(Image of 1 Samuel 18:27 used with the kind permission of Brendan Powell Smith, from his book The Brick Bible, available on Amazon.com.)
Dan Kimball is one of my oldest friends. We went to college together, moved to London, and played in a band in the 1980s. He's an excellent cartoonist, an amazing drummer, and one of the funniest people I've ever met. He runs the Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz and has written a number of books on Christianity
Last week, Dan launched Wednesday-Weird-Bible-Verse on his blog, in which he discusses one of the "hundreds of very strange sounding, weird, sex descriptive, bizarre and even violent verses in the Bible."
The first weird Bible verse he tackles is 1 Samuel 18:27: "David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage."
In reading this story straight from the Bible, it even states how after David brought the forsekins back to Saul that they counted them to show how many there were. What an incredibly weird image of David standing there counting out 200 foreskins. I have beeen fascinated with the life of David lately having studied through the his story in the Hebrew Bible/First Testament (I try not to say "Old Testament" as that can subtly indicate it isn't valid or important. So I use the term "First Testament" or "Hebrew Bible" instead).
Read the rest on Dan's blog.
