Before you read any further, do this: Shut your eyes and picture God.

Did you perhaps envision the white-haired, bearded mesomorph with the angry look? Or a comical drawing of the same? My guess is that many readers will think of Michelangelo’s God or a cartoon version of such. It is not really a very good image, in terms of Scripture, in terms of theology, or even in terms of tradition. (For the first 1500 years of Christian history, God really was not pictured this way.)

Nor is this picture very appropriate for most of us personally: most of us have long since discarded the image of a white, old male as God.

But the image lingers, partly because Michelangelo did it very well. But also, and I think more so, because of the cartoon version: it’s funny.

And that is scripturally relevant. The Old Testament is, in fact, full of humor: from witty wordplay to ribald stories to broad physical comedy to a kind of tragicomic existentialism, it’s there.

Talented comics know this. Bill Cosby got famous 40 years ago with his bit about Noah. Cosby saw the absurdity of this man in the middle of the desert making a big boat because “the Lord” talked to him. Woody Allen has a terrific version of the Abraham and Isaac story based on the same idea: “God told you to do what with me?” Shel Silverstein has a beautiful cartoon entitled “The Twenty Commandments.” The second 10 are all pretty good, like “you shall not compromise,” “you shall not seek rewards,” and “honor the children” — but the slab is too heavy, so Moses breaks it in two to make it bearable.

All Cosby, Allen and Silverstein have done is bring out the humor inherent in the material. The Bible really is very funny. It is of course many other things as well, but it really is funny.

Many Christians don’t see the humor, however. Many think of Scripture as solemn, unsmiling material. The King James Version hasn’t helped: the playful and comic aspects that are indisputably there in the real thing (the Hebrew text, that is) have a hard time getting through the ornate-sounding cadences of that old translation. But even in contemporary versions, the humor, so strong an element in the real thing (I would say, an indispensable element), seems muted.

So, to start with, let’s get past the word barrier. Let’s look at an Old Testament passage where the humor is in the action. Try reading the story of Balaam and his ass in Numbers 22. Read it in the most modern language version you can find: phrases like “the Lord’s anger was kindled against him” will only get in the way.

Now as you read the story, imagine what it would look like if you could watch the action. Imagine it as a silent movie or a television spot with the volume on “mute.”

Here’s this guy riding along on his ass. This angel appears, and the ass can see it though the man can’t — like a dog who hears or smells things beyond our range. So the ass swerves off into the ditch, and the man smacks him. They go on a little further, and the road passes near a wall. The angel again gets in the way between the walls, and the ass tries to avoid him again. The man smacks the ass a second time. Finally, the road narrows to a pass and the angel blocks the way completely. The ass swerves into the wall, and smashes the man’s foot; the ass gets it a third time.

Now the ass finds words, and says, “Hey! What are you smacking ME for three times?”

The man says, “Because you keep trying to make me look stupid, that’s why, and if I had a sword, I’d kill you.”

Then the ass says, “Look, all these years have I ever tried to make a fool of you? Haven’t I just let you ride me? What kind of a thank you is this you give me?”

And then the man’s eyes open, and he sees the angel — and remember this is an Old Testament angel, the real thing, and they are scary and dangerous — in fact, the angel has his sword in his hand and is intent on doing to the man what the man wishes he could do to the animal.

There’s some grim danger here, and some of the startling theology typical of the Torah. But also there’s humor — unmistakable, slapstick humor. How many stories have the funny business happen three times? How many involve dumb animals who turn out to be smarter than the humans? For that matter, how many funny stories have you heard involve talking animals? How many involve death and danger? Irony? The main character coming to his senses?

It’s all there. You could make a movie short of it with nothing but a trained animal a camera and the right leading man.

The words “funny,” “joke,” “laughter” appear nowhere in Scripture. But this means nothing for our purposes. We laugh at what is funny, not at the word funny. And what is funny is incongruity, impossibility. Read through a few of the Proverbs: they offer the most gentle humor in Scripture, so they are a good place to start to appreciate the Bible’s sense of humor (especially if you find the more outrageous things hard to take). You will find incongruity, absurdity, fun:

Death, danger are the “subjects” of slapstick comedy. What are some of the other subjects of humor? Think of a few jokes and of things the stand-up comics talk about. A persistent — maybe the most persistent — theme is sex. Ever hear a joke centered on sex? How about sex and age — ever heard a joke involving, say, an old man and sexuality?

Scripture has one in fact. It has God — Yahweh, that is, God in his most rounded Torah character — solemnly promising Abram (whose name means “father,” or even something like “Dad”) that he is about to become the father of many nations, that kings will spring from him, that his name will no longer be simply “Father” but “Father among Fathers.”

The only problem (ever hear those three words connected with humor before?) with this complex and extremely serious announcement on God’s part is that Abraham is 100 years old. People near the beginning of Genesis live for centuries, but by Abram’s day the era of super-advanced old age has ended (it peaked with Methuselah).

In Abram’s lifetime 100 years old means pretty much what it means now — you’re lucky to be there at all; don’t expect romance.

