The Bible underneath it

The Verses Nobody Reads Aloud

The weird ones, the gruesome ones, and the ones that cannot have happened. King James throughout, every verse linked, nothing inflated.

The rule this page follows

Shock lists are the weakest genre of Bible criticism on the internet. Most are built on a mistranslation, a missing chapter of context, or a genre the writer never bothered to identify, and a believer who catches one bad entry is entitled to throw out the rest. So: every verse below was checked word for word, every reference links to the passage so you can read what surrounds it, and the best defense is stated before the point is made. Six of the most popular shock verses are in the do-not-use box near the bottom, because they do not survive checking.

Two things about the text used here. Every quotation is King James, because that is the Bible the Church publishes and the one most people reading this were raised on. And where Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible touches one of these passages, there is a section for it further down, quoted from the Church’s own scriptures.

The page is sorted by what kind of problem each verse creates. Strange, gruesome, and physically impossible are three different arguments with three different strengths, and blurring them is why the whole genre gets waved off.

The strange ones

These prove nothing on their own. They are here because most people raised in church have never heard one of them read from a pulpit, and finding out in adulthood that they are in the book is its own kind of information.

The bread baked on dung. Ezekiel 4:12: "thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight." Ezekiel objects. God negotiates down, in verse 15: "Lo, I have given thee cow’s dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith."

The dung on the face. Malachi 2:3, God speaking to the priests: "I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts."

The naked prophet. Isaiah 20:3: "my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt," on instruction.

The bride price. 1 Samuel 18:25: "The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines." David kills two hundred men and delivers double, and verse 27 records the transaction with a bookkeeper’s calm: "they gave them in full tale to the king."

The donkey who argues back. Numbers 22:28. The talking animal is not the strange part; it is a miracle story and it knows it. The strange part is the tone. The ass asks "What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?", Balaam answers her, and they hold a two-verse argument in which no one remarks that a donkey is talking.

The night God tried to kill Moses. Exodus 4:24, three verses after commissioning him: "the LORD met him, and sought to kill him." His wife Zipporah circumcises their son, casts the foreskin at his feet, and says "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me." God lets him go. The King James text offers no reason, then or anywhere after.

The law about the hand. Deuteronomy 25:11-12: if a woman intervenes in her husband’s fight and "taketh him by the secrets," then "thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her." It is the only bodily mutilation penalty in the law of Moses.

The giants and the sons of God. Genesis 6:4: "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." On the plain reading that is divine beings breeding with women, sitting four verses before the flood.

The bones that raised a man. 2 Kings 13:21: a burial party dumps a body into Elisha’s grave, and "when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet."

Two of the crude ones. 2 Kings 18:27, an Assyrian officer taunting the men on the wall, who will "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you." And Ezekiel 23:20, describing Jerusalem’s foreign alliances as a woman doting on lovers "whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses."

Several of the explanations are correct. Ezekiel’s dung bread and Isaiah’s three barefoot years are prophetic street theater, a real and recognized genre. Ezekiel 23 is deliberately obscene; the offense is the message. Malachi’s line is a curse formula. Granting all of that changes nothing about the observation that matters here: these are in the book, you were never shown them, and something decided which verses reached you.

The gruesome ones

Different argument, so it needs a different discipline: what the Bible reports and what the Bible commands are not the same evidence, and critics who blend them deserve the dismissal they get. Labeled below, King James throughout.

Read each passage before quoting it: Judges 19, Judges 11, 2 Kings 6, Psalm 137, Exodus 21, Deuteronomy 21, Leviticus 21, Hosea 13.

Two honest notes. On Jephthah, a serious interpretive tradition holds that his daughter was consigned to lifelong virginity rather than killed, and the King James ending, "and she knew no man," is the line that tradition rests on. The vow says burnt offering; the fulfillment verse says only that he kept it. Say both, and do not pretend the text settles it. On the commanded column, this page is only the overflow: the war commands are on Slavery, Genocide, and the Moral Problem, the deaths attributed to God’s own hand are on What God Did Himself, and the statutes about women are on God and Women.

The ones that cannot have happened

This section needs the most care, because for anyone who already believes in a God who works miracles, "physically impossible" is not an objection. It is the claim. A resurrection is impossible; that is the entire point of reporting one. So this is not a list of miracles. It is the narrower category: places where the text is not suspending nature but assuming a nature that does not exist.

The sun stopped. Joshua 10:13: "So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." Notice what stops. Not the earth’s rotation. The sun and the moon, because in the writer’s sky those are the things that move.

The shadow reversed. 2 Kings 20:11: "he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz."

The solid sky. Genesis 1:6-7: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters," and God "divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." Firmament is the King James rendering of a word meaning something hammered out and made firm. There is water on top of it. Ten verses later, Genesis 1:17, God "set them in the firmament of the heaven," meaning the sun and moon are mounted in the dome, on day four, three days after light already exists without them.

Jacob’s rods. Genesis 30:37-39: Jacob peels white streaks into green rods, sets them in the watering troughs where the flocks come to drink and conceive, and "the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted." That is heredity by what the mother looks at while conceiving. It is not presented as a miracle. It is presented as animal husbandry, and in the story it works.

