story of the man Lazarus of
the village Bethany. He had been terribly sick, and he
was getting worse and worse, and his sisters Mary and
Martha were very upset, and they went to Jesus and
they said, hey, our brother is in failing health and
it doesn't look good. But Jesus didn't get up to
go and help the man. Instead, he waited until Lazarus
died and was placed in a tomb. It was a
cave sealed with a big stone door. And finally Jesus
got up and traveled to that cave and said, take
away the stone, commanding Lazarus come out, and Lazarus was
raised from the dead. Now, how long had Lazarus's dead
body been locked in that tomb? Was it one night
a fortnight, four days, or until after the cock crowed
three times, one night a fortnight four days, or after
the cock crowed three times? Lazarus had been in that
tomb for four days, so long that when they got there,
Martha said to Jesus, hey, wait a minute, you may
not want to roll back the stone door. This guy's
been in there for four days and it's going to
stink like death. I mean literal death. The Book of
John doesn't say there was an odor that came out
when the stone was rolled back, but Lazarus emerged his hands, feet,
and face were still covered in burial cloth. The Book
of John also contains the shortest verse in the entire Bible.
What is that verse? Is it, I am Jesus wept
Jehovah jyra or obey Christ? I am Jesus wept Jehovah Jirah,
obey Christ. The correct answer here is Jesus wept. And
this is also connected to the Lazarus story. Because Mary,
Lazarus's sister, had been weeping. She'd been crying about the
death of her brother. Jesus was all of a sudden
deeply moved, and so he cried as well. John eleven
thirty five then says, Jesus wept, which is bizarre because
of his Christ, who sat back, did nothing and allowed
Lazarus to die in the first place. More trivia on
the way in just a second. Stick with me. We're
knowing some Bible, we're teaching some Bible. It is atheist
Bible trivia. In the Book of Job, a giant creature
is described a chaos monster, the Behemoth, a beast so
powerful that only Yahweh himself could overcome it. The verses
go into detail, but just a few here. The behemoth
eats grass just like cows do. He makes his tail
stand up tall like a cedar tree. His bones are
like tubes of bronze. He is so big he can
stop a river from rushing. He cannot be subdued by
pithy humans. This unconquerable animal allegedly lived in an invisible
desert just east of the Garden of Eden. Some creationists
have claimed that the behemoth was a dinosaur, so this
is proof that humans and dinosaurs lived together. Other people
say that the author of Job just got carried away
after he saw a hippopotamus. Okay, but the Book of
Job has the Behemoth, and it places the Behemoth in
its story against another creature of enormous strength, this one
dominating the waters and not the land. The water monster
was called What was it the Titan, the Dragon, the
ash Ray, or the Leviathon? The water monster of chaos?
Was it the Titan, the Dragon, the ash Ray or
the Leviathon? The correct answer is the Leviathon, and the
Leviathon is referenced beyond the Book of Job. You'll find
it in Psalms, Isaiah, the Book of Enoch, which did
not make the final canon. It's one of the pseudepigrapha.
The Leviathon is the embodiment of chaos. It threatens to
eat the damned. Leviathon is associated with envy, as written
about by Thomas Aquinas Now. Sea serpent creatures were common
in ancient mythologies far beyond and long before Christianity. The
Sumerian god Ninurta overcame a seven headed serpent, that kind
of thing. Some Christian apologists actually say the biblical Leviathon
was a real dragon, and the Book of Isaiah declared
that the dragon would be slain by God God on
the last Day and cast into the Abyss. So perhaps
the dragon represented Satan, Lucifer, the evil one, et cetera,
and after the dragon was dispatched, an entirely new, evil
free era would begin. We're spending a lot of time
in the Book of Genesis today, but I can't pass
up this one. It is a trivia question from the
story of Onen. Now. Onen was the second son of Judah.
Onen had two brothers, the older brother erb and the
younger brother, Sheila. But it's the older brother, Er that
we are interested in today. Er was not a good guy.
He was wicked in the eyes of the Lord. So,
as Yahweh often does with the wicked, he decided to
kill Er. But now there was nobody to impregnate ER's
wife and carry on the family line. According to the
tradition of Leverett marriage, a dead husband's brother was obliged
to marry his brother's widow, and apparently this was supposed
to keep family lines tight. You know, you don't want contamination.
