The Hard PassagesCheat Sheet

God says He did it: “I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth” (Genesis 6:17). The text gives the reason, “the earth is filled with violence through them” (6:13), and it records long notice, with Noah “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). The children are the hardest part, and no answer removes the grief. But they are not suffering now. The dead sleep, and “all that are in the graves shall hear his voice” (John 5:28). See the fuller answer.

Start where the story starts. An earlier Pharaoh had ordered, “Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river” (Exodus 1:22). God warned the king of Moses’ day before the plagues began: “Let my son go… if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son” (4:23). Nine plagues came first, and the tenth was announced in advance (11:4–6). Anyone could shelter under the blood, and a “mixed multitude” left with Israel (12:38). The text uses both ways of speaking: “the LORD will pass through to smite,” and He “will not suffer the destroyer to come in” (12:23). It is still a terrible night, and Scripture calls it that.

The command says that, and softening it does not help. But the reason was moral, not ethnic: “for the wickedness of these nations” (Deuteronomy 9:5), including that “even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire” (12:31). God waited about four centuries, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). He warned Israel the land would “spue” them out for the same sins (Leviticus 18:28). And Rahab, who turned to Him, lived (Joshua 6:25). It was one judgment by the Owner of life and gives no one permission today. See the fuller answer.

He did, and this is among the hardest lines in the Bible. Amalek had preyed on the “feeble” at the rear of a column of freed slaves (Deuteronomy 25:18), and judgment came about four centuries later. The Kenites living among them were warned to leave first (1 Samuel 15:6). As for the infants, we can say this much: they are not in torment, they sleep, and their case rests with a God Who has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11). Scripture does not tell us their final state, and we will not guess.

The Hebrew words can cover youths and even grown men, but qatan (“little”) pulls the phrase younger, and the text gives no ages (see the side note). The stronger points are these. Bethel was a center of Jeroboam’s calf worship (1 Kings 12:28–29). The bears tore “forty and two children of them,” so the crowd was larger still. This was a mob from an idolatrous city confronting God’s prophet, not a playground. It is a severe judgment, and the text does not apologize for it. It was never about baldness. See the fuller answer.

The rule was public and specific: “they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die” (Numbers 4:15), and they were not even to look (4:20). The ark should have been carried by Levites, not hauled on a cart. So these were not accidents of ignorance, even if Uzzah’s motive looks kind. The text calls it his “error” (2 Samuel 6:7). The lesson is that God’s holiness is not safe to handle casually, and the hard edge of that remains. David himself was upset by it (6:8), so you are in good company if you are too.

The request came “in the word of the LORD” (1 Kings 20:35), and the man was told so. The blow was needed to stage an acted parable against King Ahab (20:37–42). The story turns on obeying a plain word from God, even when it makes no sense to you. That is a real theme of Kings, and the same chapter turns on Ahab refusing to do so. The text gives no further explanation, and we will not invent one.

The law was plain that “the children” were not to die for a father’s sin (Deuteronomy 24:16), so readers have long asked whether the family died at all, or were present as witnesses. The text says his sons and daughters were brought to the valley, and that Israel “stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire” (Joshua 7:25). It may mean they were executed, possibly because the plunder hidden under the tent floor could not have been hidden from them. We cannot settle it, and should not claim to.

Israel had just sworn the covenant and broken it within weeks. Moses first offered a way out: “Who is on the LORD’s side? let him come unto me” (Exodus 32:26). About three thousand fell, out of a nation of hundreds of thousands, so this was not everyone who had been near the calf. It was a judgment on an open revolt that was still going on. It is a command to Israel under direct rule by God, not a pattern for anyone since. See the note on Israel’s law.

They were the state-backed clergy of a cult under whose queen the Lord’s prophets were being killed (1 Kings 18:4), and they lost a fair public contest. Israel’s law set death for prophets who led the nation to other gods (Deuteronomy 13:5). When two disciples later wanted to call fire down in Elijah’s manner, Jesus “rebuked them” (Luke 9:55). That is the model for us: no sword for religion, ever.

