The Most Disturbing Parts Of The Bible Ranked

The Bible is full of beloved stories. Passages from it are often read at weddings, stories from it are often told to children, and its themes have inspired countless modern books and movies, from "The Chronicles of Narnia" to "The Matrix." According to Mark A. Noll, writing for Houston Christian University: "The Bible has been a permanent fixture in American culture since the beginning of the European settlement of North America."

However, from animal attacks to cannibalism, many parts of the Bible would be totally inappropriate to bring up at a wedding, let alone tell to children. The following parts of the Bible seem better suited to a horror movie than a bedtime story. Some aren't particularly well-known, and others may be more familiar, but when examined more closely, they are all definitely perturbing. These are the most disturbing parts of the Bible, ranked from bad to worst.

The following article includes references to violence, incest, and sexual assault.

In Ezekiel, the eponymous prophet has a vision of a valley filled with dry bones. On the instructions of God, Ezekiel tells the bones to come to life. He hears a strange rattling. The bones are coming back together, building themselves into skeletons. Tendons, flesh, and skin grow on the skeletons, but they are still dead. Again, on the orders of God, Ezekiel restores the bodies to life, creating a vast army. God tells Ezekiel to tell his people, "I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel."

While skeletons growing flesh might seem like a scene from "Hellraiser," Ezekiel's vision is meant to uplift readers. Ezekiel's vision occurs as he and his people are exiled after the temple's destruction. According to Scriptura: "[God] put on such an unbelievably dramatic display purposefully 'to combat the despair which had settled upon the [agonizing] exiles.'"

Some interpret this story as a promise of an afterlife, but it can also be read as a call to keep faith despite being persecuted. This made the story popular with Black ministers at the end of the 19th century, and inspired the classic spiritual song "Dem Bones."

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus discovers two demon-possessed men who are preventing anyone from traveling through the area. When they see Jesus, their demons recognize him and make a request: If he has to force them to leave the bodies of the two people they're possessing, can he at least send them into a herd of pigs that are grazing nearby? Intriguingly, Jesus grants this request, and forces the demons out of the two men and into the herd of pigs – only to force the entire herd of pigs to run away from their swineherds and off a cliff, to drown in the lake below.

Why Jesus would choose to seemingly grant the request of the demons, only to kill an entire herd of pigs, is often debated. Some scholars throughout history have argued that because Christ causes the death of animals for no apparent reason, there is no reason for people not to do the same and treat animals of all kinds as cruelly as they want. Augustine of Hippo used the fact that the pigs were innocent as evidence that, in the eyes of God, it was fine to harm innocent animals.

The Bible is full of violent deaths, but the fates of two enemies of Christ -– King Herod and Judas Iscariot -– are particularly grisly. According to Journal of Infection: "[King Herod] is famed in Roman history as a great builder and a diplomat, whilst in the Bible he is portrayed as the deceiver of the Magi and a genocidal maniac." This assessment of his depiction in the Bible is mostly due to the story in which Herod had all infants executed, in the hopes that he would also kill the baby Jesus. In Acts, an angel smites King Herod in a particularly gruesome way: he is devoured by worms.

Judas Iscariot — the guy who betrayed Jesus and gave his name to a common term for traitor — perished in no less than three different ways, depending on which Christian text is read (Matthew 27:5, Acts 1:18, and fragments of Papias). The version in Acts is the most brutal -– he falls, his body literally explodes, and his guts go flying everywhere.

The Tower of Babel is a just-so story, explaining why people speak different languages. In Genesis, everyone speaks the same language, and because they can communicate, they are able to cooperate. The people of the world come together to build a massive city, with a tower so tall it reaches the heavens. When God sees the tower, he is disturbed by how much humans can accomplish by working together. God decides to scatter humans across the Earth, and "confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech," so that people would never be able to work together again.

The most common interpretation of the story is that God is punishing humankind for its pride. However, some people choose not to read the story as being about the origin of languages or God trying to prevent collaboration. Instead, they explain God's behavior in this part of Genesis as being a criticism of empire-building imperialism. As the Journal of Biblical Literature notes: "The emphasis on one language at the beginning of the story represents the imperial suppression of local languages and cultures, and God's punishment brings down the empire ... setting free the local languages and cultures to flourish."

As described in the Old Testament, The Ark of the Covenant is a golden chest containing sacred stone tablets, upon which are inscribed the ten commandments that God gave to Moses. In Samuel, as the Ark is being transported, the holy object causes seemingly indiscriminate devastation everywhere it goes. In one instance, the Ark of the Covenant is seen by 70 people as it is moved through a city, and God kills them all.

While this apparently random violence is shocking, the most controversial death occurs later on. The Ark of the Covenant is being transported on an ox cart, one of the oxen stumbles, and the Ark almost falls out. When a man named Uzzah catches it to keep it from hitting the road, God immediately kills him. 

As noted in Water C. Kaiser's "Hard Sayings of the Old Testament," the fact that God killed someone for preventing a sacred object from breaking strikes most readers as wildly unfair, even after the 70 deaths earlier in the Ark's journey. There is no evidence that Uzzah was doing anything other than help protect an object important to God. According to Kaiser, however, God had previously warned that anyone who touched a holy object would die, and even though Uzzah was trying to do the right thing, there can be no exceptions when it comes to God's threats.

