4 Jokes in the Bible You Missed

Canva.com

When most modern readers open their Bibles, they do it with the belief that they are reading a book that is solemn and serious. The Good Book contains, of course, the Good News and is, as such, full of uplifting and inspirational stories. Within its pages, there are tales of people who overcome incredible adversity, anecdotes about miraculous healings and the amazing power of forgiveness. Those who read the Bible are confronted with stories of God’s grace and love. They also find within the Bible advice on how to live, how to worship and how to approach God. As such, the Bible is often approached with a sense of awe or a serious, studious focus. Rarely does anyone open the Bible with the anticipation of being entertained.

Modern readers miss many aspects of the Bible or gloss over elements of even the most famous stories because the cultural context has been lost. The original writers did not spell out certain things because anyone who was reading the Bible at that time would have understood the writer’s point implicitly. Unfortunately, only serious scholars tend to possess that historical context today. As such, modern readers miss a number of things in the Bible, among them the humor that permeates some of the best known stories. Here are four jokes in the Bible you probably missed the last time you read it.

Ba’al in the Bathroom

Shutterstock.com

A very large percentage of the Old Testament follows a similar formula. The Israelites start worshipping idols. God sends a prophet to tell them to stop. Some percentage of the Israelites listen, but the rest ignore the prophet. A city or kingdom is destroyed or loses a war as a result of the Israelites’ disobedience. The survivors return to God, but eventually drift back into idolatry. The cycle then repeats.

During one of these cycles Elijah decided to prove that God was real but that Ba’al was not. The challenge was relatively simple. Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al would both construct an altar and see which deity would set the altars alight in response to prayers. Elijah let the priests of Ba’al go first, but they were unsuccessful. Elijah mocked their failure by sarcastically suggesting exactly what Ba’al might be doing instead. Elijah said that Ba’al could not answer the priests’ calls because he was “musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” Essentially, in a tournament of godly one-upmanship, Elijah suggested that Ba’al was too busy using the restroom to listen to his priests.

Legion of Roman Pigs

Shutterstock.com

In Mark 5, Jesus encounters a man possessed by demons. When He asks what the demons’ names are, the demons respond with the famous line, “We are Legion, for we are many.” This response has become famous, but the fact that it is in many ways the punchline of a joke has been lost. In the rest of the story, Jesus sends the demons from the man into a group of pigs. The pigs then run away and drown in the sea.

What most people miss is that the name “Legion” is actually a sly joke on the Romans. The Romans were deeply unpopular among the Jews in Jesus’ time, and Roman soldiers worked in military units called legions. The Romans were thus identified with demons, and then sent into a group of unclean animals which stampeded into the sea. The joke is both on the comparison of Romans, demons and pigs as well as the fact that many Jews and early Christians hoped that the Roman legions would do just what the pigs did and take a long walk off a short cliff.

Jonah’s Unwillingly Successful Sermon

Shutterstock.com

Many of the best known characters in the Old Testament are remembered for their importance. Moses, Adam and Eve are remembered because of how important they are to the story of the Bible. Noah, Abraham and Isaac are generally well known because their stories are told so often. Popular recollections of Joseph, meanwhile, are often due to the fact that he was the titular character in a beloved musical filled with almost maddeningly catchy songs. Then, there is Jonah. Jonah is remembered by many not because he was a prophet but because he was the unfortunate soul who was swallowed by a whale.

Jonah’s entire story is a cross between a comedy of errors and a Greek tragedy that warns against the futility of fighting fate. Jonah had no desire to be God’s prophet and tried to run from that duty. It ended with him getting eaten by a whale and then sent to prophesize anyway. Jonah, fed up with all of it, did not give a deeply impassioned speech or the long warning of all the horrors to come that was typical of Old Testament prophets. Instead, Jonah gave an eight word warning as if to say to God, “There. I did it. Are you happy now?” To Jonah’s consternation, his warning of “40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown,” was enough to get the Ninevites to repent.

Feet Does Not Mean Feet

Shutterstock.com

To a modern reader, the Bible seems to talk about feet an awful lot. Angels are noted as “covering their feet,” and there are many characters who are noted to be covering or uncovering their feet. The writers of the Bible, however, were not simply fascinated by people’s feet. In old Hebrew, “feet” does not always refer to the appendages on the end of a person’s legs. Instead, the word “feet” is a euphemism for genitalia, much the way “sleeping with someone” has nothing to do with actually snoozing beside another person. As such, those many passages where someone covers or uncovers their feet are either showing that angels have some modesty or making a dirty joke. Modern readers often miss out on the joke, but ancient readers and writers would have been snickering like schoolchildren as they considered the image of kings with “uncovered feet.”