The account opens by saying God’s anger “was kindled against Israel” (2 Samuel 24:1), so the people were not bystanders. David makes your objection himself: “as for these sheep, what have they done?” (1 Chronicles 21:17), and he asks that it fall on him. The text also shows God stopping it early: “It is enough, stay now thine hand” (21:15). The Bible does not hide the question. It does not give a full answer to it either.

The second part was fulfilled when Absalom, in rebellion, did it publicly (2 Samuel 16:22). God foretold and permitted it, in the language Scripture uses for what He allows, and David’s own sin had opened that door. The child is the harder case: “the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die” (12:14). David’s own response holds the only comfort the text gives: “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (12:23).

Keeping the money was not the issue. Peter says so: “Whiles it remained, was it not thine own?” (Acts 5:4). The sin was the lie: “thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.” It was a calculated deception, at the very start of the church, and it would have poisoned a community that depended on trust. The text says Ananias fell down; it does not say Peter called for his death.

An army that had come to destroy Jerusalem, and whose king had openly mocked the living God (2 Kings 19:22). A God Who never stopped an invading army would draw the opposite complaint. Skeptics ask why God does not stop such things. Here He did.

This was not a private act of rage over a romance. Israel had been drawn deliberately, by Balaam’s counsel (Numbers 31:16), into the sex rites of Baal-peor, and “bowed down to their gods” (25:2). A plague was already killing thousands, and the couple were flaunting it in sight of the mourners (25:6). As with other commands to Israel, it gives no warrant for violence today.

Psalm 137 is a song of exiles who had watched Babylon do these very things to them: “happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us” (137:8). It is not a command, and God does not say it. It is a raw human cry preserved honestly. The Bible lets its people pray their rage rather than act on it. The instruction for us is elsewhere: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19).

These are prophecies of what invading armies would do, and did: “I will stir up the Medes against them” (Isaiah 13:17). God is warning what follows when a nation refuses Him and His protection is lifted. It is not an instruction to anyone to do it, and it is not approval of those who did. Hosea has God say it plainly: “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help” (13:9). Still, He speaks of it as His judgment, and we should not deny that.

It is a vision of Jerusalem’s coming fall, and the words are stark. Notice two things the skeptic’s list leaves out. First, a mark is placed on “the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations” (9:4), and no one with it may be touched. Second, it starts with the leaders: “begin at my sanctuary” (9:6). The children in it remain the hard part. The same answers apply as in the case of Amalek.

Guilt does not transfer: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). Consequences do. Children really do grow up inside what their parents have built, and Exodus says so “of them that hate me” (20:5), who carry on the same path. Note the proportion too: three or four generations on one side, and mercy “unto thousands” on the other (20:6).

It does: “they shall be your bondmen for ever” (Leviticus 25:46). We will not soften it, and this is one of the hardest laws in Moses. But the same law code killed the kidnapper who sold a man (Exodus 21:16) and forbade returning a runaway (Deuteronomy 23:15). Jesus said of another law that Moses allowed it “because of the hardness of your hearts… but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Applying that here is our inference, but Eden had no slaves. See the fuller answer.

Read both verses. If the slave dies, “he shall be surely punished” (Exodus 21:20), and the Hebrew, as the KJV margin notes, is avenged. That was unusual: the Code of Hammurabi lists no such penalty for killing your own slave. If the slave lingers, the law treats it as a loss to the master and not a killing. Those words are hard, and we do not defend them as an ideal. The very next lines free a slave who loses so much as a tooth (21:27). This law restrained masters in a brutal world. It did not bless what they did.

That is what the law says in the case of a wife given to him during his service (Exodus 21:4). If he came in already married, “his wife shall go out with him” (21:3). This is a debt-service arrangement, limited to six years, and it is still hard to read. The likely logic is that the woman had her own unfinished term of service. The text does not state that, so we hold it loosely. It is a good case of a law that regulates a broken situation rather than showing God’s ideal.

