Every card opens the passage on Bible Gateway in the NRSVUE — a standard translation in academic Bible study — so nobody can wave it off as a “bad translation.” Where the Hebrew matters, there's an interlinear link too. Use the filter to jump straight to the verse you need.
Why the NRSVUE? It is translated with the Dead Sea Scrolls (found 1947–1956) in view, manuscripts roughly a thousand years older than the medieval Hebrew text that earlier translations relied on, and its footnotes flag where they differ.
These aren't villains breaking the rules. This is the rulebook, presented as God's own law — with different rules for Israelite servants and foreign slaves.
A Hebrew slave serves six years — but if the master gave him a wife, the wife and children stay with the master. To stay with his family he must choose slavery for life, sealed by an awl through his ear.
“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.” The passage regulates the sale (no resale to foreigners; food, clothing and marital rights guaranteed) — it never forbids selling a daughter in the first place.
If an owner beats a slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner “shall be punished.” But if the slave survives a day or two, “there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner's property” (NRSVUE). Property status, in the text itself.
Slaves bought from the nations around you “may be your property. You may keep them as a possession for your children after you, for them to inherit as property. These you may treat as slaves” — unlike fellow Israelites, who are released (Lev 25:39–43). This is permanent, heritable chattel slavery of foreigners.
A soldier who sees a beautiful woman among the captives of war may take her as a wife after she shaves her head, pares her nails, and mourns her parents for a month. If he later “is not satisfied with her,” he must let her go free and not sell her — “since you have dishonored her” — but the taking itself is regulated, not condemned.
This verse is often raised as a counter-argument: it bans kidnapping a person, whether already sold or still held (Deut 24:7 specifies kidnapping an Israelite) — while elsewhere the law explicitly permits buying slaves from the nations and keeping them for life (Lev 25:44–46). Worth knowing before it comes up.
The NT never abolishes slavery. It instructs slaves to obey — including, in 1 Peter, to be subject even to masters who are dishonest (NRSVUE; “harsh” in the older NRSV and NIV), and calls enduring unjust suffering commendable.
Obey “with respect and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.” Masters are told “Stop threatening them” — the text does not tell them to free anyone.
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.” Same pattern: regulate the institution, never end it.
Slaves under a believing master must not be disrespectful “on the ground that they are brothers and sisters” — they “must serve them all the more.” Christian ownership is assumed — the text asks the slave to serve more, not the owner to free.
“Slaves, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only those who are good and gentle but also those who are dishonest. For it is a commendable thing if, being aware of God, a person endures pain while suffering unjustly.” (The older NRSV and the NIV render the word “harsh.”)
Submissive, pleasing, not argumentative, not stealing — a conduct manual for the enslaved, not a path to freedom.
In Jesus' parable, the slave who knew his master's will “will receive a severe beating”; the one who didn't, a light one. It is a parable about accountability, but slavery and beatings are the assumed scenery — never the target.
The key point: Paul had a clear chance to condemn slavery with a slave who had apparently left his owner (v.15 and v.18 imply it) in front of him — and he sent Onesimus back to his owner (v.12). He appeals rather than commands (v.8–9), asks that Onesimus be received “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (v.16), and offers to cover Onesimus's debts (v.18–19). Nowhere does Paul explicitly say set him free, order manumission, or call slaveholding a sin (some scholars read v.13–16 and v.21 as a hint that he hoped Philemon would). “Brother in Christ” changed his spiritual label — the letter never revokes Philemon's ownership. Most scholars infer from Colossians 4:7–9 that Onesimus returned with Tychicus carrying the letter; the letter itself doesn't say whether he was freed.
Paul says he could command “the right thing” — and chooses to appeal. He never says what that right thing is, and the letter never states manumission.
Onesimus is returned to the man who owns him. Whatever else the letter is, it is not an Underground Railroad document.
Verse 16 is often quoted as abolition. Read it fully: it's about how Philemon should receive him — “both in the flesh and in the Lord.” A changed relationship is requested; manumission is never stated.
The Hebrew is almah (Strong's 5959): a young woman of marriageable age — it does not specify virginity. Hebrew has a more common word for “virgin,” bethulah (בְּתוּלָה, Strong's 1330) — though even that isn't strictly limited to virgins (Joel 1:8) — and Isaiah didn't use it. In context (Isa 7–8) the sign is for King Ahaz in his own crisis, with a child born in his own time-frame — read Isaiah 8:3–4 alongside it. Matthew 1:23 follows the Greek Septuagint, which translated almah as parthenos (“virgin”) — the “virgin birth prophecy” rests on that Greek translation choice.
