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

in the presence of God is like.

Repeatedly, God warns the Israelites not to compromise and become like the people living around them:

This backstory provides a starting point for looking more closely at the Bible verses we’ve read from Exodus and Leviticus, the ones that sound so crazy to us. Let’s try to understand them through the lens of who they were originally written to and why.

Some scholars believe that the Canaanites, who were living in the land at the time, had a magical practice of “wedding” different seeds together to have offspring in an attempt to conjure up fertile crops.1 There is a strong likelihood that the prohibitions against mixing different kinds

of seeds, animals, and materials together were designed to discourage and prevent the Israelites from imitating the fertility cult practices of the Canaanites. This wasn’t gardening advice or a set of random, pointless rules. It was a very specific way for God to tell his people, the ones he rescued from slavery in Egypt, that they were not to be like the other people living around them. They were not to participate in fertility rites patterned after the worship rituals of false gods.

Only priests could wear this type of blended fabric for clothing. This may sound strange to us today, but think of someone who isn’t a police officer making and wearing a police uniform, pretending to be a police officer. The restrictions regarding clothing weren’t just fashion preferences or style choices. They were requirements distinguishing what a priest would wear when leading the people in worship of their holy God.

These restrictions about plants and clothing actually have a good rationale behind them. God wanted his people to have a distinct identity, to remain holy, and to not imitate the fertility rites of the neighboring countries.

God was providing a foundation and a structure for the roles of worship leaders by making them distinct from the people. He wanted them to be reminded that this was a new era for them, and they were not to mim...

As we saw in the last chapter, this verse is often used in a mocking way to imply that Christians shouldn’t play football if they want to obey the Bible. Yet footballs are not made of actual pigskin, despite the “pigskin” nickname. Pro and collegiate footballs are made with cowhide leather, while others are often made with synthetic material or vulcanized rubber. In fact, football exteriors were never made of pigskin.

We should not assume that those criticizing the Bible have done their homework to discover the why and the backstory.

Using these verses to mock the Bible’s validity simply shows that the person doing the mocking doesn’t understand what the Bible is saying.

Or other believers

I close with a popular verse that affects many people today: Don’t get a tattoo (Leviticus 19:28). The full Bible verse reads, “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.” The Bible isn’t speaking about our practice of contemporary tattooing,

Leviticus wasn’t talking about tattoos like these. Instead—no surprise here—God was keeping his people from participating in the religious practices of the neighboring Canaanites.

Cherry-picking from the Bible is not good if we are affirming only the things we like. However, we need to do some strategic cherry-picking.

When Jesus died on the cross, he put an end to the Old Testament law and introduced a new law called the “law of Christ.”* For those who want to dig deeper, you can read about this shift in Galatians 3:23–24; 6:2; and 1 Corinthians 9:21.

What makes our personal sense of “love” better than that of another culture or time? The solution to this problem is to study what God

guided the

New Testament writers to say about loving God with all our heart, mind, and strength and loving our neighbor as our...

Without the rest of the New Testament, we would miss a great deal of the how and why of what it means to love others.

The whole of the New Testament describes what it means to follow Jesus and the commands we should obey for moral and ethical living, including what it looks like to love other people.

in Old Testament times, when it was tempting for Israel to adopt the worship practices, morals, and ethics of the neighboring people groups, we must resist that temptation as well.

Jesus expands on many of the moral laws to clarify and strengthen their importance.

Here is a helpful summary from author Tim Keller of the change that occurred with Jesus and how we can know which Old Testament laws have continued in the teaching of the New Testament (and apply to us today):

the coming of Christ changed how we worship, but not how we live. The moral law outlines God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness.

When he spoke about murder, Jesus didn’t say he was throwing out the old. He pushes us to consider God’s intent in the law, to look at how murder begins with hatred in the heart prior to the action.