You want to keep out the riff raft. Let's bring
him the brother and he can bring his seed to
the party. Genesis chapter thirty eight, verse six says Judah's
first born, Er was wicked in the lord's sight, so
the Lord put him to death, and then the following
verses say, then Judah said to Onen, sleep with your
brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a
brother in law to raise up offspring for your brother.
But Onen knew that the child would not be his,
and this bothered him, so he went as far as
to engage in sexual congress. And then while these two
were doing the hokey pokey he had a change of mind.
He said, you know what, this child would not be mine,
or it wouldn't be raised as mine. And then he
did one of the following. He pulled out. He demanded
to finish by having sex with the woman's slave girl.
He complained to God and was killed during sex. Or
he finished and dropped off to sleep. So onan pulled out.
He demanded to finish with a slave girl. He complained
and was killed right there on top of the woman
or under the woman, or he finished and then went
to sleep. Oan was so close. He was this close
to fulfilling his duty as both brother and sperm donor.
But verses nine and ten say this, he spilled his
semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring to
his brother. So, in other words, he pulled out. Yahweh
saw this happen, He got pissed, and he executed Onen
as punishment. So let this be a lesson kids. If
God says he wants a child and he commands you
to have unmarried sex with your dead brother's wife, make
sure you always leave the bam bam in the ham. Okay,
that's a freebie. That's life advice, good life coaching. Right there.
No wonder the Christian right wants the Bible taught in schools.
There's so much good stuff in there, just educational. In
the book after Genesis, the Book of Exodus, we discover
something interesting about Yahweh that has nothing to do with
his homicidal rage or that he apparently likes to watch.
So after Moses had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, they
were all wandering about in the wilderness. God was promising
Moses that he was going to essentially drive out all
of those other icky tribes in the land to clear
a space for God's people. So say goodbye to the Canaanites,
the Hittites, the Jebusites, etc. Now outside the Israelite camp
was something called the Tent of Meeting. Anybody who had
a question for God would go to the Tent of Meeting.
They wouldn't go in, they would just be there in proximity,
and it would be the Moses who walked inside the
tent to represent them, and they would begin to praise God. Yay,
God's meeting with Moses. This is wondrous. While Moses was
in the tent, a pillar of cloud would come down
from the heavens and guard the door. The people were
amazed as God chatted one on one with Moses. And then,
in Exodus chapter thirty three, verse eighteen, Moses made a request.
He said, God, would you could you show me your glory?
Now this sounds vaguely naughty, but what it means is,
or what it's commonly accepted to mean, is that Moses
wanted to see the dwelling glory or what is known
as the Chickina glory. Moses had already encountered God in conversation.
It was apparently awesome. It was like getting high. So
he wanted even more. He wanted an even more intense
connection with the All Mighty, an overflow of abundance from Yahweh.
So he said, please, God, show me your glory. But
God said, I can't do that, Moses, verse twenty. You
cannot see my face, for no one may see me
and live. But then the Lord came up with a solution.
He said, there's a place near us, and you can
catch a glance at another part of me, and that
part is safe. You're not going to drop dead. According
to Exodus chapter thirty three, what part of God was
Moses allowed to look at? Was it God's right hand,
his feet, the light from his hair, or his ass,
God's right hand, God's feet, the light from God's hair,
or God's dairy air. The correct answer is God's dairy air,
the Lord's ass, the backside, the behind. Exodus twenty three,
verses twenty two and twenty three said God would put
Moses safely in a cleft in the rock, and he
would cover his eyes for him. God would pass by,
and when he got to a safe distance, facing the
opposite direction, quote, I will remove my hand and you
will see my back now. The King James translation says
back parts. So it is commonly accepted we're not talking
about the back, We're talking about the back side. Yahweys
butt cheeks. Just enjoy that visual. Another lightning round here
we go. Adam and Eve had three sons, Cain abel
and who was the third son? Was it Caleb Seth
a Bijah or Ishmael. Caleb Seth a Bijah or Ishmael
Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve. I
like to refer to him as the child not directly
involved in a homicide. Seth means the appointed one or
the anointed one, So apparently I am a child of
divine destiny. By the way, there is an Egyptian god
called Seth or Sets, and he's a badass. He's a
god of storms, disorder, and violence. He even gets to
hang out with the Egyptian god raw. So that was
an interesting piece of trivia for me to learn. What
was the food that Jesus multiplied to feed the five thousand?
