The Biographical Bible: Benaiah

A young by the name of David just stopped by my shop. He was carrying a book. I asked him about it. He showed it to me and gave an example of the biblical illustrations it uses. "For example," he said, "Benaiah, the man who went into a pit in a snow storm and killed a lion." I was surprised. I didn't remember that Bible story. Well, he got me on that one.

2 Samuel 23:20-21

New International Version (NIV)

²⁰Benaiah^(A) son of Jehoiada, a valiant fighter from Kabzeel,^(B) performed great exploits. He struck down Moab’s two mightiest warriors. He also went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion. ²¹And he struck down a huge Egyptian. Although the Egyptian had a spear in his hand, Benaiah went against him with a club. He snatched the spear from the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.

Quotes About the Bible

For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant. --Martin Luther

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. --Mark Twain

I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man. It is the best Book which God has given to man. --Abraham Lincoln

So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year. --John Quincy Adams

Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical . . . The things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.--G. K. Chesterton

We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations. ... --C. S. Lewis

John Calvin and Balaam's Ass

And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass. Skeptical persons criticize this passage, and ridicule it, as if Moses related an incredible fable. And, indeed, their scoff appears to be plausible, when they object that there is a great difference between the bray of an ass and all articulate voice. . . . God “opened the mouth of the ass.” For whence would men possess the faculty of speech, unless God had opened their mouth at the first creation of the world? Whence comes it that magpies and parrots imitate the human voice, unless it were the will of God to manifest in them a specimen of a certain extraordinary power? Who is there, then, who shall now impose a law upon the Maker of the world, to prevent Him from adapting the mouth of a beast to the utterance of words? Unless perhaps they would suppose Him to be bound irrevocably, because He has once appointed a certain order in nature, to abstain from displaying His power by miracles. If the ass had been changed into a man, we should have been bound to reverence this proof of God’s incomprehensible power; now, when we are told that merely a few words were drawn from it without intelligence or judgment, as if a sound of any kind were diffused through the air, shall the miracle be regarded as a fable?

John Calvin, commentary on Numbers 22:28

C.H. Spurgeon on Caleb

How the mothers would hold up their little children in their arms to look at Caleb as he walked down the street! . . . Caleb had the distinguished reward of being put upon the hardest service. That is always the lot of the most faithful servant of God. There were three huge warriors in Mount Hebron; no one will undertake to kill them, except it be our good old friend Caleb. These Anakims, with their six toes on each foot, and their six fingers on each hand, are to be upset and driven out. Who is to do it? If nobody else will offer himself, here is Caleb. Nay, he does not merely allow himself to be sent upon the service, but he craves permission to be allowed to take the place, the reason being because it was the worst task of the war, and he panted to have the honor of it. Grand old man!

C. H. Spurgeon, “Caleb—The Man for the Times”

David: A Shakespearean Character

David, in a word, is human, fully, four-dimensionally, recognizably human. He grows, he learns, he travails, he triumphs, and he suffers immeasurable tragedy and loss. . . . David is almost, or perhaps more than, a Shakespearean character. Even at the height of his career, he is not a religious symbol, but the embodiment of worldly success. At the nadir of his fortunes, he embodies the fragility of achievement, the importance of the right life rather than a high station. But at almost all times, he is a secular icon—a character so extraordinary and yet so very human, so realistically fallible, that the innocent reader almost inevitably empathizes with him. His deeds are divorced from miracle, his relationships are with other people, whether friend or foe, rather than with his God.

Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King, 6

Vashti’s Womanly Self-Respect

To Vashti, the command of the king—her husband, who alone had the right to gaze upon her beautiful form—was most revolting to her sense of propriety, and knowing what the consequences of her refusal to appear before the half-drunken company would entail, refused in no uncertain terms to comply with the king’s demand. She stood strong in womanly self-respect and “refused to come at the king’s commandment.” Her noble scorn at her threatened indignity deserves finer recognition. What the king sought would have infringed upon her noble, feminine modesty, therefore she had every right to disobey her wine-soaked husband. . . . All praise to the heroic Vashti for her decent disobedience.

Herbert Lockyer, All the Women of the Bible, 166

The Biographical Bible

Pages

Benaiah

2 Samuel 23:20-21

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