1. Sex and Death.
1. Sex and Death.
Somehow, it just seems natual for religions to dwell on this stuff. I don’t know why. So let’s get this off with a “bang”, shall we. Well, almost a bang. More of pounding, really…
21. Jael, Femme Fatale (Judges 4)
The Bible is full of war and violence and the book of Judges is chock full of them. We will come across Judges again before we come to the end of this list (the book showed up twice in Cracked’s original list- Judges 4 and 15, and I won’t repeat these). In Judges 4 the Israelites are busy smiting their enemies. One Israelite guy, Barak, is a bit of a whimp and the prophetess Deborah seems to take the lead in the fight. The enemy general, Sisera, flees and we read (vv. 18-21):
Now Sisera fled away on foot to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite. And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said to him, “Turn aside, my master, turn aside to me! Do not be afraid.” And he turned aside to her into the tent, and she covered him with a rug. And he said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty.” So she opened a bottle of milk and gave him a drink; then she covered him. And he said to her, “Stand in the doorway of the tent, and it shall be if anyone comes and inquires of you, and says, ‘Is there anyone here?’ that you shall say, ‘No.’” But Jael, Heber’s wife, took a tent peg and seized a hammer in her hand, and went secretly to him and drove the peg into his temple, and it went through into the ground; for he was sound asleep and exhausted. So he died.
A few intimations of intimacy and then, instead of him nailing her, she nails him. What makes the scene more pathetic is that in Judges 5:24, the prophetess Deborah praises Jael in a song and imagines Sisera’s mother waiting at the window for her son to come home, supposing that his delay is due to him finding a few captive Israelite women to play with. The story of Jael will be the inspiration for a later book, Judith, that is not in the Jewish Bible or Christian Old Testament, but is included in the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical collections that are part of Catholic, Orthodox and some Protestant Christian Bibles. Here is what a bible-for-kids site “Blessed Quietness” has to say:
So, boys– Get ready to defend the righteous without having to have someone hold your hand. Pound the enemy mercilessly… Learn to use a gun and your fists ONLY for self-defense … Do NOT learn Karate which is from Buddhism and is pagan. Learn to use the Bible to pound the sodomites and evil people with the Truth from God. Ask God to lead you to a girl, for a wife, who LIKES to keep a home. Don’t marry a girl who always talks about “my career.” Don’t marry a girl who has been to college, and never get near a girl who has been to seminary. That kind of girl will not take care of your home, she will run all over town playing the fool, and she will some day divorce you if you happen to lose your job. Watch for a girl who obeys her Daddy and likes to work with her Mom when it is time to get chores done.
Girls, practice being feminine … and ask Mom to help you to plan ways you can make your home more comfortable for your family and godly friends. Ask God to help you learn to submit to your Daddy so that your future husband will be strong for God because you let him be the head of your home. Please don’t even look at a boy who hangs around home all the time, especially the kitchen, and who won’t do hard work. He won’t defend you, and he won’t be any good to the Lord’s Church. He is a wimp!
Holy Jebus B. Gobley™, gender-construction persons! WTF????? Girls who go to seminary and get a Christian education are no good? They get this from a story that has a woman who is prophet?
20 Jezebel (2 Kings 9:30-37)
Jezebel was the foreign queen of the northern Israelite kingdom and all sorts of crap—like the mass murder of Yahweh’s prophets—is blamed on her. She is also portrayed as manipulating her Israelite royal hubby and that is probably just as bad. When her demise comes, it is as that hand of a hot-headed general named Jehu who rebels when some prophet’s flunky anoints him King (for anointing, see my jargon post). Now, Jehu’s rebellion will be discussed in Part II and places # 16 on our list, but this is how Jehu confronts the queen.
When Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it, and she painted her eyes and adorned her head, and looked out the window. And as Jehu entered the gate, she said, “Is it well, Zimri [another murderous revolutionary], your master’s murderer?” Then he lifted up his face to the window and said, “Who is on my side? Who?” And two or three officials looked down at him. And he said, “Throw her down.” So they threw her down, and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall and on the horses, and he trampled her under foot. When he came in, he ate and drank; and he said, “See now to this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter.” And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. Therefore they returned and told him. And he said, “This is the word of the LORD, which He spoke by His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘In the property of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as dung on the face of the field in the property of Jezreel, so they cannot say, “This is Jezebel.”‘”
A lot of commentators (Christian, Jewish, and otherwise), comment on Jezebel’s spite and courage in this episode, not to mention her concern for doing herself up. Is she vain or seeking a bit of a dignified end? Here commentators are divided. In any case, many believers are content to leave the Queen where she ended up, in the muck in the street, and the belly of dogs.
She became the epitome of the “foreign” woman, wrong blood, wrong religion, sexually liberated, a “whore” (although the Bible never has her commit adultery), greedy and violent. In the Christian book of Revelation (2:20), a warning is issued to a church about tolerating “the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray, so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.”
The “exorcist” Bob Larson thinks he can defeat the Spirit of Jezebel. See him in action here Here is another book by another guy on defeating that same spirit.
19. Ezekiel’s Whelps of Wanton Women (Ezekiel 23:46-4 
This chapter was cited in Cracked’s original list of Badass Bible Verses (#7), but they are looking at a different part of the chapter (vv. 19-20) and for different reasons. Like Ezekiel 16, chapter 23 features a long metaphorical discussion on the religious fidelity of two cities, both imagined as human sisters. In the latter chapter they are given the names Oholah (Samaria) and Oholibah (Jerusalem). The language is very explicit with the two “playing the whore” and there is more than one reference to young, virgin breasts being squeezed. Cracked cited references to the girl’s lusting after peckers the size of horses’. You can get the T Shirt from Landsdown Baptist / Cafe Press.
Oholah comes to a terrible end because of her licentious ways. Oholibah does not learn from the example made of her sister, and she is threatened with total degradation at the hands of her lovers, Jerusalem’s enemies. The long chapter shifts from metaphorical to literal descriptions of the cities and back again. Yet, right at the end, the passage turns not to speak of cities as women or even women as cities but of real flesh and blood women. And their fate is not pretty. Neither is that of their kids:
Ezekiel 23:46-48 “For thus says the Lord God, ‘Bring up a company against them, and give them over to terror and plunder. ‘And the company will stone them with stones and cut them down with their swords; they will slay their sons and their daughters and burn their houses with fire. ‘Thus I shall make lewdness cease from the land, that all women may be admonished and not commit lewdness as you have done.
So, what is to be learned from this? How about this:
The great lesson of Ezekiel 23 is that we must learn from the mistakes of others. The Israelites in Judah and Jerusalem should have learned from the errors of their brethren in Samaria. Sin and idolatry brought the wrath of God upon Samaria to its extinction as a nation. Why didn’t the people of Jerusalem reason that if they did the same things, that they would receive the same punishment? Failure to do so cost them their city, their temple, their lives and their souls.
The Bible abounds in examples of ungodly people being punished — even those who were once faithful to Him. Let’s take warning from these passages and not become infatuated with the sin of this world. Instead, let’s serve the God of Heaven with diligence.
Yeah, but what about the fucking kids? That question, by the way, brings us to the theme of Part 2.
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