Remember he was preaching near the Sea of Galilee and
a huge crowd showed up. Everybody was hungry, and Christ
took just a few items and he multiplied them. Which
items did he use and how many of each? Five
loaves and two fishes, three doves and a full wine skin,
one lamb and one oxen, or five fruits and a
basket of manna. You got this one. It is five
loaves and two fishes that Jesus multiplied to feed five
thousand men, women and children. According to the Book of Matthew,
Judas was the doomed disciple who was apparently created just
for the sole purpose of being an asshole. Right. I
feel bad for Judas because if you look at God's
plan for salvation, the whole purpose of Judas being born
and growing up and becoming one of Jesus's disciples was
that he was supposed to betray God, and he gets
a lot of shade for something that was preordained. Anyway,
the Bible identifies Judas with both a first and last name.
What was Judas's last name? Was it? Thaddeus is scary
It Levi or cobble Pott. Thaddeus is Scariot Levi or
cobble Potts. Of course we're talking about Judas is Scariot.
By the way, Judas's surname was likely not a surname.
Most probably it wasn't even his name at all. It
seems to be a variation on a Latin word sikarius,
and that translates murderer or assassin. So is Scaryo. It
was a descriptor for a killer. Surnames were not common
in Bible times. Instead, you would see lots of lineages.
You know, Bob, son of Michael, brother of Donald, eldest
of the tribe of are in Raw or whatever. Here's
the question with a longer setup, but it will test
your knowledge. Let's go to the Book of Judges and
talk about Sam's samson, the one with all that long
hair which gave him tremendous strength. Judges chapter fifteen says
Samson was doing battle with the Philistines. He was mad.
He wanted revenge after a Philistine companion stole his wife,
and so his fury was unleashed. And the story gets
really awful here. Samson went out and he caught three
hundred foxes, and two by two, he tied their tails together.
He then tied a torch to the tails, and he
set these foxes loose in the Philistine grain fields, and
of course those fields burned down. The Philistines saw this
happen and they said, oh yeah, we've got the woman
that used to be your wife. We're going to burn
her to death, and we'll do it to our father
for good men. And that's exactly what they did. Samson
saw this and he said, oh yeah, now you've done it,
and he went on a blood drunk killing rampage before
finally he got tired and went to sleep in a
nearby cave. At this point, Samson's people showed up his
tribe and they're like, dude, you have slaughtered so many Philistines.
They are the rulers of this land. They rule over us,
and you have offended them. We're all doomed to try
to save our own skins. The only choice we can
see is we're going to tie you up and deliver
you over to the enemy. So they grabbed Samson, they
tied him up, and they were going to just drop
him off with the Philistines and say, fine, like it
was him, It wasn't us, wasn't our idea. You take
Samson and you can just do whatever you want to him.
But as they got into the Philistine camp, God's came
down and super charged Samson. The ropes fell off, and
right there Samson slaughtered one thousand people with a single weapon.
What was the weapon a two edged sword, a sling,
his bare hands, or a donkey's jawbone, A two edged sword,
a sling, his bare hands, or a donkey's jawbone. Judges
fifteen fifteen says this, finding a fresh jawbone of a donkey,
he grabbed it and struck down one thousand men. This
makes no sense. Bones are fragile. Bones can be broken
just by falling down a certain way. Right. We see
broken all the time in animals across the living spectrum.
