The dark side of the Bible

[The Mikado]

Elisha and the she bears.

What's dark about that? Elisha just watched his master Elijah be called up into Heaven. A bunch of kids see him after he comes into town and start chanting "Go up, baldy," a clear threat of "go join Elijah in Heaven," which is effectively a death threat. He defends himself by summoning bears to maul them.

[The Mikado]

I always enjoyed the way the Bible is narrated: describing all these gross/scary/disturbing stuff in a truly deadpan tone. It's extremely climatic.

So many times Yahweh appears as simply the best-written villain of all times. To use a modern analogy, the entire Exodus is basically "the Chad Yahweh and the Virgin Pharaoh" meme personified.

And at the same time there is a lot of wisdom in the book I feel I can relate to. For example, I find Exodus 23:9 as particularly relevant today ("You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt").

I wonder how many people have read the book of "Wisdom"? (in the Catholic, but not the Protestant Bible).

Sirach? It's one of the nicer bits of Apocrypha (though Judith is the best of them).

Sirach does contain a really embarrassing foreward by Sirach's grandson saying "I translated this from Hebrew into Greek, and I know it's lost some of its meaning in translation, but that's true of every other book of the Law and the Prophets, so don't blame me" (paraphrasing), which would be a really embarrassing verse if it were in a book canonical to denominations that believed in Biblical literalism.