Humor in the Bible

The Bible speaks to every aspect of human life, including humor. Part of our problem in seeing humorous elements in the Bible is because we are reading it in translation. Oftentimes, humor is one of the hardest things to translate.

One of my coworkers, a man from Gujarat State in India, will tell me a joke and burst out giggling before he can deliver the punchline. Often, my response is "Huh?"

All languages, even those from the same language group (ie. Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, Uto-Aztecan, Muskogean, Slavic, etc.) are structured differently from all others. As similar as English and German are, there are still things which can be easily expressed in one language but which are totally obscure in the other. For languages with entirely different ancestries the phenomenon is amplified.

Koine Greek (the popular "people's Greek" of the New Testament, as opposed to the classical literary Attic Greek, is concerned more with types of action (ongoing, conditional, intended, completed, etc) than with what English speakers understand as tense (past, present, and future).

Ancient Hebrew, a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic family, is based on three-consonant root words (and a few two and four letter ones). The roots are made into nouns, adjectives, and verbs by adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes. The word, "Hebrew," is derived from "YBR," "to cross over." As one could guess, humor in Hebrew texts would be expressed very differently than in English.

In my ongoing series of posts on religious humor (see the Labels list below and look for the lightbulb jokes) I will begin including humorous scriptural verses stating their literary type and explaining why the verse is considered to be humorous, which does not always mean Young Frankenstein type roll on the floor laughing out loud funny. That's not its purpose.

A sentence on the Jews for Jesus website states it well: "The purpose of the Bible is not to entertain, but to instruct and so its subtle humor serves a purpose - to show people what ought to be in comparison to what exists." http://jewsforjesus.org/publications/issues/17_08/04

The humor in the Bible is expressed in several ways, which include insults, parables, riddles, puns, crude humor, subversive wit, sarcasm, irony, parallels and contrasts, and hyperbole. The humor is never there just for its own sake; it always serves a purpose. It makes you think.