Exploding penises of holy prophets, a girl cut in two to settle an argument; boys boiled alive and
eaten by their very own mothers; in the darkest of valleys a zombie army springs into action.
The bible can be a dark and frightening place, so get ready to have the fear of God put into you.
10. Let’s start with good old cannibalism,
a rather taboo practice that is nonetheless as old as time. There are actually lots of
mentions of cannibalism in the bible, although we doubt you ever read about them in Sunday school.
We also imagine many of you haven’t heard of a guy named Micah.
The Old Testament describes him living in a place called Moresheth in ancient Israel.
As prophets tend to be, he was often very indignant when it came to the wicked ways of
the rich and powerful. In terms of uttering stern words, Micah was a heavyweight champ.
When denouncing the corrupt and greedy, he talks about cannibalism.
He says of the greedy rulers, they: “Tear the skin from my people and the
flesh from their bones.” They “eat my people’s flesh, strip off their skin and break their
bones in pieces.” They “chop them up like meat for the pan, like flesh for the pot.”
As with many parts of the bible, you don’t have to take this literally. Micah might
just have been using metaphors to say how terrible the leaders were, but did
he really have to go into so much detail? Then you have this from Jeremiah 19:9:
“I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s
flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them.”
That sounds pretty literal to us, but of course, it might also have been symbolic.
That brings us to the boiled kids, because what good story doesn’t have
boiled kids in it? It’s from 2 Kings 6:28-29. It tells us that Ben-Hadad king of Aram laid
siege to Samaria, the central part of the Land of Israel. In the fighting, babies were dashed
against rocks, and pregnant women were ripped into pieces. As sieges go, it was a stunning victory,
but it left some of the surviving locals in trouble because it lasted so long and caused
a famine. Things were apparently so bad that a donkey’s head was going for eighty shekels.
It gets much worse. One day the victorious
king is walking through town when a hungry woman weakly cries to him, “Help me, my lord the king!”
The king, not one to mince words, says, hey, if the Lord hasn’t helped
you what do you expect me to do? The woman then tells him just how
bad things have gotten. She explains what happened to her recently, telling the King:
“This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’
So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we
may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.” It seems she felt worse about being
double-crossed than eating her own child. The king doesn’t seem to care much about this hypocrisy,
and that’s the last thing we hear of the woman. As you’ll now see, the old stories get even
more berserk than that. This next one involves an exploding male member.
9. You all know the story of Judas, that
man who played the betrayer of Jesus in the story Fear and Loathing in the Garden of Gethsemane.
There are different takes on what happened to him next, but we rather like the one which has
his penis turning into an explosive device. The story was written by a guy named Papias
of Hierapolis, who was around 60 to 130 years after Christ. He told a lot of stories, and he
swore they were true. He once said, “I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you,
along with the interpretations, everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders
and noted down carefully, for the truth of which I vouch.”
Still, the story we’re going to tell is called apocrypha, meaning stories
that are not accepted as part of the canon. The story goes that right after the betrayal,
Judas made a run for it, but he didn’t get far because he started to bloat like a balloon.
This goes against the more accepted story of Matthew, which has Judas being hanged and when
taken down still alive, his guts spilling out. That was balderdash according to the Acts of
Papias. He wrote that Judas expanded so much he couldn’t even get through
a gate. The passage says, “Not even the massiveness of his head could get through.”
Judas’ eyes shrank under his bloating eyelids and not even doctors could find them. This next
bit you need to hear in Papias’ own words: “His penis appeared to be more repulsive
and larger than any disgraceful member, and bloody discharge and maggots poured
from all over his body, which caused injury whenever he attended to his bodily needs.”
So, Judas may have been painfully peeing out maggots from his massive
dong right before he died. Papias writes that he soon passed away from the torture but where
he fell stank for many years to come. You can understand why kids don’t learn
this in Sunday school, but you can’t deny it would make great drama for the stage.
As would this next story. 8.
How to solve a problem, King Solomon style. This is from 1 Kings 3:16-28
and has the header, “A Wise Ruling”. One day King Solomon was kicking back
when he was told a woman wanted to talk to him about a certain problem she had.
She got to his door, and he said something like, “Hi, come in, come in, take a seat.”
The woman wasted no time and told the King: “Pardon me, my lord. This woman and I live in the
same house, and I had a baby while she was there with me. The third day after my child was born,
this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us.”
Both these women, by the way, were prostitutes. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that the
plaintiff said the other woman accidentally laid on her own child in her sleep and suffocated
it. The plaintiff said that this woman then sneaked into her room and took her living child.
The woman added, “She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast.”