So Samson went out and with all of his might,
with all of his strength was smashing this jawbone against
a thousand bodies multiple times until each guy was dead
and the jawbone didn't snap or shatter. This doesn't work
in my brain, but then again, it is the Bible,
so we are used to things not adding up. And
here's some trivia. Did you know that a common musical
instrument is made from the jawbone of a donkey. It's
called the kihadda. You take the jawbone and you clean
all the tissue off, and you dry it out, and
then you loosen the teeth just a little bit and
you kind of tap it with a rod and shake
it like a rattle. It's a rhythm instrument. So a
musical instrument made from a donkey's jaw. Maybe Samson just
showed up at the camp and he was playing the kihata,
you know, and everybody started to dance and they boogied
until they died of exhaustion. I mean, that's the only
way the story even remotely works in my head. And
one more, just to finish us off here, we all
know the biblical story of Jonah. This is one of
the most famous tales in scripture. In short, God commanded
Jonah to travel to the wicked city of Ninevah to
preach the good word, and Jonah said, nope, I'm not
doing it, and instead Jonah hopped on a boat to Tarshish. Instead,
God sent a great storm. He knocked the boat all around.
The crew freaked out. Jonah said, you're cursed because I'm
out of favor with God. Throw me into the sea
so that you won't sink. And once Jonah hit the water,
he was swallowed up by something that is commonly called
a whale. The Bible never actually uses the word whail.
So there was Jonah and he was living for three
days and three nights in a giant, submerged prison fish.
How did he breathe? This is a question that has
always vexed me. Was there like an air pockets at
the top of the stomach? How did Jonah breathe for
three days in a submerged fish. Okay, that's a whole
other conversation. Jonah's in there, and I don't know if
there's stomach acid or just the stench of the krill
or whatever else was going on. But he decided, I've
had enough. Please God deliver me from this fish. I
will go and do thine will. And so the fish vomited.
Jonah up and he went to preach at Ninevah like
a good boy, and the king and the people of
that city repented, and Nineba was spared from God's now
Here is a part of the story that few people
have heard. This outcome actually made Jonah angry. God was
going to wipe out the city because they were disgusting
and evil and wicked, and then Jonah preached to them.
They had a change of heart. They would no longer
be wicked. But Jonah thought, wait a minute, why are
you letting this city off the hook. They deserve to
be wiped out. Which makes no sense to me. Why
would Jonah preach to a city in the hopes that
they would be spared and then complain that God had
spared them? You know, why did you rescue the people?
I was preaching rescue too. And so Jonah was all
angry about this, and he stomped out of Nineveh and
he sat down at a place east of the city,
and in that place, just outside the city, he made
a shelter which would give him shade, but it wasn't
a very good shelter. He was watching Ninevah very closely,
because he thought, you know, what's God gonna do? Is
he gonna spare Nineveh? Or is he going to rain
down sulfur and plagues and horror and death? He was
a spectator from this distance. Jonah sitting in the shade
of his shelter. And then suddenly the Lord God conjured
a leafy plant, and it grew and grew and grew
over Jonah to provide shade for his head so he
would be more comfortable to ease his hot temper. But
the following morning, Yahweh sent a creature to eat the plant.
What kind of creature ate the big shade plant? Was
it a ram, a serpent, a worm or a locust? Ram?
Serpent worm, locust? Jonah, Chapter four, verse seven. But at
dawn the next day, God provided a worm which chewed
the plant so that it withered. Jesus, what kind of
worm we talking about? Like the worm from done? I'm
thinking earthworm, you know, or a grub. But no, this
thing came out and it ate the whole plant. That
just conjures wild images in my brain. But God wasn't done.
He whipped up a scorching wind from the east and
the sun blazed so hot on Jonah's body that he
almost passed out right there. He was miserable. He looked
up and said, just kill me, just let me die.
But it was at this point that Yahweh revealed his
clever object lesson. He told Jonah, you didn't make the plant,
you didn't tend the plants. It grew, and it died
in a day, and yet you were concerned about it.
Should I not have concern for the city of Ninevah,
especially knowing that the one hundred and twenty thousand people
who live there are pretty much dumbasses. Now we know
Yahweh didn't say dumbasses in the Bible, but verse eleven
says they cannot tell their right hand from their left,
So it's obvious God did not have a high opinion
of their intellect. All right, if you can't tell left
from right, it is obvious you have got a big
leak in your think tank. And that'll do it for
today's edition. Thanks for playing along. I'll see you back
here next week.
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