Malicious Biblical Insult Instruction

By James Donahue

If you think the contemporary practice of shouting insults and giving insulting hand symbols is something new, guess again. The Old Testament is crammed with examples of insulting remarks that might make your head spin.

In fact, some of the Biblical insults easily top the standard old clichés "f… you" or calling a dislikeable person a "mother sucker" and "knock pucker," or words to that effect. If you want to sound more sophisticated about your insults, study and memorize some of the almost poetic insults in Samuel, Kings and Isaiah and you will have a stack of new intellectual sounding ammunition to fire at your enemies.

Notice in 1 Samuel 20:30 what King Saul bellows out at his son Jonathan when he finds out Jonathan is loyal to David: "You son of a perverse and rebellious woman! So I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?"

Now that is how a king calls a person a "son of a bitch" and say his "mama is a whore" but doing it with a royal tongue.

Another great phrase that allows a person to proclaim that your penis is larger than that of the person you are attacking is found in 1 Kings 12:10. "My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins." Yes, it is subtle, but it’s there.

Even Jesus got somewhat gross when he used a barren tree as a metaphor about Israel’s failure to be faithful. He told his disciples that rather than just cut down the tree, he was quoted in Luke 13:8 as saying: "Let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it at put kopria (manure) on it." What he was saying then was that what Israel needed to become more fruitful was "more shit."

God apparently liked to use shit as a warning to those who failed to do His bidding. In Malachi 2 he warns the priests that if they fail to give glory to His name "I will corrupt our seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn easts; and one shall take you away with it."

It is interesting to read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where he warns in Matthew 5:22 that calling someone a fool is bad enough to make a person liable for judgment. To understand what he was saying is that the Greek word for fool is "moros," from where we get the modern word "moron." Thus in those days, calling another person a fool carried more contempt than it does for us today. Yet Jesus used this very word when he attacked the money changers in the temple and called the religious leaders "blind fools" several times in the sermon he delivered. It is small wonder that they were lined up to demand that the Romans murder Jesus when he was brought before Pilot only a few days later.

The Apostle Paul, who penned much of the New Testament in his letters to the various churches, instructed the Corinthians to "let your women keep silent in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak . . . And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home." (1 Corinthians 14:34-35.)

That sentence was a malicious insult to all women of the Christian faith and it has been a foundation for making women second class citizens for over 2,000 years.