“Before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land… will be deserted” (7:16) — a deadline measured in a toddler's childhood, ~730s BCE, not 700 years later. Isaiah 8:3–4 repeats the same pattern with Isaiah's own son.
Commonly cited because each one clashes directly with the “God is love / the Bible is a moral guide” claim. One plain line each — open the link and let the text do the work.
Saul sets the bride price for his daughter Michal at 100 Philistine foreskins, hoping David dies collecting them; David pays in full — and then some in the Hebrew text, which says 200 (the NRSVUE follows the Greek: 100; see its footnote and 2 Samuel 3:14) — and gets the wife. Cited because the price is a king's demand for enemy foreskins and David, “a man after his own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), pays it.
As punishment for David's sin, God says he will take David's wives and give them to his neighbor, who “shall lie with your wives in broad daylight.” Cited because the punishment falls on the women — and God claims authorship of it.
A tent is pitched on the palace roof and Absalom sleeps with his father's concubines “in the sight of all Israel” — readers connect it to 12:11–12, though the narrator doesn't say so here. Cited as the follow-through on God's stated punishment.
A man who rapes an unbetrothed virgin must pay her father fifty shekels, marry her, and may never divorce her. Cited because the remedy centers the father's payment and the rapist's marriage rights — the victim's consent appears nowhere.
Moses orders the killing of Midianite boys and non-virgin women: “but all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Cited because the order comes from Moses in God's war — and the girls are distributed as spoils (v.35 counts 32,000).
A Levite pushes his concubine out to a mob, which rapes her all night; he finds her lying at the door, says “Get up… we are going,” and gets no answer. He cuts her into twelve pieces sent across Israel (19:29); later he says she died (20:5). Cited because no divine speech follows in the chapter — the horror becomes the trigger for a civil war (ch. 20) that is presented as God-directed.
Small boys jeer “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!”; Elisha curses them in the LORD's name, and two she-bears maul forty-two of the boys. Cited because the punishment for name-calling is a divinely-sent mauling — Elisha is never rebuked for it.
God's announced judgment on Samaria: little ones dashed, pregnant women ripped open. Cited because this is presented as God's own sentence, not an enemy's atrocity he condemns. (Compare Amos 1:13, where the same act is condemned when Ammon commits it.)
A lament over Jerusalem's fall turns into a blessing on whoever repays Babylon by dashing its little ones against the rock. Cited because it sits in the Psalms — the worship book — and the poem never retracts it.
Parents who call their son stubborn, rebellious, a glutton and a drunkard bring him to the elders, and “all the men of the town shall stone him to death.” Cited because the capital offense is disobedience — and the law is presented as purging evil by God's command.
The Bible isn't arranged in the order its books were written. Genesis isn't the oldest book, and the Gospels aren't the oldest part of the New Testament. Read in the order scholars date them, the same story gets retold, and each retelling adds details, changes them, or explains away a problem in the version before it.
About the dates: they are the approximate ranges most critical scholars give, worked out from what each book quotes, what it refers to, and which events it knows about. Many are debated, and conservative scholars date some books (Daniel, the Gospels) earlier. Most of the cards below depend on the order rather than the exact year, and much of that order (Paul before the Gospels, Mark before Matthew and Luke, Chronicles after Samuel and Kings) is accepted well beyond critical scholarship.
| Roughly when | Written | Where it sits in the Bible |
|---|---|---|
| c. 750–700 BCE | Amos, Hosea, Micah, the core of Isaiah 1–39 | Among the oldest books, yet near the end of the Christian Old Testament |
| c. 620 BCE | The core of Deuteronomy | Linked to King Josiah's reform (2 Kings 22–23), though set in the time of Moses |
| c. 550–400 BCE | Genesis to Kings take their final form; Isaiah 40–55 | Earlier sources edited during and after the Babylonian exile. Genesis comes first in the Bible but was finished centuries after Amos |
| c. 400–250 BCE | 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ecclesiastes | Chronicles retells Samuel and Kings, with changes |
| c. 167–164 BCE | Daniel, in its final form | Set in Babylon in the 500s BCE. Christian Bibles place it among the prophets; the Hebrew Bible places it among the Writings |
| c. 50–60 CE | Paul's undisputed letters (1 Thessalonians first) | Placed after the Gospels and Acts, but written before any of them |
| c. 70 CE | Mark | Second in the New Testament, but the first Gospel written |
| c. 80–90 CE | Matthew, Luke (Acts soon after) | Both use Mark as a source |
| c. 90–110 CE | John; Revelation (c. 95) | John is the last Gospel written. Revelation closes the Bible, but 2 Peter is probably later |
| c. 100–150 CE | 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Peter | Carry Paul's and Peter's names, but most scholars think others wrote them later |
Paul's letters are about twenty years older than the first Gospel. His summary of what he was taught says Christ died, was buried and was raised on the third day, then lists who saw him, including a group of more than five hundred and James, appearances no Gospel describes. He says Jesus was “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4), and nothing about Bethlehem, a virgin birth, miracles, or women finding the tomb empty.