The mountain with a view of every kingdom. Matthew 4:8: the devil "taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." No mountain does that on a sphere. Many readers take the temptation as a vision, and that reading is genuinely available in the text.

The lifespans. Genesis 5:27: "all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years." The whole genealogy runs on that scale, and no human biology permits it.

The dead walking in Jerusalem. Matthew 27:52-53: at the crucifixion "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." No other gospel mentions it. No Roman or Jewish writer mentions it. Matthew never refers to it again.

The strongest evidence that this last one is a real problem is who else thinks so. Michael Licona, an evangelical New Testament scholar whose 2010 book was a defense of the historicity of the resurrection, suggested in it that the raised-saints passage may be apocalyptic imagery rather than reportage. The backlash from other evangelicals cost him his positions at Southern Evangelical Seminary and with the North American Mission Board in 2011, as Christianity Today reported at the time. A believing scholar was pushed out of two jobs for saying out loud what this passage costs.

What the impossibilities have in common

Every one of those is a mistake freely available to a writer in the first millennium BC and unavailable to anyone after. Not one runs the other way. Nowhere does the book state something that sounded absurd in its own century and turned out to be right, which is exactly the thing a text dictated from outside time would be full of, and exactly the thing a defender would lead with if it existed.

The usual candidate is Isaiah 40:22, "the circle of the earth," offered as ancient knowledge of a round planet. Give it a fair hearing, then read the rest of the same sentence: God "stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." A circle is a disc, the sky in that verse is fabric, and the verse is poetry about a throne, not a claim about geometry.

What the Joseph Smith Translation does with these

Latter-day Saint readers have an answer no other Christian has: Joseph Smith revised the Bible, and the Church prints selections from that revision in its own scriptures. So check it, the same way you would check anything else. His revision reaches only part of the Old Testament, and of everything on this page it touches three passages.

Genesis 6, and it does help. Joseph’s version of Genesis 1 through 6 is published as the Book of Moses, and in Moses 8:14 the sons of God become "the sons of men," which removes the divine-beings reading entirely. The giants stay, in Moses 8:18, now as men who "sought Noah to take away his life." Grant this one fully: it is a real fix to a real problem.

Exodus 4, where the revision explains rather than removes. The Church’s own appendix, JST Exodus 4:24-26: "The Lord was angry with Moses, and his hand was about to fall upon him, to kill him; for he had not circumcised his son." Moses ends the scene saying "I have sinned before the Lord." God is still about to kill his own prophet on the road. What the revision adds is the missing reason.

Genesis 1, which is the one that matters. Joseph rewrote the creation account in full, and the ancient sky survives it intact. Moses 2:7: "I, God, made the firmament and divided the waters, yea, the great waters under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." The single clearest piece of obsolete cosmology in the Bible passed through a prophet’s revision, in the chapter he worked on hardest, and came out unchanged.

Everything else here, Judges, Leviticus, Deuteronomy 21 and 25, Hosea, Joshua 10, both passages in 2 Kings, Ezekiel, Malachi, Psalm 137, is untouched. That is not a complaint about Joseph. The revision was never finished and the Church has never adopted it as its Bible. It is a note about what the escape hatch can actually carry, and there is a whole page on that: The Bible Joseph Rewrote.

The standard answers

"You are cherry-picking." Yes. A list is a selection, by definition. But the question a list raises is not whether other verses are beautiful, because plenty are. It is whether these ones are in the book and mean roughly what they appear to mean. Every one is linked above. Read the chapter around it, which is the opposite of what cherry-picking survives.

"That is the Old Testament." Two of the hardest items here are in Matthew, and one of them is in the crucifixion account itself.

"That is just the King James wording." It is, deliberately, because that is the Bible the Church prints and preaches from. If a modern translation reads better in a given verse, that is worth knowing, and it is also a concession that the text most Latter-day Saints read is not the clearest one available.

"You are reading ancient literature like a science textbook." That is the correct way to read it, and it is also this page’s conclusion. Ancient literature is exactly what it looks like. The claim in dispute was that it is something more than that.

"Miracles are supposed to break the rules." Agreed, which is why the impossible section is short and specific. A resurrection breaks a rule. A sun that stops instead of an earth that stops does not break a rule; it repeats a mistake. Peeled rods changing a lamb’s coat is not a suspension of biology, it is the biology the author believed in.

Why this should make you question

No single verse on this page is fatal, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The finding is in the distribution. The strange parts are strange in the specific way ancient Near Eastern writing is strange. The cruel parts are cruel at the exact level of the surrounding cultures and never below it. The impossible parts are impossible in precisely the ways a person of that century would get wrong, and never in a way that would have looked wrong then and right now.

Then there is the quieter thing. You were probably taught this book by people who selected from it carefully, kindly, and with good instincts about what to leave out. That selection is the evidence. A text that has to be curated before it can be taught in a family is being edited by the moral judgment of its readers, which means the moral judgment came from somewhere other than the text. Once you notice you have been doing that filtering your whole life, the question stops being which verses are hard and starts being what you were using to sort them.