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I'm doing today a presentation about contradictions and inconsistencies in the bible and I wondered if someone could point out some of them (beside those I've already found).
This is for literature class, so I'm focusing only on the text. I'm not going to nitpick on stuff that makes no sense according to reality (water turns to blood). Just stuff related to what the text gives us. I'm also not using anything from the New Testament since I'm unfamiliar with it (though I imagine I'll try many contradictions between the two testaments)

As a source, I'm using the Complete Jewish Bible

First of all, the most major contradiction there is:

Genesis chapter 1:

26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth." 27 So God created humankind in his own image; in the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.

Genesis chapter 2

7 Then ADONAI, God, formed a person [Hebrew: adam] from the dust of the ground [Hebrew: adamah] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. (...)

Basically the contradiction here is that in the first chapter, both the man and women are created together, but in the second chapter they are created separately. (also the two chapters are presenting the creation in different order - in chapter 1: Adam is created after everything else. In chapter 2: Adam is created before many things (such as the animals). These are two different stories of creation.

An inconsistency:

Isaiah chapter 27:

1 On that day ADONAI, with his great, strong, relentless sword, will punish Livyatan the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent Livyatan; he will slay the sea monster.

The thing is that until that point (?), there is no mention of any sea monsters and its origin is untold.

My third example, rather than an inconsistency, it's more of a plot-hole:

Genesis chapter 4:

16 So Kayin left the presence of ADONAI and lived in the land of Nod [wandering], east of 'Eden. 17 Kayin had sexual relations with his wife; she conceived and gave birth to Hanokh. Kayin built a city and named the city after his son Hanokh.

After Cain kills Abel, the only humans in the world should be Adam, Eve and Cain. So from where does Cain's wife come from?


Any other examples?

Actually, Eve was created after Adam, the sea monster is a metaphore and the Bible never said Adam and Eve only had 2 children so they must've made other ones

MaitreDétective wrote: Actually, Eve was created after Adam, the sea monster is a metaphor and the Bible never said Adam and Eve only had 2 children so they must've made other ones.

If the bolded bit is correct then does it count that God said incest was wrong when apparently Cain and his wife had a son together without God being mentioned as disagreeing with it? I can't remember the exact passage, but it said something like "do not have sexual relations with your brother/mother/mother's brother" and so on.
Other than that, nothing else off the top of my head, only the ones that don't work with reality at the moment

Stopwatch wrote:

MaitreDétective wrote: Actually, Eve was created after Adam, the sea monster is a metaphor and the Bible never said Adam and Eve only had 2 children so they must've made other ones.

If the bolded bit is correct then does it count that God said incest was wrong when apparently Cain and his wife had a son together without God being mentioned as disagreeing with it? I can't remember the exact passage, but it said something like "do not have sexual relations with your brother/mother/mother's brother" and so on.
Other than that, nothing else off the top of my head, only the ones that don't work with reality at the moment

they were close from perfection so it wasn't a problem at that moment

MaitreDétective wrote: Actually, Eve was created after Adam, the sea monster is a metaphore and the Bible never said Adam and Eve only had 2 children so they must've made other ones

I'd be fine with that, but then if you don't take those bits literary, why should you take the other stuff as it's written? It also doesn't seem like you read all of my post carefully. At the first chapter of Genesis, Adam is created after the animals are created. In the second chapter, he's created before them, hence a contradiction. You also have no way of confirming from the first chapter that they were created separately.
Leviathan is mentioned more than once in the bible (in one of them he is described even in detail). With all the research that I have made, not even once did I find it stated as a metaphor. More than that, Leviathan is more than likely taken from the mythologies of other cultures that preceded the bible.
About the final part of your post - yes, it has never said that Adam and Eve had only 2 children, but then again it has never said that they had more as well. You draw your conclusion then according to your logic and not from the text itself which doesn't give you the answer.

Other contradictions from the bible:

2 Samuel, chapter 24:
“9 Yo'av reported the results of the census to the king: there were in Isra'el 800,000 valiant men who could handle a sword, while the men of Y'hudah numbered 500,000.â€

As I recall, Adam and Eve had several sons, who then went to take wives from other villages.

I'm just distinctly confused about where these other villages came from, since immediately beforehand Adam and Eve and their sons were the only humans.

Also, I'm extremely skeevy of Noah's Arc, largely because the only surviving humans are this one man and his wife and kids. There must have been some heavy-duty incest going on to repopulate humanity.

Oh, and the Bible isn't that down on incest; both of Lot's daughters got pregnant by him after they fled Gomorrah (?).

And if you want real inconsistencies, look no farther than the New Testament. The four books all contradict each other a lot, particularly regarding Jesus' birth; one has him born in a cave, another in a house, and another mentions that the only reason that he WASN'T born in the house was that Joseph's actual wife and kids were taking up all the space.

It's a sensitive topic everywhere, and probably won't get an objective reading on a Christian website.

The topic's pretty clear from the title, and if it makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to read the thread.

We had to do critical readings of the Bible in RMPS and it was actually pretty fun. One standout exercise was the lists of names in two of the New Testament books tracing Joseph's descent from David. The two lists each had a different number of names on them and there were almost no overlap between them XP

The Bible has some interesting poetry and imagery, but it's pretty blatant that it's not to be taken as history XD

Conan324 wrote:

mangaluva wrote: It's a sensitive topic everywhere, and probably won't get an objective reading on a Christian website.

The topic's pretty clear from the title, and if it makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to read the thread.

We had to do critical readings of the Bible in RMPS and it was actually pretty fun. One standout exercise was the lists of names in two of the New Testament books tracing Joseph's descent from David. The two lists each had a different number of names on them and there were almost no overlap between them XP

The Bible has some interesting poetry and imagery, but it's pretty blatant that it's not to be taken as history XD

Please highlight my post.

Huh?

tiny text saying he was joking :x