20 Bible Stories You Probably Remember Wrong

In Genesis, Adam and Eve are the first humans, and eating forbidden fruit in Eden gets them banished. The Hebrew word used, peri, simply means “fruit,” and no species is named. Centuries later, St. Jerome’s Latin translation rendered “good and evil” as mali, which sounds almost exactly like mālum, the Latin word for apple. Medieval readers took the pun and ran. Painters and poets cemented it.

After leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses went up Mount Sinai to meet God and receive God’s law. After spending 40 days there, he came back down, but his face had changed. The Hebrew says qaran, which means his face was shining with rays of light, but Jerome’s Latin translation interpreted it more literally as “horned,” because that root can also mean “horn.” Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo took Jerome at his word, carving his famous statue of Moses in 1515 with two little horns atop his head.

Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee heading to Damascus with orders to arrest Christians, encountered a blinding vision of the resurrected Jesus. In all three versions of the story in the book of Acts, Saul fell to the ground when the light appeared. There’s no mention of a horse. That bit comes from the Baroque painter Caravaggio, who painted an image of Saul falling from a horse in 1601. Saul, later known as Paul, was blinded for a while, then went on to become one of the most important apostles.

Eastern astrologers were led by a star to find the newborn “King of the Jews” in Judea, causing King Herod to be afraid. The Gospel of Matthew does not specify how many there were. It’s only in subsequent centuries that they became three, when a writer added up their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The text also says that they found a child in a house, not a stable, at which point Jesus was probably already a toddler.

Goliath, the Philistine warrior who taunted Israel’s forces before he was slain by a young shepherd named David, is said in the standard version of the Bible used by most English-speaking Christians today to be roughly nine feet nine inches. However, the earliest known manuscript of the text, a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an early Greek version of the Bible, as well as the historian Josephus, say he was closer to six feet nine inches. Most textual critics consider the latter to be correct, representing a tall man by any standard.

Jonah was a Hebrew prophet who was commanded to preach to the people of Nineveh, but he tried to run away from God. He was thrown overboard by his crew in the middle of a storm, and then a sea creature swallowed him. He was spat out days later. The Hebrew text simply says “great fish.” Ancient Hebrew didn’t have a word for whale. A Greek translation referred to the sea creature as a “sea monster.” When England’s 1611 King James Bible translated that same Greek word, used again when Jesus refers to Jonah in the Gospels, into English as “whale,” it stuck.

Genesis also tells us that God told Noah to build an ark to survive a catastrophic flood. The first mention we get of the ark tells us in a general way that there were two of every sort of animal. But then a few verses later, we read that there were actually seven pairs of every clean animal, and just one pair of the unclean. That’s significant because later Noah offered some of the clean animals as sacrifices. If there’d only been one pair of each of those animals, they would’ve been completely wiped out.

The parents of Jesus, Joseph and Mary, arrived in Bethlehem for a Roman census, and it was there that Mary gave birth, placing her newborn son in a manger. The Greek version of Luke’s gospel notes that there was no place for them in the guest room, using a different word than the one Luke uses for a commercial inn in the parable of the Good Samaritan. A guest room was a space for extended family to stay in a house, not a commercial inn as we would think of it today. If the guest room was full, then the family probably took up residence in a crowded main room.

In the book of Genesis, God makes Eve, the first woman, from the tzela of Adam, the first man, to be his companion. This word appears some 40 other times in the Old Testament, generally translated as “side,” as in the side of a house. It is often understood by biblical scholars to refer to a structural half, implying that Eve was made to be Adam’s equal. And anatomically, it is not true that men have a rib less than women.

Because Joseph was his father Jacob’s favorite son, the special robe that he gave him aroused the jealousy of his ten older brothers. The Hebrew expression translates to long-sleeved robes, which the daughters of kings wear elsewhere in the Old Testament. It was a status symbol, not a working man’s clothes. “Coat of many colors” is a later rendering from a Greek translation, and modern scholars understand the Hebrew as a reference to long sleeves that left the wearer’s hands free of labor.