Where it has a point: Paul wrote letters to churches, not a life of Jesus, so his silence alone proves little. But his letters are the earliest Christian writing there is, and the Gospel details come later.
Scholarship: Dale Martin (Yale), From Stories to Canon · Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (1997)
In the oldest manuscripts Mark ends at 16:8: the women flee and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The appearances in 16:9–20 were added later, and the NRSVUE prints them with a footnote saying some of the most ancient manuscripts end at 16:8.
Each later Gospel adds more. In Mark, Jesus “is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Matthew has the eleven meet him on a mountain in Galilee (28:16–20). Luke rewrites the line as “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee,” has every appearance in and near Jerusalem, and has Jesus tell them to “stay here in the city” (24:49). John adds Thomas touching the wounds (20:24–29).
Scholarship: Dale Martin (Yale), The Gospel of Mark
Paul, Mark and John have no birth story. The two that exist disagree. In Matthew, Joseph and Mary are already in a house in Bethlehem, flee to Egypt from Herod, and only settle in Nazareth on their return (2:11–23). In Luke they live in Nazareth, travel to Bethlehem for a Roman census, present Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem, and go home to Nazareth, with no flight to Egypt (2:1–39). Matthew sets the birth under Herod the Great, who died around 4 BCE; Luke ties it to the census under Quirinius, which the historian Josephus places in 6 CE.
Where it has a point: There are attempts to reconcile them (an earlier census, a different date for Herod's death), but each one has to add events neither Gospel mentions.
Scholarship: Dale Martin (Yale), The Gospel of Luke · Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (updated ed., 1993) · Josephus, Antiquities 18.1–4 and 18.26 (Quirinius's census)
Around 50 CE Paul expects to live to see it: “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord.” In Mark, Jesus says “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (13:30; also 9:1). 2 Peter, which most scholars date to the 2nd century, answers scoffers who ask “Where is the promise of his coming?” with “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years.” In the order they were written, you can see the expectation, and then the explanation for why it didn't happen.
Scholarship: Dale Martin (Yale), Paul as Missionary · Dale Martin (Yale), Apocalyptic and Accommodation (on 2 Peter)
In 2 Samuel the LORD is angry with Israel, “and he incited David against them” to count the people, then sends a plague that kills seventy thousand for it. Chronicles, written centuries later, retells the same events and opens: “Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel.” The later writer moved the act from God to Satan.
Scholarship: Shira Golani, “A Census Causes a Plague?” (TheTorah.com) · Christine Hayes (Yale), The Restoration: 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah
Daniel 11 is a vision dated to the reign of Cyrus of Persia (10:1). It traces the wars between the Greek kings of Egypt and Syria in close detail, up to Antiochus IV's desecration of the Temple in 167 BCE (11:31). After that it goes wrong: verses 40–45 have the king conquer Egypt and die in the land of Israel, but Antiochus died in Persia in 164 BCE. That is why most scholars date the book to about 165 BCE: accurate history up to the author's own day, then a prediction that failed.
Where it has a point: Conservative scholars keep a 6th-century date and read the chapter as prophecy. The late date doesn't rest on this chapter alone: the book's late Hebrew and Aramaic and its Greek loanwords point the same way.
Scholarship: Lawrence M. Wills, “The Lead up to Chanukah in the Book of Daniel” (TheTorah.com) · Christine Hayes (Yale), Visions of the End: Daniel and Apocalyptic Literature · Amy C. Merrill Willis, “Daniel” (Bible Odyssey)
Several texts, some of them among the oldest poetry in the Bible, take other gods for granted and make Israel's god the greatest of them: “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?” (Exodus 15:11); “in the midst of the gods he holds judgment” (Psalm 82:1). In Deuteronomy 32:8 the Most High divides the nations “according to the number of the gods.” Here the NRSVUE follows a Dead Sea Scrolls manuscript; the medieval Hebrew text reads “the Israelites.” The flat statement “I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” comes in Isaiah 45:5, written during the exile in the 500s BCE.