She said she woke up and was about to feed her son when she noticed he was dead. She then became
aware that he wasn’t her son at all. As she was explaining this to Solomon,
the other woman then suddenly appeared in the palace protesting her innocence. She
screamed at the king and the plaintiff, “No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.”
In the absence of modern forensic science, King Solomon was in a bit of a fix. Using an ancient
toothpick to get a tough bit of lamb he’d eaten earlier from his teeth, he said in a composed,
restrained voice, “Hmm, this one says, ‘My son is alive, and your son is dead’… hmm…while that one
says, ‘No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.’” He sat there, in deep contemplation, the two
manic women hanging on each of his breaths. The king then shouted out, “Bring me my
sword.” The women looked perplexed. The king saw that and made things clear by saying,
“Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”
He finally got that bit of lamb out of his teeth, and like detective Columbo,
he seemed to know what was going to happen next. He was right. One woman screamed at him,
“Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!”
The other woman said, nah, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!”
Picking up a jug of wine, the King turned away from the women and said to his guards,
“Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.”
According to the bible, the people of Israel heard about this story
and celebrated King Solomon’s endless wisdom. Ok, now back to stories with no happy endings.
7. Everyone gets their due There are a lot of big villains in the bible,
and one of the stand-out baddies is King Herod the Great. What a piece
of work that guy was. He was the one who ordered the “Massacre of the Innocents”.
That was when he sent some folks looking for the child Jesus when he heard he was the son of God.
Those people failed in their mission. After that, Herod sent the order to kill
all the boys in Bethlehem under the age of two. That’s pretty scary, although likely mythology.
So, Herod was an ancient psycho with a short temper. He was a persecutor of the first degree,
but as is often the case in the bible, he got his comeuppance, and he got it in style.
In Acts 12:21 – 22 it is said he went to the town of Caesarea, that he had built, to have a
firm chat with some folks he’d been arguing with. All they wanted was a bit of peace from the king.
He got up to address the people and they screamed out, “This is the voice of a god, not of a man.”
This is what that part of the bible said happened next, “Immediately, because Herod did not give
praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.”
That’s a fitting end for such a tyrannical ruler, although his real death might have
been somewhat more down-to-earth, but just as frightening. Experts say Herod might have spent
his final days itching like crazy and convulsing in pain, due to chronic kidney disease and a weird
infection that turned his genitalia gangrenous. That disease we now call Fournier’s gangrene.
So, if he was as bad as the bible makes out, talk about divine retribution.
Now for something completely out of this world, and no, not the zombies. We’ll get to them later.
First, super-heroic killer babies. 6.
This comes from the Apocalypse of Peter, which is more apocryphal text.
In these texts, Peter talks a lot about punishments. For instance, blasphemers
were hanged by the tongue. Women who dressed up and tried to attract men they weren’t married
to were hanged by the hair above a bubbling mire. The men who got it on with them were
hanged by the feet with their heads in the mire. Men who dressed up as women, or as the text says,
take the role of women, were taken up a cliff by angels and thrown off. After they got splattered,
they were taken up again and thrown off again, we guess until the angels were content.
That would create a lot of blood and flesh, but Peter says nothing was wasted.
All that gore formed a lake to which women who had abortions were sent. The aborted fetuses meanwhile
tormented them by turning into superheroes. That’s because they fired a “flash of fire”
from their eyes into the mothers. The text says the beams of fire “smote the women in the eyes.”
In this orgy of violence Peters says he saw both men and women “gnawing their tongues
and having flaming fire in their mouths.” At the same time, if any milk came out of
the mother’s breasts it would congeal and turn into snakes, animals that would attack the women.
Peter also says: “I saw the murderers and them that were consenting
to them cast into a strait place full of evil, creeping things, and smitten by those beasts, and
so turning themselves about in that torment. And upon them were set worms like clouds of darkness.”
Either Peter needed some anger management classes or a good old-fashioned hug, or none of
that happened. Scholars point out that all this stuff almost became part of the New Testament,
but in the fourth century, the Bishop of Athanasius chose the Book of Revelations instead.
As you’ll now see, the Book of Revelations is also pretty dark.
5. The Book of Doom You’ve all probably
heard the story of mankind coming to an end after seven angels blow their trumpets.
In short, blood and hail and fire rain down and Wormwood poisons a third of all
rivers and water. Mountains crumble into the sea; a plague of evil locusts wreaks havoc,
and then two hundred million horsemen come down spitting fire and sulfur from their mouths to
finish off who’s left. When the seventh trumpet blows, seven bowls are released,
and they carry enough disease to make everyone around have faces filled with horrific sores.
It’s likely that John the Elder wrote all this doom and gloom in about 96 CE,
possibly the year of a major depression. Now for some more standard violence.
