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Crazy Bible Stories

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ideologyhunter

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Since I'm a long-term atheist, it's unlikely I'll ever be asked to run a Sunday School class, but I am stock-piling my favorite crazy-ass Bible stories, just in case. I feel that youngsters have been fed the same old stories over and over -- Adam & Eve, David & Goliath, etc, etc, when there are so many lesser-known but memorable stories to tell. I would love to tell the young (really love to tell the young) what's inside the covers of their little Bibles, that their other teachers omitted. Here are some tales that deserve to be better known:
1) Gen. 30 - the magic way to breed goats with stripes, using...striped sticks!
2) Ex. 17: 10-13 - Israelites are battling the Amalekites but are only winning when Moses has his arms in the air, holding up a magic stick. Again with the sticks. This could lead to a fun outdoor activity with the class divided into Israelites and Amalekites, playing Dodgeball. Me holding up a yardstick.
3) Judges 7: 2-8 - Gideon can tell which of his 10,000 men will be victorious warriors by watching & evaluating how all 10,000 of them drink spring water. Easy to play-act at the water cooler.
4) Judges 14: 1-19 - Samson uses God's power to murder 30 guys and take their clothes, all so he can pay off a bet he'd set up involving a 'riddle' that you'd have to be Samson to solve, because he's the only one who had seen a bee's nest inside a dead lion (long story). I would have the class take out their crayons and illustrate this one.
So the point is, share the wonder. Hopefully, the kids would retell these stories on the drive home. "Hey, Dad, Mom, wanna know how to get striped goats when you don't already have any striped goats?"
 
I don't remember the citations for these, but I seem to remember the following stories:

Curing poison by looking at a statue of a snake
Curing the curse of hemerhoids by making golden models of hemeroids.
the conquest of the 'peaceful, unsuspecting people'
When the other disciples lock Peter out because they thought he was dead, and the voice calling was his spirit.
When Paul's sermon was so boring a guy fell asleep and fell out a window and died.
 
Excellent! The guy who fell out the window is in Acts 20. Paul miraculously (?) revives him. My students could re-enact this by falling off their desks.
 
i would have them either individually draw the biblical cosmology, or as a group project, make a world diorama.

God spent all of the 2nd day of Creation just on forming the sky. The solid firmament keeping the Waters Above from drowning everyone.

In Job we find that the Earth is a big flat mud pie spread across the Wates Below.

Or the 1-day life of the sun? “In them [the heavens], a tent is fixed for the sun, who comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, rejoicing like a strong man to run his race. His rising is at one end of the heavens, his circuit touches their farthest ends; and nothing is hidden from his heat (Psalm 19:4-6).” so the sun has a little doghouse down below where he gets the night off, rising up each day to run across the sky.
 
Something about God walking on the Dome of the Sky looking down on the folks below. Jacobs ladder where the Angels climb up and down between Heaven and Earth, apparently invisible to the Mortal Eye.
 
Well to be fair Jacob's ladder can be brushed aside because it was just a dream he had.

God walking around the camp (of Israel) at night and getting pissed off because he stepped in shit and ordering people to take a spade with them when they have to go ... that's pretty funny.

Yahweh can't see in low light like he used to.
 
The symbolism of a dream of course, yet when Jacob awoke, in awe he called the place the gateway to heaven. Not to be taken literally, yet an invisible Ladder between heaven/above the dome of the sky and the earth kind of fits together in terms of sheer silliness.
 
Jonah living inside a whale is a good one.
 
Jesus wanted some figs but the fig tree didn't have any. This pissed Jesus off so he cursed the tree and it died.
~ Matthew 21

For your sunday school class, you could have the kids destroy anything that upsets them (like dull crayons). In honor of Jesus' lesson, of course.
 
The Sons of God impregnating the Daughters of Men, giving birth to giants. (Gen 6:2-4)

Lot's daughters getting their father drunk, having sex with him (twice in as many nights) and becoming pregnant.
 
Romans 9:13 God hated Esau before he was born... sounds fair.
 
Genesis 2. God creates animals for Adam to find him a "helpmeet". Tyrannosauruses, and platypuses. Mammoths and elephant shrews.
Stegosauruses and field mice. God, maker of a vast Universe cannot figure this out and is a right goofball.
 
I like the one in Exodus,where the god kills all the animals in a plague, then gives them all boils in the next plague, then hits them with hail in the plague after that. Dude. They were dead.

But you students could create diaramas for this.
 
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

And so our loving god, who sees to us as his children, said... when he saw how well they were doing... 'well this shit needs to stop!'

Much like how I teach my daughter how to do math wrong so that she will never be smarter than me. Don't we all?
 
Moses and the Hebrews wandering in circles for 40 years in the area roughly between Cairo and Plasticine without being seen or leaving any evidence is pretty strange. They must have been really bored.

Talking snakes.

The Ark is a strange story, it must have quickly stunk to 'high heaven' to to speak. And all the rotting plant material and carcasses when the flood receded.
 
It could depend on the sediment accumulation in such a flood, which would bury pretty much everything. Would be quite a lot of very deep digging for the future archeoligists looking for bones, I suspect.

Some good indivdual topic ideas, nice one.
 
Learner said:
It could depend on the sediment accumulation in such a flood, which would bury pretty much everything. Would be quite a lot of very deep digging for the future archeoligists looking for bones, I suspect.

Some good indivdual topic ideas, nice one.
Click to expand...

Geologists have been investigating the earth's crust for a long time, and they have found all sorts of things. For example, they have found evidence of a meteor strike from 65 million years ago, all across the globe, which is the event that is believed to have caused a mass extinction on the planet that included the dinosaurs. Guess what geologists haven't found? Evidence for a global flood within the past 5,000 years or so that could be tied to the Biblical flood story. Amazing, right?

But it doesn't end there. An extinction event of the magnitude of the Biblical flood would have been obvious in the genomes of all living things that experienced this extreme population bottleneck (a family of humans and two animals of each kind). That evidence does not exist either. We can identify population bottlenecks in humans from 100,000 years ago when the population had dropped to just 30,000 or so individuals, but there's nothing from 4,000 years ago when the population had dropped to just a handful of people? Its almost as if the global flood story isn't true.

Getting called out repeatedly for posting nonsense like this would be embarrassing to most people, but not to you apparently.
 
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