Illuminating Humor of the Bible

Steven Walker

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781620321485
  9781498215237
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621897125
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

Humor smiles and chuckles and sometimes laughs so loud in virtually every book of the Bible, so it's remarkable how readers manage to overlook it. It's also unfortunate. Humor graces biblical texts at so many levels that to miss the humor is to miss not only much of the emotional impact of the Bible, but much of its meaning. Illuminating Humor of the Bible shows how--and how much--comic elements contribute to understanding the most vital book in our culture. Biblical humor has been seriously underestimated. We have not begun to appreciate why humor winks with such unexpected frequency and understated significance from this revered text. It's time to shine a spotlight on scriptural wit to illuminate the ways humor refracts biblical meaning. Unveiled by the frank perspective of humor, Bible texts reveal implications that will surprise the most informed readers. The reader-response lamp of humor lights up dark corners of biblical significance inaccessible until now. Awareness of the irony and wit and satire and slapstick enables not just better readings, but better ways to read. Go where no Bible reader has gone before. Try eight fresh and relevant methods of reading the Bible better through the lens of its humor.

1

“A Time to Laugh”

Humor “More Abundantly”

A reasonably sane person comes to a consideration of humor in the Bible as to claims of Elvis appearances or reports of UFO sightings or rumors of unicorns glimpsed at the mall. It’s not that you’re the world’s most enthusiastic fan of Bible humor, just curious to see whether there might actually be any. Despite insistent indications to the contrary, there really is humor in the Bible. We’ll find some.

And we might find something even better. Scripture possesses power to shift our dispositions, holds even more than most literature the latent potential to change our minds, the potent literary capacity to alter our perspectives. At its best—and our best—its deep dreams and its revolutionary visions and its provocative questions can ferment in us yeastily enough to stretch our souls. Discovering humor in the Bible could change not just the way we see Scripture but the way we see. We may actually manage, by means of the happy expedient of appreciating Bible humor, to make ourselves capable of reading better. By the light of God’s good word, we might read better everything we read, maybe even our own murky psyches. By reading its humor we’re certain to read the Bible better, beyond reverently to relevantly.

The headlights of this venture into biblical humor will seem less theologically directed than typical Bible study, but the focus should actually explore biblical values more deeply. The undergirding doctrinal principle proceeds from the Will Rogers premise that God must have a sense of humor, since he made us. Humor may be the Bible’s most direct access into human experience. “Whatever else you care to say” about these Bible characters, they strike a lot of us as “quintessentially human.” “They are three-dimensional beings with a substance to them,” not so much saints as “fellow pilgrims. Like me, they are flawed. They trudge along, step by step, just like most of us mortals. What they share in common is a sense that the call of God is the call to be human, to embrace our humanity in all of its ambiguity.”1

D. H. Lawrence thought the novel “the one bright book of life.”2 Many of us think the Bible is—think it deserves to be read as life-affectingly as Lawrence read the novel. So the specific approach of this book will be
enthusiastically literary. That does more than make the Bible easier to read, more accessible and invitational. Reading the Bible as literature makes the most of the best recent scholarship and at the same time taps into the reader-response methods of traditional midrashic close reading. It’s a
rewarding way to read. After almost half a century of teaching the Bible as literature, I know enough serious Bible readers well enough to know you are likely a first-rate reader of Scripture already. But I guarantee that insofar as we’re missing the literature in it, and particularly the humor in it, we could read the Bible better. In the course of this volume, we will.

Bible Bloopers

Our cultural reluctance about biblical humor isn’t helped much by the unfortunate fact that most of the funny things we have noticed in the Bible aren’t really there. The drought of our awareness of any kind of mirth in Scripture is so severe it makes us read in mirages of humor, punfully. “Who was the most constipated man in the Bible? Cain—he wasn’t Abel.” “Who was the best financier? Pharaoh’s daughter, when she went down to the bank of the Nile and drew out a little prophet.” “Who was the greatest biblical comedian? Samson: he brought the house down.” Yuk yuk. Maybe even yuck.

Part of the reason we resist the notion of humor in the Bible is that this sort of shameless punning is not just not funny, it’s not in the Bible. Not even close. We are understandably reluctant to contribute to a chorus of laughter celebrating that kind of gross misunderstanding, especially when it points an accusing finger at our own obtuseness. We naturally resist chortling at concepts beyond our ken, wisely avoid the obtuseness of rednecks mocking British accents, or opera fans dissing rap music. That kind of uninformed laughter at biblical matters can be as demeaning to the scoffer as it is to the Bible. “For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool.”3

We’re nervous about biblical humor even when it’s obviously there. We worry that the most arrogant Bible characters slipping most clumsily on the slickest banana peelings on the very steps of the temple right before our eyes might be funnier for us than for the Bible. Because our amusement is so often “based on the perception of an incongruity between something dignified and something mean,”4 we worry we might be laughing at the Bible rather than with it. We’re susceptible to that kind of uncertainty even in genuinely comic moments. Lack of appreciation of biblical humor makes us hesitant to smile at unmistakably amusing scenes—like Adam and Eve’s embarrassment, blown so far out of proportion to their perfectly natural nakedness that the juvenile couple, blushing incandescently, tries to hide, fetchingly ineffectually, behind too-scanty leaves in Eden.5

Our kneejerk habit of looking away from biblical humor makes us miss moments as inherently funny as Noah planting vines first thing off the boat so he can grow grapes so he can get soused as soon as possible.6 Or Abraham bidding down the Lord for the sake of those oversexed Sodomites: “Will you take fifty? Will you take forty?”7 Or Jacob conning his twin out of the birthright through the burlesque travesty of irresistibly delectable boiled beans8 (perhaps the only such beans in the history of legumes) and a silly goat disguise.9 Or Leah slyly passing herself off as her prettier sister in the dark of the honeymoon bed of Jacob, the patriarch apparently too drunk to tell the difference.10 Or Rachel claiming menstrual distress, refusing to rise so her father can’t find the filched household icons she sits on in disrespect not only of her father but of the gods.11 Or Moses dredging up every excuse in the book to try to squirm out of God’s majestic call out of the burning bush.12 Or Aaron’s interesting explanation of how the golden calf just happened to form itself from those golden earrings that just happened to be melting over his campfire—“I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”13 Or the Hebrew midwives rescuing death-sentenced newborn babies by means of the zany excuse that their mothers deliver too Quickdraw-McGraw “lively.”14 Or solemn prophet Balaam lectured by his upstart politically incorrect ass.15 Or Samson in juvenile delinquent mode...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: “A Time to Laugh”
• Chapter 2: Jonah as Joke
• Chapter 3: “Turned to the Contrary”
• Chapter 4: Eve’s Initiative, Sarah’s Sassiness, and Jael’s Nail
• Chapter 5: “Peter Stood at the Door Knocking”
• Chapter 6: “A Ruddy Countenance”
• Chapter 7: “And Who Is My Neighbor?”
• Chapter 8: “Man Thinks, God Laughs”
• Bibliography