The law covers a daughter given in a marriage-like arrangement, usually out of poverty, and every clause protects her. She may not be sold “unto a strange nation” (21:8). If he gives her to his son she is treated as a daughter (21:9). If he takes another wife, her “food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage” cannot be reduced (21:10), and if they are, she shall “go out free without money” (21:11). A father selling a daughter at all is grim, and the Bible does not present it as good. But the law is limiting the man, not licensing him.

It does tell them to obey, because Christians then had no power to end Roman slavery, and a slave revolt would have meant crucifixions. But look at what Paul says next, to masters: “do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening… neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9). He lists “menstealers” among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10) and asks that Onesimus be received “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philemon 1:16). That is teaching that eats away at slavery from within, though we admit it is not a direct ban.

It is a parable about accountability, not a rule for households. Its point is the last line: “unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (12:48). Jesus uses a familiar picture from His hearers’ world, as He uses a dishonest steward and an unjust judge, without approving of either. And what it teaches is that God judges according to what people actually knew, which is the opposite of cruelty.

The command is in the text, and it is hard: “keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:18). The reason given is that these women had drawn Israel into the rites of Peor on Balaam’s counsel (31:16). The line appears to fall at those old enough to have taken part. The text does not mention sexual use. What Israel’s law did allow a soldier was marriage on strict terms (see the next entry). The killing of the boys has no easy explanation, and we offer none.

The law on captive women is Deuteronomy 21. She is not to be touched for a full month while she may “bewail her father and her mother” (21:13). Then she becomes a wife, not a slave. If he tires of her, “thou shalt not sell her at all for money” (21:14). In the ancient world this was a sharp restriction on what soldiers did. It is still a hard law, since she had no say, and the text itself admits he “humbled her.” And distant cities were first offered peace (20:10). Judges 5:30 is the mother of an enemy general speaking, not God.

Compare the laws. Where a man “force” a betrothed woman, he dies (22:25). Verse 28 uses a different verb, “lay hold on,” and adds “they be found,” which some take as a seduction case like Exodus 22:16. That difference is real but not decisive, because the verb often means “seize,” and verse 29 says he “humbled her.” What protects her either way: Exodus has her father able to “utterly refuse” (22:17), and the man can never divorce her, in a world where an unmarried, non-virgin woman had almost no future. Do not claim this law is comfortable. Do not claim the Hebrew settles it.

The law is about telling apart adultery from assault, with no modern forensics. In the city, with neighbors in earshot, the text treats the lack of any cry as evidence of consent (22:24). In the field it gives her the full benefit of the doubt: she “cried, and there was none to save her” (22:27), even though no one heard. It says of her, “there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death”, and likens the man to a murderer (22:26). The law’s starting point is that a forced woman is innocent.

The penalty is severe, and it belongs to Israel’s covenant law (see the note). The same passage also protects her from slander: a husband who falsely accuses her is punished, fined a hundred shekels, and can never divorce her (22:18–19). And men were not exempt from the sexual laws. In adultery, “they shall both of them die” (22:22). When Jesus met such a case, He protected the woman (John 8:7).

This is the clearest case of record versus approval. God does not command it. The book closes on it with its own verdict: “every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The end of Judges shows how far a people fall without God. It is not an example, and the Bible never says it is.

Genesis 3 describes the world after the fall, not God’s design. The design comes first: “male and female created he them,” both in His image (1:27). “He shall rule over thee” (3:16) is a sentence on what sin did to the marriage, and every age of history has shown it to be true. The gospel moves back toward the start: “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Yes, that is the law, and it is a strange one. It appears to be the only mutilation Moses sets as a penalty, beyond the principle of eye for eye. Some think the concern was his ability to father children, since the law just before it (25:5–10) is about keeping a family line alive, but the text does not explain it. We can say that this was a law for ancient Israel. We cannot tell you exactly why it says what it says.