Scholarship: Emanuel Tov, “The Sons of Israel or God? Deuteronomy 32:8” (TheTorah.com) · Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford, 2001) · Christine Hayes (Yale), Perspectives on the Exile (Second Isaiah)
For most of the Hebrew Bible the dead go down to Sheol, a shadowy grave: “in Sheol who can give you praise?” (Psalm 6:5). As late as Ecclesiastes, around the 3rd century BCE, “the dead know nothing.” Apart from a few late passages (Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2), the Hebrew Bible has no idea of a future resurrection. Daniel 12:2, from the 160s BCE, is the first to say that individuals will rise, “some to everlasting life” and others to everlasting shame. Heaven and hell as later Christians describe them are not in the older books at all.
Scholarship: Shawna Dolansky, “Sheol” (Bible Odyssey) · Amy C. Merrill Willis, “Daniel” (Bible Odyssey)
Sources for the dates: Yale Open Courses lectures by Christine Hayes, Introduction to the Old Testament (Deuteronomy and Josiah, Second Isaiah, Chronicles, Daniel), and by Dale Martin, Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (Paul's letters first, Mark, Paul's undisputed letters, 2 Peter) · Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (1997)
Genesis opens with two creation stories that put things in a different order. Read literally, as young-earth creationists read them, both also clash with what astronomy, geology and the fossil record show about how the world came to be.
How to read these: many Jews and Christians don't read Genesis 1–2 as a scientific or historical record, and many accept an old earth and evolution. These cards are about what the texts say and about the literal reading. The science behind them is on the Evolution, Geological Dating and Big Bang pages.
| Order | Genesis 1:1–2:3 | Genesis 2:4–25 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Light, then the dome of the sky (days 1–2) | The earth, “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth” (2:5) |
| 2 | Dry land, plants and fruit trees (day 3) | The man, formed “from the dust of the ground” (2:7) |
| 3 | Sun, moon and stars (day 4) | A garden and its trees (2:8–9) |
| 4 | Sea creatures and birds (day 5) | Animals and birds, brought to the man as possible partners (2:18–20) |
| 5 | Land animals, then humans, “male and female” together (day 6) | The woman, made from the man's rib (2:21–22) |
Genesis 1 builds up to humans last: plants on day 3, birds and sea creatures on day 5, land animals and then humans on day 6, “male and female” at once. Genesis 2 starts again “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth.” The LORD God forms the man first, then plants a garden, then forms “every animal of the field and every bird of the air” and brings them to the man, because “for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.” Only then is the woman made from his rib. The two stories even name God differently: “God” in the first, “the LORD God” in the second.
Where it has a point: Some readers take Genesis 2 as a closer look at day 6 rather than a second sequence. But there the animals are formed after the man, as candidates for his partner, and the trees are made to grow after him too. Most scholars read two separate stories placed side by side.
Scholarship: Marc Zvi Brettler, “Differing Conceptions of the Divine Creator” (TheTorah.com) · Christine Hayes (Yale), Genesis 1–4 in Context · Christine Hayes (Yale), Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources
“Let there be light” comes on day 1, and from then on each day has its “evening” and “morning.” The earth and its waters are there from verse 2, plants and fruit trees appear on day 3, and only on day 4 does God make “the two great lights … and the stars.” In fact the sun is older than the earth: about 4.6 billion years ago a cloud of gas and dust collapsed, the sun formed first, and the planets formed from the material left over. Other stars are far older: the Webb telescope sees galaxies full of stars as they were about 280 million years after the Big Bang, more than 9 billion years before the earth formed.
Where it has a point: Some read day 1's light as something other than the sun, and the days as long ages. Even then, Genesis has the earth, its seas and its plants before the sun.
Sources: NASA Space Place: How did the solar system form? · USGS: Age of the Earth · Naidu et al. 2025, MoM-z14 (arXiv)
On day 5 God creates “the great sea monsters,” everything the waters swarm with, and “every winged bird.” Land animals, including “everything that creeps upon the ground,” come on day 6. The fossil record runs the other way. Four-limbed animals were moving from water onto land by about 375 million years ago (Tiktaalik). Birds descend from theropod dinosaurs, which lived on land, and Archaeopteryx, generally accepted as the oldest known bird, is about 150 million years old. Whales descend from land mammals related to the even-toed hoofed animals (hippos, pigs, deer), and appear only about 50 million years ago.
Sources: Daeschler et al. 2006, Tiktaalik (Nature) · UC Museum of Paleontology: Dinosaur–bird relationships · Thewissen et al. 2007, whales from even-toed ungulates (Nature)
On day 6 God gives humans seed plants and fruit, and to “every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth … I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. Isaiah pictures that world coming back: “the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (11:7; 65:25). Meat-eating animals were around long before humans. Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived about 66–68 million years ago, was one of the largest predators ever to live on land.
