The 6 Weirdest Moments in the Bible

The Bible is serious stuff. For over two billion Christians all over the globe, this book is the Word of God, full of holy wisdom and divine guidance.

But the Bible also has some seriously weird stuff in it. And it’s no wonder—when the supernatural comes into play, pretty much anything is possible. Most of us are familiar with things like Moses’s plague of frogs, Samson’s Superman status, and pretty much all of the book of Revelation, but believe it or not, there are some hidden Biblical gems that get even weirder.

These are things they don’t teach you in Sunday school because they’d probably make you laugh. But we’d like to think that God is pretty okay with us finding a little humor in some of the stranger moments in Biblical history.

So get ready—we’re going to take a look at the 6 weirdest moments in the Bible.

Bears and Baldies

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So there’s this guy named Elisha in the Bible. He was one of the prophets of Israel, which means he had a very special connection to God, and was called to be the intercessor between God and Israel, ministering, teaching, and performing miracles.

Most of these miracles were acts of blessing and helpfulness. You know—things like resurrecting the dead and curing leprosy and turning one piece of bread into a bunch of pieces of bread. Standard Jesus stuff, right?

Well, mostly.

Elisha, apparently, was a little self-conscious about his male pattern baldness. In 2 Kings 2:24, the shiny-headed prophet was on his way to Bethel, when a bunch of kids came up to him, crying out, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!”

Big mistake. Let’s look at what the very next verse says.

“When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.”

Yep. That’s right. When a bunch of children pointed at his bald pate and laughed, Elisha made good use of his God powers by bringing down she-bears on them, killing all 42 of those little bullies.

Remember, kids: never make fun of a bald prophet.

The Talking Donkey

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Let’s talk about good old Balaam and his very odd experience with a donkey.

Balaam was another prophet of God, but unlike Elisha, he wanted to curse everybody rather than just a bunch of kids who made fun of him. When King Balak—an enemy of the Israelites—offered him a bunch of money to use his prophet-powers to curse Israel, he accepted, and tried to get God to do it. In all, Balaam was a pretty bad guy.

Of course, God wasn’t really into this, but when Balaam kept pestering Him, He finally just said “Go with them, [Balak’s men] but do only what I tell you.

It’s a good thing God used a Disney moment to scare him straight in Numbers 22: 21-39.

The morning after this conversation with God, Balaam saddled his donkey and left for Moab. But unbeknownst to Balaam, there was an angel waiting for him in the road, ready to kill him when he passed. Luckily, though, even though Balaam couldn’t see this angel, his donkey sure could, and it ran him off the road and into a field.

Of course, Balaam beat his donkey until it took him back to the road. But again, it ran, this time crushing Balaam’s foot against a wall in its panic. Eventually, it just laid down and wouldn’t move at all.

And then this happened.

“Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and it said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?’

Balaam answered the donkey, ‘You have made a fool of me! If only I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.’

The donkey said to Balaam, ‘Am I not your own donkey, which you have always ridden, to this day? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?’

‘No,’ he said.

Then the Lord opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown."

So after a disturbingly casual conversation with his donkey, Balaam lived happily ever after. Kind of.

A Strange Wedding Gift

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Here’s a question: how much would you pay to marry the love of your life? A herd of sheep? A sack of gold? 200 human foreskins?

Bingo! David—you know, the giant killer—chose this last option in 1 Samuel 18:27.

David was pretty famous after killing Goliath, and everyone loved him. Women threw themselves at him, and men instantly stripped naked and gave him all their clothes.

Even King Saul adored him. Well, until he didn’t, anyway. When Saul got tired of David one-upping him at literally everything, he tried to kill him in a friendly game of dodge-the-spear. When that failed, Saul went with the second-best option: just making him a part of the family by giving David his oldest daughter as a wife.

Feeling unworthy to be in the royal family, David humbly refused. But when Saul offered his other daughter, Michal, who was in love with David, David was pleased.

But old Saul, seeing another opportunity to get David killed, decided that the price of Michal’s hand would be 100 Philistine foreskins.

But this just left David strangely excited, and he went out and collected not 100, but 200 human foreskins for Saul. Saul was not happy.

But nevertheless, the king accepted the foreskins and gave Michal to David as a wife, plotting to kill him the entire time.

And you thought you had family issues.

The Undead Army

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As far as the weirdest parts of the Bible go, the book of Ezekiel pretty much wins the game.

Ezekiel, who grew up as a priest in Jerusalem’s temple, was another prophet of God—we’re sensing a theme here—and had some pretty crazy encounters with the supernatural during his lifetime.

At some point, God jumps into Ezekiel’s brain, where He proceeds to create the Biblical prequel to Night of the Living Dead.

Ezekiel finds himself suddenly in the middle of a valley. But he’s not exactly alone—the valley is filled with human bones.

God asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel, probably began sweating at this point.

Then God instructs Ezekiel to command the bones to live. Ezekiel does. And then things start getting weird.

First came a rattling, according to Ezekiel 37:1-14. And then the bones began skittering across the valley floor, coming together into a full skeleton army. Tendons began growing over these skeletons, and then muscle, and then flesh.

Finally, God commanded Ezekiel to command the breath of life into the undead, and a “vast army” stood up to up to their feet.

Since God technically did this through a prophetic vision to metaphorically show Ezekiel what he wanted to do with the Israelites, this verse technically describes the very first zombie movie.

The Terrifying Cherubim

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Think the undead army is the weirdest thing in the book of Ezekiel?

Think again. Another of Ezekiel’s visions involved the cherubim, a decidedly terrifying brand of angel.

When most of us think of cherubim, we think of chubby, winged babies. But this isn’t actually Biblical, and comes from putto, winged infants which were thought to influence human lives, and that often appeared in ancient classical art.

So what do real cherubim look like? Well, to start out with, they have four faces—a human face, a lion’s, an ox’s, and an eagle’s, according to Ezekiel 1. They also have four wings. And then there’s this.

“I looked, and I saw beside the cherubim four wheels, one beside each of the cherubim; the wheels sparkled like topaz. As for their appearance, the four of them looked alike; each was like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the cherubim faced; the wheels did not turn about as the cherubim went. The cherubim went in whatever direction the head faced, without turning as they went. Their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels.”

So the cherubim are giant, four-headed creatures whose bodies are entirely covered in eyes, and they ride around in spinning rings, which are also covered in eyes.

If an angel is going to manifest in your bedroom at night, you better hope it’s not one of these guys.

Fishy Funds

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Jesus did a lot of good. He healed the sick, resurrected the dead, and died to compensate for the sins of all mankind. His story is the centerpiece of the Bible—the most serious of all the Biblical narratives.

But He also did something that’s kind of weird in Matthew 17:24-27.

When Christ and His disciples arrived in Capernaum along their journeys, they were approached by some tax collectors who were gathering the Temple tax that must be paid by every male Israelite above twenty years of age—this tax went into the Temple treasury and paid for Temple services.

“Doesn’t your teacher pay the Temple tax?” they asked Peter.

“Yes, He does,” he replied.

So Peter went back to the house that Jesus and the disciples were staying at, and Jesus immediately lets them all know that they’re exempt from the tax, but that He’s going to pay it anyway so as not to cause offense.

But instead of reaching into His satchel or scrounging around in the couch cushions for change, Jesus tells Peter to “go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours."

Peter does, and when he finally catches a fish, it has exactly the amount of money needed to pay the Temple tax sitting right there in its fishy mouth.

David Blaine would be proud.