In other words, to get this story, to get the joke, you have to picture a 100-year-old man receiving this promise involving princely descendants, religious ritual and an act of sex with his 90-year-old wife.

If you had never read this story before, your reaction might very well be, “What is wrong with this Yahweh character?” Yahweh seems to be overlooking one very serious and very obvious obstacle to his elaborate predication. Doesn’t Yahweh get it?

Abram obviously does. He falls on his face laughing (Genesis 17:17), the first mention of laughter in Scripture. And Abram expresses himself how? Not by a prosy statement of fact, but with an ironic, rhetorical, Yiddish-style question: “At 100 years, I should be a father?”

Can’t you hear Henny Youngman or Mel Brooks or Jerry Seinfeld (depending on your own generation) deliver that line?

That little slip on Yahweh’s part happens more than once in Torah. Yahweh has several levels — at the deepest, he is the inexorable and profound intelligence that moves everything. But on the surface, God often acts like an absent-minded, bumbling, forgetful character. You have seen the type often in comedy — Shakespeare portrays him in several works, and Sherlock Holmes’ friend Watson fits the mold exactly. In Genesis, on the surface, so does Yahweh.

Re-read the story of Rachel and Leah — the romantic comedy they play with Jacob. Lots of silliness involving (again) sex goes on here, starting with Uncle Laban (how many comedies involve wily, plotting relatives, especially trickster uncles?) who gets the whole plot in motion by substituting Leah for Rachel in Jacob’s bed. And there’s a funny subplot paralleling the human antics involving fertility and animals (kind of like those funny movies that mix live action with cartoons — this one, like much in Genesis, being R-rated).

Speaking of Rachel and Leah: what’s in a name? Nowadays, in Western culture, not much. But most people invest lots of meaning in names. Read the passage in Genesis 30 where Leah and Rachel and their servant-girls (who are helping out in the pregnancy race — what are servants for, after all?) name their boys (and girls). It’s one word-play after another: from Reuben to Joseph, every name is a witty response to the circumstances of his birth.

The O.T. offers this from Genesis to Malachi, and the Hebrew language does it perfectly. It is, after all, a language that sounds like what it means, whenever possible — what literary people call onomatopoeic. Go back to the very beginning for a funny example: “In the beginning,” says the Authorized Version, “the earth was without form and void” — which sounds very stately. The Hebrew says this: “At first there was tohu-bohu” — wild and empty, a mess, a mixed-up rhyming mess.

Jacob’s name is “heel-catcher” or “man who supplants” or maybe simply “tricky.” And in fact his whole journey begins with a tricky act, a deceitful ploy where he tricks his father and cheats his brother. It is mean, and it is also very funny: Isaac and Esau both look like macho simpletons and Jacob is the wily Mamma’s boy who outsmarts them. This Jacob, who will have the vision of angels ascending and descending, who will father the tribes and who will bear the new name Israel — he begins life as a comical trickster.

He’s far from the only one. Samson is another — a great, colorful character, he’s a classic strongman, with exaggerated appetites (for wine and women, which prove fatal), and also an exaggerated sense of wit and play: his exploits with the Philistines, deadly though they are, are also full of something like horseplay (think of the antics with the foxes and the torches, for example). And of course his scenes with Delilah — “If you really, really loved me, you’d tell me where you get your strength.” “Alright already! Just take seven new bowstrings...” — are the stuff of farce. There is even a bitter joke involved in his death: “Those he killed in death were more than he had killed in life” (Judges 16:30, Moffatt).

Bitter jokes — Scripture is replete with them. Try reading the historical trilogy of the three kings of the united Israel — Saul, David and Solomon — from its opening in Samuel, when God has a little fun with the youthful prophet, all the way through to the bitter end, in 1 Kings 11. There is plenty of intrigue, violence, duplicity, scandal. But there is also plenty of humor: Saul among the prophets, the slow review of Jesse’s sons, the marital adventures of Solomon — the funny bits are definitely there. They really do in fact offer comic relief; otherwise these stories might be too sad for words.

Speaking of which, let’s do what comics do and get serious for a minute. Let’s return to the Abram story. The humor in the Old Testament is not just there for distraction. It’s much deeper than that — it is always rich with meaning and it always flirts with tragedy. Yet it can so often be resolved by asking the classic question: who gets the last laugh? Abram got the first laugh, the first in Scripture, but Yahweh gets the last one: “A son indeed, and let’s name him ‘laughter,’ since this is all so funny. And Abram becomes Abraham — 100 years old, and yet “father of fathers.”

Further Reading:
Barry Holtz, Back to the Sources (1984) offers three superb essays on the literature of what we call the Old Testament. Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Wisdom (1994), like his Jewish Literacy (1991), is solid and often very funny, as is the classic by Leo Rosten, The New Joys of Hebrew, revised by Lawrence Bush (2001). Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About the Bible (1998) emphasizes the humor almost to the point of flippancy, but given our heavy English tradition, that’s probably a good thing. What could it hurt?