Where it has a point: The passage can be read as a picture of an ideal peace, the way Isaiah uses it, rather than a claim about the past. Read literally, it says no animal ate another at creation.
On day 2 God makes “a dome in the midst of the waters” and separates “the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome.” The sun, moon and stars are then set “in the dome of the sky.” In the flood the water above comes through: “the windows of the heavens were opened” (7:11), and later “closed” (8:2). Job asks, “Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?” This is the ancient Near Eastern picture of the world. In the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, the god Marduk makes the sky from half the body of Tiamat, the sea.
Where it has a point: Job 26:7 says God “hangs the earth upon nothing,” which is often quoted as ahead of its time, though the same chapter speaks of “the pillars of heaven” (26:11). Many readers take all of this as poetry rather than a description of how the sky works.
Scholarship: Christine Hayes (Yale), Genesis 1–4 in Context
The Psalms say “He has established the world; it shall never be moved” (93:1) and “You set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken” (104:5). Ecclesiastes has the sun doing the moving: “The sun rises, and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises.” In Joshua, “the sun stood still, and the moon stopped” for about a whole day. These verses were used against the discovery that the earth goes around the sun. In 1615 Cardinal Bellarmine quoted Ecclesiastes 1:5 against it, and in 1616 theologians advising the Inquisition ruled that a motionless sun at the centre contradicts the Catholic faith.
Where it has a point: People still speak of the sun rising, and Ecclesiastes can be read the same way, as how things look from the ground. The Psalms are poetry about God's rule. But in Galileo's day, church authorities read them literally.
Sources: Robert Bellarmine, letter on Galileo's theories, 1615 (Fordham Internet History Sourcebooks) · “The Prohibition of the Heliocentric Theory (1616)” (Tel Aviv University Galileo exhibit)
In Genesis 1 God simply creates “the great sea monsters” on day 5. Other passages remember a battle instead. Psalm 74 praises the God who “divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan,” and goes straight on to “the luminaries and the sun” and “all the bounds of the earth.” Job says God “stilled the Sea” and “struck down Rahab,” and Isaiah asks, “Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?” This is the older Near Eastern story of a god defeating the sea to make an ordered world, like Marduk defeating Tiamat in the Babylonian Enuma Elish.
Where it has a point: These are poems, and Isaiah 51:10 goes on to apply the image to the sea crossing at the Exodus; elsewhere Rahab is a name for Egypt (Isaiah 30:7). They give a different picture of creation rather than a rival timeline.
Scholarship: Christine Hayes (Yale), Genesis 1–4 in Context
Each day of Genesis 1 ends “there was evening and there was morning.” The genealogies that follow give each father's age when his son was born: Adam “had lived one hundred thirty years” when Seth was born, and so on down to Noah, who was six hundred at the flood, and on to Terah, who “had lived seventy years” when Abram was born. Added up, that is 1,948 years from Adam to Abraham. Joined to the Bible's later chronology, it gives a world roughly 6,000 years old. The earth is about 4.54 billion years old, and the universe about 13.8 billion.
Where it has a point: Many Jews and Christians don't read the days or the ages literally. That avoids the conflict, but only by not taking the numbers as history.
Sources: USGS: Age of the Earth · Planck 2018 results VI: cosmological parameters (arXiv)
Genesis has all people descend from one man formed from dust and one woman made from his rib, whom he names Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (3:20). Human genomes carry a record of the population they came from. Reconstructions from them go back about a million years, and even at its smallest, a bottleneck 10,000–60,000 years ago in the ancestors of people outside Africa, that population numbered in the thousands. Genetics finds no point at which humanity came down to two people.
Where it has a point: Some Christian scholars propose an Adam and Eve who lived among a larger population, or much further back. Genetics can't rule that out, but it isn't the story Genesis tells.
Sources: Li & Durbin 2011, human population history from whole genomes (Nature)
Sources: Yale Open Courses lectures by Christine Hayes, Genesis 1–4 in Context and Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources · Marc Zvi Brettler (TheTorah.com) · National Academy of Sciences: Science, Evolution, and Creationism
All links open Bible Gateway (NRSVUE). Interlinear links go to Blue Letter Bible's Hebrew interlinear. Text in quotation marks is quoted from the NRSVUE, sometimes with ellipses; text outside quotation marks is a summary. Always open the passage and read it in full rather than trusting the card.