With the amount of warfare featured in the Bible, it's unsurprising that at some points God appears to endorse violence. Some passages are more explicit than others, but one in Deuteronomy is among the most disturbing, which states that if anyone encourages worshiping a different god, they should be immediately put to death. It specifically states that there can be no exceptions, even if the person who is trying to convince you to practice another religion is your friend, brother, wife, or child – they should be killed.

This advice is seemingly put into practice in Numbers, where God commands Moses to destroy an entire kingdom that does not follow their faith. Moses sends an army of 12,000 men, who initially kill all of the men in the kingdom and capture the women and children, but this enrages Moses. He commands them to kill all of the prisoners, leaving alive and enslaving only virgin women and girls.

In Leviticus 12, if a woman gives birth to a son, God tells Moses: "[She] will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period." It also states that purification will take 33 days, but if the baby is a girl, that takes twice as long. Furthermore, the new mother must also bring sacrificial animals to her priest, to be offered up as burnt offerings and to atone for her sins. Deuteronomy is even harsher, stating that if a woman is a virgin, and a man sexually assaults her, he must pay her father a fine. Then the woman and her rapist must get married, and they can never get divorced.

Some have attempted to read these rules in a way that is less harsh towards women, such as the interpretation shared by Women in the Scriptures, which explains: "... when she was pregnant she was filled with potential life and the spiritual power of creation. When her child is born that spiritual power departs and she becomes tuma [unclean]. In addition by bringing a new child into the world she has also brought more death, because each child who lives must also one day die."

Others have pointed out that although these rules are in the Old Testament, Jesus is not depicted as following them in the New Testament. Indeed, Jesus repeatedly ignored or dismissed those restrictions, in favor of helping women.

There are many more risks to children in the Bible than being sacrificed. In Kings, the prophet Elisha is walking on a road when a group of little children starts mocking him for being bald. Elisha then curses them, and immediately two bears run out of the woods and maul 42 of the children to death.

The most common interpretation of this story is that everyone should respect authority, because God won't tolerate anyone, even small children, making fun of his representatives. However, some modern Christians argue that "little children" was actually a mistranslation, and it is actually supposed to be 42 male servants who were killed by bears. They also argue that the reason that they were killed wasn't as seemingly petty as it appears, and that rather than Elisha being offended by taunts about hair loss, the bears were called to kill the group because they worshipped different gods.

Famously, in chapters 7-12 of the Book of Exodus, God sends a series of 10 plagues to force the Egyptian pharaoh to release the Hebrews he had enslaved. First, the Nile River turns into blood. Then, all of Egypt is covered in frogs, which hop into people's beds and get into the cooking, and swarms of bugs which cover everything and eat all the crops, causing famine. Next, a gruesome skin disease causes the people and animals of Egypt to break out in boils. Terrible storms kill anyone caught in them, and the sun vanishes for three days, throwing the entire kingdom into darkness. Finally, the oldest boy in every family is killed by God in one terrible night.

These plagues are certainly disturbing enough on their own, but even more distressing is the fact that God seems to have wanted these catastrophic events to happen. Although the plagues seem to be a punishment for the Pharaoh refusing to free the enslaved Hebrews, it seems that God is the one who made him refuse. As Exodus tell us, before Moses asks for his people to be freed, God tells him: "I will harden [the Pharaoh's] heart so that he will not let the people go."

The story of Lot and his daughters in Genesis has a similar premise to the story of the Levite and the concubine, but ends very differently. Two angels come to Sodom, planning to spend the night in the town square, but Lot urges them not to. Instead, the two angels stay with Lot's family. That night, every single man in Sodom surrounds the house and demands that Lot send the two angels out.

Lot makes the mob a horrific offer: "I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man. Let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please." The mob refuses. The city of Sodom is going to be destroyed by God, so Lot and his family make their escape, but Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at the burning city. This leaves Lot alone with the two virgin daughters he tried to sacrifice.

Lot and his daughters go into hiding, and the two young women worry that they will never have children since they aren't able to meet any men. As described in Folklore, the two decide to "make our father drink wine and then lie with him, and this way keep the family alive." Their plan works: Both daughters become pregnant by their own father.

The final book of the New Testament is Revelation to John, which floridly describes the end of the world. Despite how widely known parts of the book are, the sheer scale of horror and death is still shocking to modern readers. As described in 1999 by professor of religious studies, James Tabor, for PBS, "Someone once tallied up the death count and projected it on a modern world such as ours, with five billion people, and it's absolutely a horrible kind of a statistic. You come up with maybe four billion dying of famine, war, earthquake, plagues." That's a fatality rate of four out of every five people in existence, which as of late 2023, would be well over six billion horrifying deaths.

There are many terrifying enemies of humankind in Revelation, including "The Beast," also known as the Antichrist, and Satan himself. But in Revelation, these monsters are only sidekicks to the one actually destroying the world and killing billions of people: God. 

God's wrath turns the oceans to blood, splits apart the land, and blots out the sun. It is his storms and diseases that kill everyone, and when Jesus Christ finally appears, it isn't to save humanity. Rather than preaching peace as Jesus often does in the rest of the New Testament, he arrives as a conqueror, seizing control of the last bastions of civilization by force. As stated in Revelation 2:27, "he will rule them with a staff of iron and dash them to pieces like pottery."