For your amusement, Today's Odd Bible Verse:
In Which Bad Children are Eaten by Bears
Yes, really!
10. 2 Kings 2:23-24
Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up the road, some youths came from the city and mocked him, and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.
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when I read the Bible, I get at least two or three times more problems and puzzles than illuminations
ReplyDeletepartly this is because the texts are really old, two or three thousand years old, and we don't have the background to understand them fully
taking the text you cited, my recollection is that:
first, the Hebrew word can apply to kids or to teenage hoons, and that the context suggests the latter
second, it's been suggested that the hoons were mocking Elisha for having cropped hair to indicate he was a prophet (a bit like insulting a monk for his tonsure)
Just like Belloc's Cautionary Tales... only better!
ReplyDeleteWilliam, Who Taunted A Prophet Of God And Was Mauled To Death By A Bear.
Killed 42, and that apparently was not even all of them. That must have been a huge gang of kids!
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean about that kind of odd verse, I'll have to start paying attention and jot them down when I come across them.
"Odd?" That passage is well loved by old-school Christians and god-haters alike.
ReplyDeleteI think a better passage would be the one in Judges where Ehud butchers the obese Prince Eglon.
These are the stories that God in his wisdom sprinkled through the text so that it could never be convincingly co-opted by the loving, caring, and sharing crowd.
ReplyDelete