How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Specifically, there are a few reasons I love this book. First, it’s practical. Some apologetics books, like Evidence That Demands a Verdict, offer answers and evidence for faith. Other books, like Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions, are designed to help believers navigate spiritual conversations. Yet this book offers both content and methodology—a rare trait for a book of its kind.

was really struck by how, in

the last chapter of the book, he says that there is no truly satisfactory emotional answer to why God commanded the killing of children and infants. There’s no escaping it—these passages are jarring. Of course, Dan believes God is just. But the point is that this book is refreshingly honest about the emotional challenges of faith.

He didn’t leave the faith because of boring preaching or irrelevant worship music. He told me he left because he finally got around to reading the Bible. Yes, reading the Bible led him to become an atheist.

Pastors and church leaders regularly encourage us to read our Bibles. Yet here is the great irony. It was reading the Bible that caused this student—and an increasing number of others like him today—to leave Christianity.

But the problem goes farther than Christians leaving the faith in which they were raised. The Bible is a stumbling block for many non-Christians as well.

She told me how she had initially been excited about exploring faith in Jesus. In the teachings at church, she had heard about grace and forgiveness and was drawn to Jesus because of what she had heard about him. But she’d had no idea, no warning at all, that these disturbing and crazy ideas were also in the Christian Bible. Apologetically, she admitted that she wondered whether Christianity was a cult because she could not understand how thinking people could believe what she was reading to be true. How could they take all of this seriously? This young woman’s interest in exploring faith in Jesus came to an abrupt halt after she began reading the Bible.

We can’t just sweep questions like these under the rug and ignore them. They forced me to look at the origins of the Bible and whether there are ways of understanding the bizarre and unusual things in it.

I would never, ever mislead anyone into believing in a faith that is not trustworthy. I can say with confidence that we can intelligently, and with faith, believe that the Scriptures are from God. If you knew me, you would know that I am never closed to learning new information and am always looking at current criticisms of Christianity and the Bible. No Christian should be afraid of or ignore difficult questions.

Here’s where we are heading. First, we’ll learn what to do when we come across a crazy-sounding Bible passage. We’ll start with some critical principles to utilize when we open a Bible or read any verse, and how these can drastically change how we understand a passage in the Bible. These are principles most people who criticize or are confused about the Bible don’t know how to use.

Second, we’ll look at several of the Bible passages most commonly objected to. We will look at five areas of challenge to the Bible and ways to address them. There are more than just five, but these are the most commonly discussed topics:

The Anti-science Bible. We’ll focus on the creation story in the early cha...

is one of the most commonly mocked section...

The Pro-violence Bible. How do we worship and love a God who kills thousands and thousands of people, even children, in the pages of the Bible?

The Anti-women Bible.

Isn’t the Bible just promoting misogyny and male chauvinism?

The Pro-slavery, Anti-shrimp, and Bizarre-Commands Bible.

Don’t these suggest the Bible is a primitive book and not to be taken seriously today?

5. The Intolerant Only-One-Way-to-God Bible. The Bible claims there is only one way to God. The world has more than seven billion people, and there are more than four thousand religions, including five major ones.

While there are plenty more very strange and confusing subjects and verses in the Bible that we could cover, we can look at these five to start.

We will walk through not just responses to these topics but, more important, how we get to those responses. That way, whenever other difficult questions and crazy verses are brought to your attention (and they will be), you will have some basic methods for addressing them.

Unicorns are mythical horses with a horn and magical powers living in forests. I had never heard the claim that unicorns are in the Bible, but after the haircut, I did an online search and learned there is, in fact, a connection between unicorns and the Bible.

“Because the Bible tells me so.” Listed were several verses, including Numbers 23:22, Psalm 22:21, and Isaiah 34:7. Another meme (1.2) had an image of a unicorn with one of these Bible verses written out followed by the words “Know your Bible.”

He saw the Bible being quoted in a way that seemed ridiculous and rather unbelievable. How do we respond to challenges like this?

Bible verse memes similar to the ones I just mentioned are all over the internet. They are being used in arguments about the Bible in interviews on television and in discussions on YouTube channels. The intent is to discredit the Bible.

Memes like 1.6 use an actual Bible verse to show God giving instruction about buying slaves from Leviticus 25:44. Notice how the comment in the meme is pointing out that allegedly “90% of so-called religious people don’t read their Bible.” The implication is that if Christians really read their Bibles, they would reject what the Bible teaches.

Another commonly quoted Bible verse is Leviticus 11:7–8, which is used to mock Christians who play football. The visuals that accompany it attempt to show that it is hypocritical for a Christian to play football because the Bible clearly prohibits it (1.9).