“Let the woman learn” (1 Timothy 2:11) was itself a step up in Paul’s day. Whatever verse 12 means in church life, and believers read it differently, it cannot mean God does not speak through women. Deborah “judged Israel” (Judges 4:4), Philip’s daughters “did prophesy” (Acts 21:9), and Priscilla, named first, helped teach Apollos (18:26). Women funded and followed Jesus (Luke 8:3), and women were the first witnesses of His resurrection.

Read to the end of the sentence that matters: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The standard for the husband is a man who dies for her. Any man who uses verse 22 as a weapon has skipped verse 25, and God sees it: “the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth” (Malachi 2:14).

God stopped it, and that is the point: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad” (Genesis 22:12). Of child sacrifice He later says, “which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart” (Jeremiah 7:31). Abraham expected to return with Isaac (22:5), “accounting that God was able to raise him up” (Hebrews 11:19). And the Father then did what He spared Abraham: He “spared not his own Son” (Romans 8:32). See the fuller answer.

God never asked for this vow, and His law forbids what it may have led to (Leviticus 18:21). Scholars disagree about what happened. Some, noting the KJV margin’s or at 11:31 and the words “she knew no man” (11:39), hold that she was dedicated to lifelong service. Others say the Hebrew means what it first appears to mean, that she died. Do not claim the Hebrew plainly settles it. Either way, the Bible records a rash vow in a dark period and never praises it. Hebrews honors Jephthah’s faith in battle (11:32), not this.

The word here means “devoted to destruction,” the same word used of judged enemies. It is about people already under a sentence, such as Canaanite cities or idolaters, who could not be bought out of it. The Bible does not present them as offerings, and it condemns human sacrifice repeatedly (Deuteronomy 12:31). This is a law about no ransom from a judgment, not a rite.

Both are in the text, and we should not flatten it. God foretells it at Exodus 4:21. Then Pharaoh acts: “he hardened his heart” (8:15, 32). Not until 9:12 does the narrative say “the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh” as something that has happened. Here was a king who ruled a nation that had drowned Hebrew children, and who refused repeated warnings. The same sun melts wax and hardens clay: more evidence pushes a refusing man further in his refusal. God gave him over to what he had chosen, and used it so “that my name may be declared throughout all the earth” (9:16).

The bones were burned to defile the altars of the rival cult, so they could never be used again. That was foretold three centuries earlier (1 Kings 13:2). The word “offer” there is grim irony: this was an execution and a defilement, not a rite to God. The priests served the high places where Israel had been led into idolatry, under a law that made that a capital crime (Deuteronomy 13). It belongs to Israel’s covenant law, and the church has been given no such sword (John 18:36).

They could freely eat of “every tree of the garden” but one, and they were told the cost beforehand (Genesis 2:16–17). A being who cannot say no cannot truly say yes, and that one tree was the smallest possible test of love. Saying God was withholding something good is exactly the serpent’s argument (3:5). The objection repeats the accusation. It does not discover anything new. See the fuller answer.

The text never says that, and James rules it out: “neither tempteth he any man” (James 1:13). The voice was “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9), who was “perfect” until iniquity was found in him (Ezekiel 28:15). God did not keep the question away from them. He warned them and let them choose. If He had kept them sealed off from any challenge, they could never have been free.

We do not inherit Adam’s guilt: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). We inherit his world, as children inherit a house their father lost. Death passed to all “for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And the math runs both ways: “by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men” (5:18). If one man can ruin the race, one Man can rescue it.

He made them “very good” (Genesis 1:31). “God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). To make a person who could love was to make a person who could refuse. A parent who has a child is not the author of that child’s crimes, and God warned us far better than any parent can.

“Cursed is the ground for thy sake” (Genesis 3:17): the text frames even this as serving humans, perhaps because an unbroken, idle life in a fallen race would be worse. It is also temporary. Creation was subjected “in hope” and “shall be delivered” (Romans 8:20–21). See After Eden for how the natural world came to be as it is.

It was not a game. It was a test of a real charge: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” (Job 1:9). Satan did the harm, within limits God set (1:12; 2:6). Yet the book does not let God off the hook by hiding behind him: “thou movedst me against him” (2:3), and “all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (42:11). God then commends Job’s anguished honesty over his friends’ tidy answers (42:7). See the fuller answer.