Let’s tackle the topic of slavery. There are Bible verses in the Old Testament that seem to indicate that God did not oppose slavery. Even more puzzling are sections of the New Testament that also speak about slavery without explicitly condemning it. We never find an “end all slavery immediately” verse in the Bible.

This is a major and understandable criticism of the Bible, and whenever you hear or see verses from the Bible referring to slavery on memes or billboards, take the question very seriously.

In our modern context, just reading these verses makes us cringe in horror and confusion, seeing that they are in the Bible. We can’t help but wonder if God approves of slavery.

Slavery is a serious topic. Our purpose is to better understand how to read the odd and strange parts of the Bible, so here are a few initial thoughts to help us make sense of these passages on slavery:

Slavery Is Evil Taking a person against their will and forcing them to become the property of another is evil.

corruption. Slavery is one of many ways human beings have strayed from God’s perfect creation.

According to both the Old Testament and the New Testament, slavery is wrong. This is very important to pay attention to. We see in Exodus 21:16 a clear condemnation of anyone who steals someone to make them a slave: “Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.” And in the New Testament, in 1 Timothy 1:9–10, it says, “The law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers

for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine.”

It’s important to remember that after the fall (see the timetable chart in chapter 3), human beings began developing all kinds of practices that God did not intend in his original creation. Human beings, not God, developed slavery.

Jesus modeled this for us when he was asked about marriage and divorce. He sent those asking questions back to the beginning to remind them of how God had originally created people before human beings rebelled against God and altered God’s original setup.* The same is true with slavery. God did not create slavery, and what we find in the Bible is a process in which God is slowly

moving people back toward a standard of greater respect and dignity for all people, not less.

Keep in mind that God commanded the death penalty for those who kidnapped people and made them slaves (read Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:10). Although this type of slavery did happen at times, we never see God endorsing it or teaching people to do this. Instead, we see God condemning it. And when we do find slavery being addressed in the Bible, it is generally speaking about the type of slavery

existed to help the poor survive in the ancient world, forms of slavery that were established for people to work off debt (Leviticus 25:39), for example. When we look at slavery in the context of the ancient world, we need to deprogram our normal definition and redefine it according to what it meant in that world.

in ancient Israel or at the time of the New Testament, you would not typically notice a racial difference between those serving as slaves and those who

weren’t slaves. When you look at the Old Testament, you find Israelites who had fellow Israelites as slaves (for a limited time). In New Testament times you would find Romans and Greeks of the same race and ethnicity having Roman and Greek slaves. Back then, slavery was not race based as slavery was in the United States.

In other places in the New Testament we see a clear leveling of the divide between slave and nonslave, treating them as equals. Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In a world where at least 30 percent of the population were slaves, this was extremely forward thinking. It was nothing less than revolutionary!

It Was Wrong to Use the Bible to Justify Slavery in America Those who used the Bible to support race-based slavery in the United States were seeking to justify an evil and wicked practice. They did not use correct or intelligent Bible study methods.

Many Christians fought against slavery and condemned the incorrect usage of the Bible in this way. Christians such as Wilbur Wilberforce and many others fought against slavery.

there were Christians who used the Bible to back slavery—that was clearly wrong and evil. Bible study methods are important.

Looking at Bible verses through the lens of the entire storyline of the Bible, you cannot conclud...

We don’t know why he didn’t address this practice or the hundreds of other evils in the world. Some have surmised that because more than 30 percent of the population were slaves, it could have led to economic upheaval and likely more poverty and starvation.

Jesus did not focus

on specific civil laws or governments, but addressed the desires and moti...

God did not create slavery nor endorse it anywhere in the Bible. Humans created slavery. God gave regulations and guidance to improve the conditions of people trapped as slaves in this evil system.

a non-Christian friend of mine put it, the Bible seems to teach that the church is a “boys’ club for adults”—and I can understand why she said this. However, as we will soon learn, if we look at how these verses fit into the larger context of the whole Bible story, it significantly changes how we understand them.