The logic here is that a football player

shouldn’t touch the “pigskin”—the carcass of a pig—since the Bible says it is off-limits. This joke about biblical prohibitions on playing football became popular enough that it was mentioned in a Golden Globe award-winning national television show.

Here is the good news. There are ways to better understand these crazy-sounding Bible verses. We must learn how to, and how not to, read the Bible. Most of the examples we’ve seen so far are a result of people who are not reading the Bible correctly.

look beyond the visual image and explore beyond a literal, out-of-context reading of a verse, you’ll discover the Bible is not “sheer nonsense.”

Most of those mentioning unicorns were mocking the Bible. There was even a satirical website dedicated to unicorns that said, “Unicorns Are Real. The Bible says so.”

Almost any Christian who reads the Bible today never sees the word “unicorn.” Contemporary translations don’t use “unicorn,” they use a more accurate term, “wild ox,” in translation to English. However, you can still find the word “unicorn” in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), a translation from the year 1611.

authorized by King James I of England and utilized the best Greek and Hebrew texts (the languages in which the Bible was originally written) along with several other Bible translations they had access to at the time.

you’ll also encounter unfamiliar words like “thee” and “thou,” which were common words at that time. Today we use “you” or “him” or “her” for “thee,” and...

The word translated “unicorn” in the King James translation is the Hebrew word re’em. This word refers to an animal the original audience of the Bible would have been familiar with, and the best estimate of when that word was written is between 1400 and 700 BC. Scholars who study the Hebrew language and its usage at those times tell us it likely was referring to an animal of great strength that had a prominent horn.

the scholars translating this Hebrew didn’t know the specific animal the Hebrew word re’em was referring to, so they looked at an older translation for help. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (an older translation called the Septuagint) sometime in the second or third century BC, those translators chose the Greek word monokeros, which, when translated to English literally means “one horn.” When the King James translators encountered this unfamiliar word, they looked to the Greek translation for help and chose the English word “unicorn” (meaning one horn) to represent what they felt the original word meant, an animal with a prominent horn.

The original writers of the Bible would have been familiar with the now extinct but very large and powerful horned oxen the Assyrians called “rimu,” also referred to as “aurochs.” Today, we know there also once existed an animal that is now extinct, Elasmotherium sibiricum, an extremely large single-horned bull.

Cultural changes over time lead to shifts in the way words are used, and all of this makes a difference in translating ancient texts.

that we think of today? No, of course not. Here is why this matters. Today there are memes, graphics, and stories that make their way into online discussions—and even into conversations with barbers—that convince people that the Bible is filled with nonsense. These images and verses build a case that the Bible is crazy, and anyone who believes the Bible is crazy. All of this may look convincing, but after you research the original usage of the word in the Bible, the context, and where the English translation first

appeared, it’s easy to see that the Bible does not teach that mythical unicorns existed.

We’ll look at the makeup of the Bible, because to understand what Bible verses mean we need to understand how these verses fit in the whole Bible. If we ignore this, we will all-too-easily believe that mythical, magical unicorns are in the Bible (along with talking snakes), that churches don’t let women speak or ask questions, and many other crazy and very strange and weird-sounding things.

We believe the Bible was written for us, that it’s for everyone of all times and places because it’s God’s Word. But it wasn’t written to us. It wasn’t written in our language, it wasn’t written with our culture in mind or our culture in view. —DR. JOHN WALTON, PROFESSOR, AUTHOR1

Here are the four facts about how to and how not to read the Bible: 1. The Bible is a library, not a book. 2. The Bible is written for us, but not to us. 3. Never read a Bible verse. 4. All of the Bible points to Jesus.

2. The Bible is written for us, but not to us. 3. Never read a Bible verse. 4. All of the Bible points to Jesus.

This library is diverse, containing writings of history, poetry, prophecy, and law. This library of diverse books was written in three different languages over a 1,500-year period by a whole bunch of different people from different cultures. Some books in this library were written more than a thousand years before the other books.

So when you go to the poetry section of a library and pull a book off the shelf, you would read it differently than a book in the history section. The way a history

book is written means it is to be interpreted and understood quite differently than a poem. Keep walking through the library and you’ll come to a section containing writings from Europe in the medieval period (around 900 AD).

Which of the two major parts you are reading from makes a big difference in how you interpret a book or verse.

The word “testament” simply means “covenant,” and though it’s not a word we use much today, it was very common at the time the Bible was written. A covenant means an “agreement” between two parties.