Look at the pairing: “I make peace, and create evil” (Isaiah 45:7). The opposite of peace is calamity, and the Hebrew ra’ covers calamity as well as moral evil. God brings judgment and disaster, and He says so. He is not the author of sin: “a God of truth and without iniquity” (Deuteronomy 32:4).

Think of a husband. One who feels nothing when his wife leaves for another man is not secure. He does not love her. Paul uses the very picture: “I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband” (2 Corinthians 11:2). God’s jealousy is the jealousy of a covenant love, not envy of anything we have.

The Hebrew word nacham includes being sorry and grieved, and Genesis says as much: “it grieved him at his heart” (6:6). This is grief at what people did, not an admission of error. The same chapter in Samuel that says He repented also says He “will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man” (1 Samuel 15:29). So He changes His response when people change, while His character does not.

Read 1 Kings 22 closely. God’s own prophet tells King Ahab the whole plan to his face: “the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets” (22:23). Ahab was told the truth and chose the lie anyway. Paul describes the same pattern: delusion comes to those who “received not the love of the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:10). It is a judgment of letting go, on people who had already refused the truth.

Not children. The charge is “he is a glutton, and a drunkard,” so this is a grown or nearly grown son. It requires both parents to agree and to bring the case to public elders (21:19), which took the power of life and death out of a father’s private hands. Scripture records no case of it being carried out. It belongs to Israel’s covenant law (see the note).

“He that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death” (Exodus 21:15). This was covenant law in a society where parents were the whole of old-age care, and where honoring them is in the Ten Commandments. It is severe, and it applied to Israel as a nation under God’s direct rule. The principle stands today. The penalty is not ours to carry out.

It comes right after a passage on sinning “presumptuously” (Numbers 15:30), with the KJV margin reading “with an high hand.” It is placed as an example of open defiance, not an honest slip, under a covenant the nation had just sworn. The penalty ended with Israel’s national government. The Sabbath stands as a gift, not as something any state should enforce. See the Sabbath Cheat Sheet.

The law addressed Israel’s nation, not Christians in Salem or Europe. People who burned witches took a law given to one covenant nation and took up a sword Jesus never gave His church: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Those trials are a stain on the people who ran them. The warning against spiritism still stands, because contact with spirits is not harmless. The penalty does not.

Leviticus 20:13 is in the Bible, within Israel’s national law, alongside the same penalty for adultery (20:10). No Christian has any warrant to harm anyone, and anyone who uses these verses for contempt or violence is sinning against God. Scripture does teach that God’s design for marriage is a man and a woman (Matthew 19:4–5) and that homosexual acts fall short of it (Romans 1:26–27). It sets them in a list with theft, greed and drunkenness, and adds: “such were some of you: but ye are washed” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Those who struggle here stand on the same ground as the rest of us, and they are as welcome. Jesus’ way is in one sentence: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:11).

These were laws for Israel, whose God was also its King, so idolatry there was treason. The law required careful inquiry first: “enquire, and make search, and ask diligently” (Deuteronomy 13:14). It never applied to other nations, and it does not apply to anyone today. Jesus refused to call fire down on a town that rejected Him (Luke 9:54–56). Forcing faith is what the persecuting powers of prophecy do, not what Christ does.

The law held the priestly family to a higher standard: “she profaneth her father” (Leviticus 21:9). Elsewhere burning follows execution (Joshua 7:25), and many read this one the same way, though the verse does not state it. It is a hard law for a covenant nation, and it was never given to the church. Jesus shows us how He treats such a woman (John 8:11).

These are not all the same kind of law. The clean-and-unclean distinction is older than Moses (Genesis 7:2), and we still treat it as sound health guidance (see The Health Message). The beard rule sits right beside a ban on cuttings “for the dead” (Leviticus 19:28), so it seems aimed at pagan mourning rites. Mixed fabrics and mixed seed appear to have taught Israel to be set apart, and their purpose has passed. The Exodus rule on milk gives no reason, and any reason we offer is a guess.

