While we’re sure Paul was right when he told Timothy that all Scripture is inspired and useful (2 Timothy 3:16), these verses may seem odd, crass or just plain weird, especially when taken out of their context and viewed in isolation. Perhaps you can go find these texts and find out why they’re included.
1. Exodus 23:19
Bring the best of the first fruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
2. Isaiah 36:12
But the commander replied, “Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”
3. Galatians 5:12
As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!
4. Leviticus 26:29
You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.
5. Judges 3:21,22
Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.
6. 2 Kings 2:23,24
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.
7. Deuteronomy 23:1
No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.
8. Exodus 4:24–26
At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the Lord let him alone.
9. Ezekiel 23:19,20 (KJV)
Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
10. Deuteronomy 25:11,12
If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.
