Ten Impossible Biblical Events

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated – so here’s mine, plus four more, that reside in the land of the Biblically ridiculous.

One hardly knows where to start there are just so many Biblical absurdities to pick and choose from, so I expanded the White Queen’s six impossibilities to a Biblical ten. That aside, here are my ten of the best of Biblical impossibilities, a quintet each from the Old and the New Testaments.

Now imagine if your next door neighbour, work colleague, fiend, relative, spouse or partner told you that he (or she) had…

1) Been swallowed by a large shark and lived to tell the tale. You’d have to conclude that there are fisherman’s tall tales, and then there are the real whoppers! This would be a Whopper squared! (Jonah and the Whale)

2) Haircuts which made them go as weak at the knees as a newborn infant. You might conclude that they had some sort of physiological condition that made them prone to fainting spells, but that haircuts had no logical connection at all to those spells. At least that’s what I would conclude. (Samson’s Haircut)

3) Practiced their trumpet at home, endured near neighbours wanting to stone them to death due to the noise, but to add insult to injury, their house came tumbling down around them. If they played a trumpet and as a result their house did indeed come a tumbling down around them you’d have to conclude that the architects and builders were slipshod indeed, in fact downright fraudulent. You certainly wouldn’t make any connection between a well built brick home collapsing and playing the trumpet. (Joshua and the Battle of Jericho)

4) Followed their MD’s advice to the letter; getting the right amount of sleep and exercise and eating all the right and proper foods in the right and proper amounts; having an ideal body weight while refraining from smoking or drinking alcohol or caffeine. Their MD now promised them they will live to be as old as Methuselah at over 900 years! What do you think of that?  I’d suspect that you’d think that the MD in question was deluded, practicing snake-oil medicine, probably a downright fraud and that your neighbour had Buckley’s of hitting 90-plus far less 900-plus. (Biblical Longevity)

5) Commanded the Sun and Moon to stand still (or stop the Earth’s rotation – same difference), and it was so, a kind of do-it-yourself daylight savings. The obvious question, how come you didn’t notice or benefit by this one-off daylight savings event? (Joshua at Gideon)

6) Been born to a virgin. The date in question clearly has to be the first of April – right?

(Virgin Birth of Jesus)

7) Existed in the wilderness for 40 days and nights without food. I’ve heard of fad diets, but this is bordering on the ridiculous! I suspect that if you could survive 40 days without food that you must have been pretty flabby at the start; lots of fat reserves from which to draw off of for your energy requirements. (Jesus in the Wilderness Tempted by Satan - though I don’t recall ever seeing illustrations of Jesus being obese or even flabby)

8) Walked on water since they didn’t want to get their “itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow poke-a-dot bikini”, wet. Since the average human isn’t so sweet as to have to worry about dissolving if emersed in water, what’s the problem in getting wet, especially if your friendly neighbour has a backyard swimming pool? (Jesus Walking on the Waters)

9) A supply of bread rolls and fish fingers that, at their snap-of-the-fingers command, resulted in a near infinite supply all without ever going to the supermarket to restock. Now if that got around, you’d think the supermarkets would press charges against your friend for practicing witchcraft! (Loaves and Fishes Multiplied by Jesus)

10) Kicked-the-bucket but had been resurrected. Might I kindly suggest that you’d suspect your neighbour of inhaling the good stuff or putting some magic mushrooms into their stew! (The Resurrection of Jesus)

Now what would you really think of you neighbour’s sanity if he or she uttered such statements? I imagine that you might be inclined to call all those nice young men in their clean white coats and have your neighbour carted away to the funny farm! If you wouldn’t tend to believe your friends and neighbours, even family about such extraordinary claims, why would you put faith in an ad hoc cobbled together text (the Bible) written millennia ago by people you’ve never met and who have never been subjected to a polygraph test?

Seriously, if someone you knew made any one of those claims and therefore as a result you questioned their mental bona-fides, why not question the sanity of those Biblical scribes that made those above ten claims, and many more besides? And if you do that, a logical extension would be the assumption that nearly all parts of Bible lore are indeed suss, and if some parts are highly suspect, then odds are all Biblical texts are equally whacko.