Leviticus 21 limits one job, offering at the altar, and the same man “shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy” (21:22). The sanctuary was a picture of perfection to come, not a ranking of human worth. Deuteronomy 23:1 is harder, yet Isaiah answers it: to eunuchs God promises “a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters” (56:5). Then the first African convert we meet in Acts is a eunuch, baptized on the road (Acts 8:38). And Jesus spent His days touching the very people this objection names.

“Goeth upon all four” is an everyday description of walking on the ground, like saying an animal is “on all fours,” and the text itself goes on to add the jumping legs (Leviticus 11:21). So it was never counting legs. In Matthew, Jesus is speaking of seed a man “sowed in his field” (13:31), using a common picture for a tiny beginning. Teachers speak the language of their hearers, and no one takes it as a botany claim.

The same chapter makes men unclean for a discharge too (Leviticus 15:16). Unclean here is a ritual category for handling bodily fluids near the sanctuary, not a moral judgment, and it is not a sin. When a woman with a long-running issue of blood touched Jesus, He did not recoil. He called her “Daughter” (Mark 5:34).

Matthew reports the same teaching in plain words: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (10:37). Hate here is a Semitic way of saying “love less.” You can see it in Genesis, where Jacob “loved also Rachel more than Leah” and the next verse says “Leah was hated” (29:30–31). Jesus also commanded people to honor their parents (Matthew 15:4).

He is describing what would happen, not what He wants. A man who follows Him will find some of his household against him, and many Christians have found exactly that. The same Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). The sword here is the cost of following Him, one that falls on His followers. He never told them to pick one up (26:52).

It was an acted parable. A tree in full leaf advertises fruit it does not have, and it happened right around the cleansing of the temple. Jesus had already told a parable about a barren fig tree given extra time (Luke 13:6–9). Nearly all His miracles heal. Here He cursed a tree rather than a person, to warn a nation before its fall.

He is quoting Isaiah, and Matthew gives the rest: “their eyes they have closed” (13:15). The closing came from them first. Those who asked Him what the parables meant were told (Mark 4:10–11). Parables give truth to those who want it and do not force it on those who have already refused. Anyone could step closer and ask.

John states the reason: “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world” (3:17). Condemnation is what happens when light comes and “men loved darkness rather than light” (3:19). It is a warning about refusing the only source of life, not a threat of torture. And those who never heard are not judged for what they never heard (Romans 2:14–16). God “winked at” times of ignorance (Acts 17:30).

He said no such thing. In answer to a question on marriage, He says some people give up marriage “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and adds that this is only for “he that is able to receive it” (Matthew 19:12). It is a figure of speech for a life of celibacy, and it is voluntary. If anything, it is a word of honor for those who were excluded.

Fair question. The moral law stands: not one tittle of it fails. The sacrificial system was “a shadow of good things to come” (Hebrews 10:1) and has met its substance. The penalties belonged to Israel as a nation under God’s rule, and Hebrews speaks of them in the past tense (10:28). Jesus said His kingdom is “not of this world” (John 18:36), so it has no courts or executioners. See the note on Israel’s law.

Both verses are about one event, seen from two sides. Satan did it, and God permitted it in judgment, and Scripture will describe what God allows as His own act. Job shows the same pattern: Satan strikes, and God says, “thou movedst me against him” (Job 2:3). This is exactly how a world under a controversy would be described.

Both can be true, since a hanged body can later fall, especially one left unattended during Passover and a Sabbath. The text does not say so, so this is a reasonable harmony and not a claim of the text. Acts, written by a careful historian, also says the field was bought with his money, as Matthew explains: the priests did it on his behalf (27:7).

Chronicles gives the plain statement: “Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath” (1 Chronicles 20:5). In 2 Samuel 21:19 the words “the brother of” are in italics in the KJV, because the Hebrew there lacks them, and most scholars see a copying error in that verse. Admit it openly. It is a small scribal slip in one copy, and the parallel account lets us correct it.

