Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
People swear on Bibles, inscribe babies’ names on their flyleaves, hurl verses at each other, use them to justify warfare, condemnation, and weird ideas about pork. But rarely does anybody point out how just plain funny the Good Book is.
David Peters, McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University, was beginning his annual ritual of reading the Bible cover to cover when he decided to try a new theme: He’d highlight all the funny bits.
By the time he was finished, he’d turned more than 1,000 passages fluorescent. Surely somebody had written a book about all this mirth? He went looking, found one dry-as-dust Ph.D. dissertation, and that was it.
So he wrote The Many Faces of Biblical Humor.
How did you organize the book—a chapter on shtick, a chapter on irony and innuendo, a chapter on wordplay? Almost! But then I decided to make it a Biblical commentary and go straight through, in order. The Genesis section is called “Dysfunctional Families.”
How is the humor in the Bible different from today’s humor? It’s more subtle. And more macabre. Deborah, for example, was a tribal chieftain, a judge—she had a palm tree where people would come to settle disputes—and a general. When she defeated the Assyrian general Sisera in a big battle, he turned and ran, hiding in the tent of a double agent. The agent’s wife urged Sisera to drink some nice warm milk, and when he fell asleep, she drove a tent peg through his head.
That’s not funny. Not yet. But after the battle, Deborah sings this song about Sisera’s mother home saying, “Why is he late? He’s probably captured a lot of women and has a beautiful red scarf around his neck.” Well, he’d been captured by a woman, and the scarf was blood.
How has all this alleged humor escaped us? My sense is of the Bible as a text that’s often grim, occasionally lyrical, always soberly earnest… It depends on your tradition. I come from a Baptist background, where preaching is almost theatrical, and a lot of our preachers understood the humor. When I tell friends I grew up with about my book, they say, “Oh, do you have the passage where…?”
You say there are more than 300 puns in Isaiah alone. Why so many? Because Hebrew has no vowels. You have to guess, and a word can mean different things depending on which vowels you guess—so there’s even more room for puns.
How loosely did you translate? I paraphrased to bring out the humor, but I studied the different translations first. The Good News Bible is good at the humor; if you see an exclamation point, it’s probably a funny passage. The Complete Jewish Bible brings out all the Hebrew humor in the New Testament. King James is a little stuffy; it’s probably the least funny. But it’s
still there.
Having seen how slippery the language can be, how faithful do you think modern Bibles are to what was first written? Oh, I have a lot of confidence in the Scripture. Remember in the ’40s, when they dug up the Dead Sea Scrolls? There’s a complete Isaiah text, verbatim, and pieces of every book in the Old Testament except Esther. Copyists were so careful—they would count out letters and make sure they had the same number as the original.
What role do you think humor plays in life? It takes down our defenses, so it helps us see things we wouldn’t otherwise see. Jesus says, “How can you possibly tell your brother, ‘Hey, I think I see a little speck in your eye,’ when you have a log sticking out of your own eye?” It’s so preposterous, it hits you: I’m a hypocrite! Humor helps us not take ourselves too seriously. And when things get tense interpersonally, you throw in a little humor and it shows the other person, “OK, things aren’t as bad as I thought.” Even in Shakespeare’s tragedies, there’s humor. Otherwise I think we would just drown in the seriousness of everything.
Your favorite funny story is the one about Balaam and the talking donkey—who reminds me of Donkey in Shrek. why are talking donkeys inherently funny? Because donkeys are supposed to be so stupid. With a talking donkey, the joke’s on us: The donkey’s telling us what to do. In terms of farcical humor, that’s the best story in the Old Testament. Balaam is so mad, he doesn’t even realize it’s absurd that the donkey’s talking, and when it finally hits him, he faints.
You say Luke’s the funniest writer—why? He’s the only Gentile writer in the Bible, the only goyim, so maybe it’s just that he’s got a more Western humor, and I appreciate him more. Also, he wrote both Luke and Acts, so he’s got more material. He’s got this line, when they arrested Paul for preaching against idols, about how the sales of Artemis statues were going down in Ephesus. And then the mob’s chasing Paul, and Luke points out that nobody even knows why they’re chasing him.
