The Ship of Fools is a Christian website which claims "Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith."
Recently they invited readers to nominate and then vote for the verses in the Bible that they found difficult to swallow. They then published the top (or should that be bottom?) ten verses. The results say as much about modern society as they do about the vagaries of the Bible.
The verse which was voted the worst in the whole Bible comes, perhaps surprisingly, not from the Old Testament but from 1 Timothy 2:12:
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." (1 Timothy 2:12)
As the Ship of Fools website explains:
St Paul did well to make the top place with his rules for church life in first-century Ephesus, beating genocide, infanticide, executions, dismemberment, human sacrifice (and donkeys) to get there. All the verses that were placed from fifth to second place resorted to violence to do so.
In second place, the Lord via the prophet Samuel instructs King Saul in ethnic cleansing:
"This is what the Lord Almighty says... 'Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'" (1 Samuel 15:3)
It seems like a rather disappointing elucidation of what the Lord did and didn't mean by, "Love your neighbour as yourself."
At number 3 is the only entry from the Hebrew Torah:
"Do not allow a sorceress to live." (Exodus 22:18)
This is not the only biblical death penalty, but it appears sorceresses elicit greater sympathy than blasphemers, rebellious sons, unfaithful fiancées and brides who fail to prove their virginity.
You can read about the remaining seven offenders at Chapter and Worse.
The article ends:
It's an unedifying list, but we think the Bible can survive bringing these shadowy verses into the spotlight. It's not the all-or-nothing book that fundamentalists (atheist and Christian) say that we must either accept wholesale or burn. We need a view of the Bible that is nuanced enough to treasure its comforts and challenges, its classic stories and groundbreaking ethical wisdom, while facing the plain fact that some of it is unacceptable.
So what's your view? Does the problem lie within the wrong-headedness of modern society, perhaps our lack of understanding of these verses or do we have to admit that there are a few "unacceptable" verses in the Bible? Five hundred years ago one suspects this list would have looked different. And in five hundred years time?