Daniel was a Hebrew prophet who had spent many years in the courts of both Babylon and later Persia, having been captured in his youth. The lion’s den story takes place over 65 years later, at the time of Babylon’s surrender to Persia, meaning Daniel would have been between 80 and 85 years old, a seasoned statesman, not a teenager. He survived the ordeal with no harm done.

There’s a snake in the Garden of Eden, persuading Eve to eat some forbidden fruit. It’s just described as a “crafty” wild animal, one of the animals God had created. And after God curses it, he speaks of an actual animal, cursing it to move around on its belly. The snake is never called Satan in the text. It was only in later writings by Jews, and eventually explicitly in the book of Revelation, which was written hundreds of years after Genesis, that the snake was referred to as Satan.

The Bible tells us that after a great flood, a group of people settled in the land of Shinar. They decided to build a city and a tower that would reach up to heaven. But Genesis says that God confused their language and scattered them throughout the earth. And they just… stopped building. The Bible doesn’t say anything about the Tower of Babel being struck by lightning, engulfed in flames, or toppled over. This idea stems from a later extra-biblical source and from medieval art. Genesis, meanwhile, leaves us with a half-finished building.

Esau and Jacob were the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah, Esau being the older hunter while Jacob was the younger tent-dweller. Hungry one day, Esau traded away his birthright for a bowl of red lentil stew, swearing an oath over it. But all Genesis says is that Esau “despised his birthright,” not that Jacob tricked him into the trade. The deception would occur much later and independently. Decades later, in an attempt to steal his blind father’s final blessing from him, Jacob disguised himself.

While Moses was on Mt. Sinai with God, the Israelites, frustrated, beseeched his brother Aaron, the High Priest of Israel, to create for them a god they could worship. Aaron took the gold jewelry from the Israelites, melted it down, and cast a golden calf. Then, he constructed an altar and said, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD.” He even used the name of the LORD rather than that of a foreign god. This suggests he was trying to represent Israel’s God by means of an image rather than substitute one god for another, although the narrative still considers it a serious breach.

In order to test the patriarch Abraham, God asked him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac at a place called Mount Moriah. According to Genesis, Abraham placed the heavy wood for the burnt offering on his son, while he carried only the knife and the torch. Since Abraham was well past the age of 100 at the time, he could not have physically forced his grown son up the mountain. Isaac, by then a strong young man, must have gone willingly. An angel intervened, and Isaac was spared.

King Solomon, famous throughout Jerusalem for his wisdom, had recently been told of a quarrel between two women who were living together, and one of them had lost her baby during the night, and each then claimed the surviving child as her own. Both women were prostitutes, which is relevant since without any relatives or witnesses around to attest to what had happened, it would be impossible to determine who the mother really was. So he suggested they cut the baby in half and each take a piece. The true mother cried out at the suggestion, and Solomon handed the child over to her.

While Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, Pharaoh’s forces caught up with them and left them cornered against the Sea of Reeds. After Moses stretched out his hand, the Bible says, “the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land; and the waters were divided.” Many films portray the waters parting in a split second. But here, we learn, the sea did not suddenly vanish. It receded over the course of a long night.

The story of Samson’s downfall is well known. An Israelite judge, he had made a vow not to cut his hair, and from that hair his strength came. He fell for Delilah, whom Philistine leaders bribed with silver to learn where his strength lay. Delilah knew it was his hair, so she let Samson fall asleep in her lap, then called for a man who shaved it off. She had arranged the whole thing, and Samson had no strength left. The Philistines captured him and blinded him.

A Hebrew prophet, Elisha, the successor of Elijah, was walking near Bethel when a group of people approached him along the road and taunted him by calling him “baldhead.” He cursed them, and two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of them. The Hebrew phrase, commonly translated as “little children,” was also used elsewhere for young men well into adulthood, and it is more likely that the text refers to a band of hostile young men, not to a group of infants. The text doesn’t confirm that any of them actually died.

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