Is there not one single joke in the Bible?

It is easy to pass over this question as being silly and trivial, but if we think for a moment about the nature of humour I think this is unjustified.

Humans are, according to current understanding, the only animals that have a concept of humour, that laugh, and that smile (A monkey's 'smile' is indicative of fear). Surely humour, like other concepts such as language, self-awareness and complex reasoned actions that are uniquely human and thus reflexive of 'God's image', is worthy of a prominent place in the Bible.

Secondly, laughter is an integral part of life that is inextricably linked with happiness. Humor is being recognized as a powerful force for maintaining good mental and physical health. The idea that laughter is good for you is nothing new, but now science is proving it:

“We now have laboratory evidence that mirthful laughter stimulates most of the major physiologic systems of the body,”
William Fry, M.D and professor emeritus at Stanford University in California

So why does the Bible ignore this fundamental and unique human faculty that is central to healthy functioning. The omission of humour in the Bible reeks more of people desparate for control fabricating a doctrine of fear that the words of an omnipotent God communicating to his most treasured creations that he created in his image.

Kachana

Well, someone's going to say it, it might as well be me ...

I thought the Bible was a joke.



--W@L

Ho ho!!!

A woman is walking naked through the forest. All of a sudden, a talking snake pops out of the bushes and says: "Hey sweetcheeks, want a piece of fruit?"

The women says: "Oh no, I can't to that. God says I'll die if I eat that fruit."

Snake says: "No you won't; and besides, it will make you smart as hell."

The woman says: "Cool." She eats the fruit which brings sin, death, suffering and hardship into the world.

If that's not a fucking joke then I don't know what is.

(Surely you've heard this one before.)

Opus1

The Bible is full of jokes. Unfortunately, most are puns and do not translate into English.

U.S. legal code does not contain intentional humor, I see no reason Palestinian legal code should.

Did Eve even know what death was? I mean, she'd just been created out of thin rib. What did god do, murder a chipmunk and say, "See, that's death. It'll happen to you if you take one bite of the fruit that I've conveniently placed in the middle of the garden."

Kachana

I put a similar post up a couple of months ago, but extended it to include all "holy scripture (Qur'an, Book of Mormon, whatever). The results were pretty much no, there is no humour in any religious traqct.

Norm

Makes you think, doesn't it? If eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was evil, she wouldn't know until she had eaten the fruit, right? How would she even know she wasn't supposed to follow God's commands until she knew the difference between good and evil? Whew, makes my head spin...

I'm currently writing a novel that begins with the quotation "The tree of life was also in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil".

One of the themes of the novel is the importance of choice, and I don't believe such choice is possible unless one has the knowledge of good and evil. You might as well flip coins to decide what to do. One of my characters is a woman who has (metaphorically speaking) never eaten the fruit of that tree, and she commits horrific acts of cruelty simply because she doesn't see them as evil.

The bottom line is, eat the fruit of that tree. It's better than the alternative : ignorance.