The Canon Within a Canon: Editing Out the Bible’s Horror Stories
by Reinder Bruinsma | 21 May 2025 |
Sometimes I am confronted with Bible passages that make me very uneasy. Here are three examples:
Bald Elisha
Recently I was working on a sermon about an incident in the ministry of the prophet Elisha. My topic was the story of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4 whose only child had died of heat stroke. In preparing for the sermon, I did what all preachers learned to do in their homiletic classes: look at the wider context of a biblical passage.
The context led me to a strange story that had receded quite far into the recesses of my memory. It’s about a group of boys who mocked the prophet because of his baldness. The prophet “called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord,” and immediately two bears came out of the forest and “mauled forty-two of the boys” (2 Kings 2:23,24).
The story stuck with me for the rest of the day. Being a mostly bald man myself, I felt empathy with the (possibly still young) prophet who had just started on his prophetic ministry. But asking God to send two bears to hurt little boys does not exactly fit with my picture of either a prophet or a loving God.
Noah’s flood
Recently I arrived to preach at a small church, about halfway through Sabbath School. One of the participants—a recent convert, I later learned—was struggling with the idea of Noah’s flood. Was it true that this global catastrophe had not only taken the lives of all but eight adults, but had also drowned numerous children—even toddlers and babies? Why would God allow this to happen?
It had never really occurred to me that many little children must also have been included among “every living thing . . . people and animals . . . [who] were wiped out from the earth” (Genesis 7:23). I understood why this person wondered about God’s love when thinking through the details of the story of the flood.
Job’s family
While working on an article I decided to read once again the first chapter of the book of Job, about Satan’s conversation with God in which he casts suspicion on the motives for Job’s piety.
As if the role of Satan as Job’s accuser is not problematic enough, we learn that Job lost all his possessions, his own health, and also all his children—his seven sons and three daughters (Job 1:2; 1:18–19). But the story has a happy ending: in the last chapter of the Bible book that bears Job’s name we read that he is blessed with new wealth and is once again given a new set of seven sons and three daughters!
I found this extremely awkward. It seems to suggest that the death of the first batch of Job’s children was not so bad after all, because the ten young adults were simply replaced with the new bunch of offspring! Can the children whom you love ever be replaced when something terrible happens to them? Is that how God thinks about parental love?
Contradictions
It is not difficult to find contradictions in the Bible. Here are a few:
- The number of women in the resurrection narratives differs sharply. Luke mentions five women, Mark three, Matthew two, and John one, while in the version of the resurrection story that Paul was familiar with, women do not feature at all.
- John’s gospel tells us it was still dark when the women reached the tomb, while Mark tells us that the sun had already risen.
- One of Jesus’ most well-known public addresses is usually referred to as the “sermon on the mount,” following Matthew 5:1—though Luke has Jesus speaking “on a level place” (6:17).
- Who inspired King David to organize a census in order to measure his military power? Was it the Lord who told David “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah” (2 Samuel 24:1)? Or do we opt for the version of 1 Chronicles 21:1: “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel”?
- According to Matthew 27:5, Judas hanged himself. But Acts 1:18 gives quite a different—and considerably more gruesome—version of what happened to him:
“With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.”
I know there are ways to reconcile these contradictions. Some of the solutions sound credible, but I have to admit that others seem rather contrived.
Why we needn’t worry
However, I have gradually come to the conclusion that we need not worry whether the Philistine warrior Goliath was defeated by David as in 1 Samuel 17:4, or by Elhanan according to 2 Samuel 21:19. And we need not lose any sleep about whether or not the disciples carried a staff when they were sent on a mission. (According to Matthew 10:9,10, they were not supposed to take a staff with them, while in Mark 6:8,9 they are expressly told to equip themselves with a staff.)
Why should we not worry about such details? Because the Bible is both a divine and a human product. The human element is not only responsible for differences in style and vocabulary but also surfaces in the selection of what became part of the biblical narrative and in what depended at least to a certain extent on the memory of the authors.
Many years ago I found a phrase in a German book about the inspiration of the Bible that I have never forgotten. The author suggested that we should approach certain questions about the Bible with “ein fröliches unbekümmert sein”—literally “a cheerful, carefree attitude.” Some German terms are very difficult to translate, and to me the expression ein fröliches unbekümmert sein has a greater depth in German than in the English translation. It describes problems that have such a low priority that we can with gladness decide not to let them spoil the joy of our Bible reading.
After all, isn’t the fact that human authors were enlisted in the writing of the Bible God’s way of making his Word more accessible to us?
What of the horror stories?
But what of the three Bible passages that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay? They’re not as simple to resolve as contradictions about the number of women at Jesus’ tomb or whether David or Elhanan killed Goliath. These three passages cause me serious uneasiness.
For most of us it is downright revolting to read a passage such as Deuteronomy 7:1,2, in which God tells the Israelites that they must in their conquest of the “promised land” destroy the pagan nations “totally” and “show them no mercy.” Is that a God of love speaking, the God whom I profess to serve? Is he really a God who wants his people to show no mercy? What do we do with these gruesome divine punishments, either commanded or tolerated by God?
Should this be a reason to simply stop reading the Bible, or at least the Old Testament part of it? Some Bible readers have come to that conclusion. Or should we simply ignore certain stories and skip these parts of the Bible that seem to be based on moral norms that are no longer ours?
Canon within the canon
Even Christians who will tell you that all parts of the Bible are equally important, if they are honest, have to admit that they have a kind of personal canon within the canon of the Bible. For many, the gospels tend to be more meaningful than the Old Testament narratives about the warfare between Israel and its neighbors, and the Pauline letters seem to have greater significance than, for instance, the laws concerning ritual purity and the various genealogies.
This preference for certain parts of the Bible is a rather general phenomenon and has much to do with where we are at a given moment in our spiritual journey. Skipping some parts of the Bible is rather common. Many sincere Christians do it!
It is not just common, but in my view justified when we come to these biblical “horror stories.” These are the places in the Bible where the humanness of the Scriptures shines through more clearly than in other places. They date from a time when the God of Israel was often still shrouded in some of the ancient conceptions of deities that were very humanlike. Some of the Old Testament writings betray a way of seeing God that had not yet risen to the kind of religion that we now experience as we worship the One who in his love came to us in his Son Jesus Christ.
With all the questions that emerge as we are confronted with stories about bears that kill young boys and babies that drown in a cataclysmic flood, we should focus on the blessings we gain from reading the Scriptures, and on the certainties it offers us. God exists, and, yes, sin is also a reality. And God, through Christ, in his often- (for us) mysterious ways, dealt with the sin problem. He stood ready to save the world, and that includes me. And it includes you who read this.
Perhaps we should decide that we will no longer be upset by the violence and mass killings in the Old Testament stories but simply skip them and exercise “ein fröhliches unbekümmert sein.” We can rejoice in the good news of the Bible which confirms that our salvation is sure.
Reinder Bruinsma lives in the Netherlands with his wife, Aafje. He has served the Adventist Church in various assignments in publishing, education, and church administration on three continents. He still maintains a busy schedule of preaching, teaching, and writing. He writes at http://reinderbruinsma.com/.
His latest book is Adventists and Catholics: The History of a Turbulent Relationship.