4. John the headless According to one version of the tale,
John the Baptist had criticized the tyrannical King Herod because Herod had divorced his wife
and taken his brother’s wife as a lover. John didn’t think this was moral, and he made it known.
So, Herod had him imprisoned. Then one night Herod threw a party and dancing at that party
was Herod’s new lover’s daughter, Salome. Herod was apparently very impressed with
her dancing and after a bit too much booze he promised her she could have anything she
asked for, including half of his kingdom. Salome then went to her mom and told her
what Herod had said. She asked for advice as to what to ask for, to which the mother said
John the Baptist’s head, and on a platter. Even for Herod, this was a bit hardcore, but he agreed.
Herod might have done this because he saw what influence John had over his people and so worried
about him starting a rebellion. This is not apocrypha but there are various takes on the tale.
This next one is literally out of this world.
3. Horny angels The story comes from
the Book of Enoch which was written two to three hundred years before Christ came on the scene.
According to this apocryphal text, there were entities called The Watchers. The
Watchers were angels who gave birth to rebel angels known as Nephilim.
According to Enoch, Nephilim were giants, whose height was three hundred cubits.” That would work
out at about 440 feet (137 meters). Enoch says that The Watchers came down to Earth
from heaven and made out with human women, that’s how the giants were born.
There are many different stories, but one says the angel leader named Samyaza got horny after
seeing people down on Earth had been having a fair few “beautiful and comely daughters.”
In total, 200 of the lustful angels descended on Earth to take advantage
of the women. But they also started eating all the animals and vegetation,
and when that ran out, they feasted on the humans.
When God got wind of this, he was far from impressed at what was pretty much cannibalism,
and one take on the tale is that this was one of the reasons God flooded the Earth.
At the same time, he banished the rebel angels to a kind of hell or abyss called Tartarus.
This next one is just twisted. 2. Breaking all the rules
You’ve probably all heard of Sodom and Gomorrah, the two cities which sent God
into a fit of anger after he’d seen the wickedness going on there. You name it,
it happened: murder, corruption, adultery, pride, promiscuity, greed, they had it all in excess.
To fix this problem, God sent two angels down to sort things out. When they arrived on Earth,
they ended up at a guy’s house. His name was Lot. Now things get X-rated.
That’s because when those angels were in Lot’s house, an angry mob formed outside
and demanded to know who the two strangers were. It seems they also wanted to have sex
with the strangers. We have no idea what happened to Lot’s moral compass right then,
but to get the mob to calm down, he offered them his daughters to do with as they pleased.
In Genesis 19:4-9 it says Lot said: “Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man;
let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men,
for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” The crowd wasn’t impressed, and instead of
taking Lot up on his offer of a couple of virgins, they tried to break down the door.
That’s when the angels blinded them all. It gets worse. The angels told Lot that he
should tell them if he had any more family because they were going to burn the place to the ground,
with all the now blind people in it. As the bible says, “Then the Lord rained
on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities,
and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.”
The trouble was, when Lot and his wife were making their escape, his wife looked behind
to get one last look at the place. She was subsequently turned into a pillar of salt.
As if things couldn’t get any more messed up, after Lot took his two daughters up to
a cave in the hills, the girls got blind drunk and started trying to get their dad
to drink. They had a wicked plan, which was to get him so drunk he’d sleep with them.
The next day, the eldest child whispered to the younger child, “I lay last night with my father;
let us make him drink wine tonight also; then you go in and lie with him, so that
we may preserve offspring through our father.” Lot must have been thinking, what am I doing,
but he took the booze and he also slept with his other daughter.
They both got knocked up and each of them had a boy, one named Moab and one named Ben-ammi.
Ok, so that’s not exactly scary, but it’s also not the kind of thing you see in school plays.
Now for the zombies. 1. Army of the dead
This story comes from Ezekiel 37:1 – 10. Guided by the Lord’s good hands,
the prophet Ezekiel was taken to a really quiet valley, and everywhere were scattered bones.
When Ezekiel saw the massive pile of bones, God said to him, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
Ezekiel said something to the effect, dunno, you’re Lord, you tell me.
God shouted, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! I will make breath enter you,
and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon
you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life.”
And by God, did those bones start rattling. Suddenly, Ezekiel watched them picking themselves
up off the floor. Flesh and tendons did appear to be surrounding the bones, but they still weren’t
breathing. God then said to Ezekiel, say this to the bones, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’”
One by one, they stood to their feet, a vast army of God’s zombies, according to the bible,
respectable zombies, not the riff-raff you get nowadays.
Now you need to watch “Was Jesus Actually Resurrected.”