They do. Matthew gives Joseph’s line, and Luke says Jesus was “as was supposed” the son of Joseph (3:23). A common explanation is that Luke follows Mary’s family, while another is that one tree is legal and the other natural. We cannot prove either. What we can say is that both writers knew Jewish records, their readers could check them, and no one in antiquity who had those records appears to have treated it as fatal.

The differences are real, and they are what you would expect of independent witnesses. Mark says of the women as they fled, “neither said they any thing to any man” (16:8), while Luke reports they later told the eleven (24:9). Matthew mentions the angel who spoke, and Luke mentions two who stood by. A story made up in collusion would match better. On the central fact there is no disagreement, and Paul appeals to “above five hundred brethren at once” (1 Corinthians 15:6), most still alive to ask.

Genesis 1 is the sequence of the six days. Genesis 2 zooms in on one garden and one couple, and arranges its detail around them. Verse 19 in the KJV reads as if the animals came after Adam, while many read it as “had formed,” since the Hebrew allows that. A writer putting these side by side knew what he had just written, and he did not think he had contradicted himself.

1 Samuel gives the narrator’s account: “Saul took a sword, and fell upon it” (31:4). 2 Samuel 1 records a young man’s story, told to David, with Saul’s crown in hand for a reward. David later says that he had thought he was bringing good news (2 Samuel 4:10). Scripture accurately reports what someone said, including when he is lying.

Both, and it is not a slip. The “angel of the LORD” (Exodus 3:2) is the One Who says, “I am the God of thy father” (3:6). “Angel” means messenger, and this Messenger speaks as God because He is the Father’s own Son. Jesus later takes up the same claim: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Genesis 6:19 gives the general instruction: two of every sort, male and female. Genesis 7:2, given as the time drew near, adds the detail: clean animals “by sevens,” which would be needed for sacrifice afterward. Instructions getting more specific is not a contradiction.

This is a real historical puzzle. The known census under Quirinius came around AD 6, about a decade after Herod’s death, and Luke knows about that one too (Acts 5:37). Luke says this taxing was “first made” (2:2), which may mean an earlier registration, and some read the Greek as “before.” We do not have a settled answer. Our knowledge of the period has gaps, and Luke has proven reliable on many other details, so we hold the question open.

We agree: that would be monstrous, and the Bible does not teach it. The wicked are destroyed: “it shall leave them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 4:1). See Hell: What the Bible Really Teaches.

Scripture does not ask you to believe that. “To us there is but one God, the Father… and one Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The trinity came from later creeds. See The Godhead and How the Trinity Crept Into Christianity.

So does the Bible. “The dead know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5), and God “only hath immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16). Our hope is the resurrection, not a soul that cannot die. See the State of the Dead & Hell Cheat Sheet.

They happened, and they are a disgrace. Jesus had said, “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). The Bible does not defend those who did it. It predicted them: a power that would “wear out the saints” (Daniel 7:25), and a woman “drunken with the blood of the saints” (Revelation 17:6). See the Daniel 7 study.

We take Genesis as written: six days, about six thousand years ago, with death entering after sin (Romans 5:12). The evidence is more contested than the textbooks suggest. See Genesis vs Deep Time.

We do not run from this. We take the Bible’s description of the earth and the firmament as true, and we question the modern model rather than the text. See The Shape of the Earth.

Prayer is not a vending machine, and the Bible never says it is. Jesus Himself prayed “let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will” (Matthew 26:39), and the answer was no. Paul asked three times and was told, “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Daniel shows us a side we cannot see: his prayer was heard the first day, and the answer was opposed for “one and twenty days” (Daniel 10:13). A war is on. We do not know why every prayer goes as it does, and we keep praying.

Ask for the primary source of any parallel. Many popular claims fall apart once you check them, while Isaiah wrote centuries before Christ (7:14). Luke says he worked from eyewitnesses (1:2), Paul names living witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:6), and he stakes everything on it: “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain” (15:14). See A Letter to Our Atheist Friends.