Isn’t Peter supposed to be one of the more comical characters in the New Testament? Upon seeing Jesus transfigured along with Moses and Elijah, Peter essentially said, “Hey, let’s make this a tourist attraction!” And when Jesus said it was hard for a rich person to be saved, Peter said, “Then we should get in easy.”
What about God, who’s pretty much the main character in both Testaments—is God ever funny? Well, in response to criticism, he says, “Woe to the man who argues with his Creator. Does the pottery argue with the potter, saying, ‘Just a second, you’re making me wrong’?”
Prophets are funny, too: There’s Elijah’s famous answer when Baal failed to respond. Essentially, he says, “Maybe you’re not shouting loudly enough; Baal might have a hearing problem. Or maybe he’s in the middle of an important conversation and hasn’t noticed your calls. Wait, I know: He’s going to the bathroom and can’t get up right now.”
You even found a droll story about exorcism. Oh yeah. Paul was casting out demons in the name of Jesus—people’s mental illnesses or evil spirits would come out—and the seven other exorcists saw how much success he was having, so they tried the formula: “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, we command you to come out of this man.” And the demon says, “I’ve heard of Jesus, and I’ve heard of Paul, but who are you guys?”
Then what happened? The demoniac jumped all seven of them and whipped the tar out of them until they ran out of the house naked and wounded. It’s from Acts 19:15–16.
Paul, you point out, was a pro at laying down guilt. In 1 Corinthians, he says, “I want you to collect an offering.” In 2 Corinthians, he says, “You guys haven’t collected the offering yet. Now, I don’t want to be embarrassed here: I’ve told all the churches how good you are, and what big offerings you collect!” But the best is the story of Philemon, a rich guy whose slave escaped. Paul later won Philemon to Christ—and then the slave happened to run into Paul in another town, and Paul converted him, too. The slave confides that he’s a runaway, and Paul says, “I know Philemon, let me talk to him.” Then he writes to Philemon asking him to forgive his slave; he says, “Now, I don’t want to tell you what to do…but you do owe your very soul to me.”
On your website, manyfacesofbiblicalhumor.com, you pulled out the 14 best one-liners in the Bible—what’s your favorite? Well, there’s King Achish when his men brought him David, who was feigning madness: “Why did you bring this lunatic to me? Does it look like I have a shortage of lunatics in my own entourage?” That’s from 1 Samuel 21:15.
What about Jesus—was he capable of irony? Oh yeah. To the Pharisees who kept man’s rules but not God’s commandments, he said, “You blind guides! You strain the gnats out of your soup”—gnats are not kosher and should not be eaten—“and then you swallow a whole camel!”
Did you have to figure out Biblical culture before you could grasp some of the humor? Yep. And in the New Testament, it’s a different culture—Greek culture had permeated, but the orthodox Jewish culture was still embedded, and those two clashed as Christianity began to spread outside the Jewish community.
Er… give us an example. OK: People were saying you had to become Jewish before you could be baptized. That meant you had to be circumcised. Paul says, “I wish that those people who are commanding you to be circumcised would be cut off completely.” Which is a triple pun, because in the Old Testament, if you were not circumcised, you were cut off from your people.
There are also a lot of wry comparisons. Yes: “Israel is like a broken pot or a lonely, wild ass. No matter how many laws I give her, she thinks they are for someone else.” That’s Hosea 8:8–12.
And there’s a proverb about being too cheerful? “If you rise up very early in the morning and wake your friend with a wonderful blessing, your friend will count it worse than receiving a curse.” Proverbs 27:14.
Have you gotten any flak from pious readers, any accusations of irreverence? No! And I thought I would! I was expecting my website to be bombarded with “How dare you?” Instead I’ve gotten emails from people all over the country who are grateful, because it made the characters come alive.
Interview by Jeannette Cooperman
