It's a Biblical exploration of the strange, fantastical and mysterious. From Leviathan to unicorns to UAPs, we're inspiring curiosity and awe as we see what these strange occurrences and observations in the Bible tell us about the Divine.
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In this episode:
[00:00] Introducing a little levity
[02:01] God-human hybrids
[05:18] Sea monster
[07:11] The talking donkey
[09:25] Horned beasts
[10:13] Giants
[11:39] Insanely old people
[14:08] Horned Moses
[15:59] Four-legged fowl
[17:14] Moses' body
[18:41] The walking dead (where did they go?)
[22:15] Cursed with hemorrhoids
[23:29] Close encounter of the third kind
[25:57] Expressing something of the Divine
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This episode posted on April 2, 2025
Episode Transcript:
Ryan Dunn [00:00:04]:
Welcome back to Compass, Finding Spirituality in the Everyday. This is the second top ranked deconstructing faith podcast. According to a, recent unsolicited email I got in my inbox, but rest assured your faith journey is in good hands. I'm Reverend Ryan Dunn, fellow spiritual seeker and a United Methodist minister. There's a lot of heaviness right now. It's the season of Lent as I record this, which carries a somber feeling to it as it's a season of self denial and contemplation and repentance. And then beyond that, there's just the world. And personally, myself and my family are in a season of mourning following the death of my father.
Ryan Dunn [00:00:48]:
I'm ready for a little levity is what I'm saying. And for many of us that involves our retreat into something fantastical, which I realize some people may say is the whole nature of religion, resurrection, all encompassing love, omnipresence. All these are some pretty fantastical ideas, right? Of course, I've been thinking about those ideas a lot during this season. And it's gotten me wondering about some of the other fantastical things that maybe we just miss or pass by in the Christian tradition. The strangely fantastical, it actually got me wandering down a rabbit hole about strange things recorded in the Bible. So on this episode of Compass, I hope you'll join me in scratching that itch and wandering deeper down the rabbit hole of exploring the strange fantastical, weird, and mysterious things written in the Bible that we often, well, overlook. I've actually got 12 fascinating creatures or situations that may seem like they're less from the Bible and more from something like a Tolkien novel. First, let's talk about God human hybrids.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:01]:
Genesis six one through eight says this, when people began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh their days shall be one hundred twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renowned. The lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the lord was sorry that he made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created, people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I'm sorry that I've made them. But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:08]:
That's the end of the passage. It goes on to describe the genealogy of Noah. Now this is all that we have about this. Figuring out exactly what is meant by sons of God and Nephilim requires conjecture. Some suppose that the sons of God are angels. So what we might have is a story of angels coming to earth, mating with women, and producing a race of renowned warriors who are called the Nephilim. But sons of God could merely refer to exalted type people. So what we have are righteous people who are intermingling with less than righteous people, which makes sense in the context of what comes after this passage, where God judges humanity and is disappointed in how things have turned out.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:58]:
There's kind of like this dumbing down in a sense of the righteous, the sons of God could also refer to mighty rulers, people who were enjoying this near God, like, notoriety or power on earth. So this story could be that the mighty rulers were mating with normal citizens and be getting a class of warriors. There's another proposed interpretation of this passage, albeit a less fantastical one. In the previous chapter of Genesis, you know, just before what I shared here, we get genealogies from Adam on down. Cain was one of Adam's children. Cain was the one who committed murder by killing his brother Abel. Seth then was a consequential son, another of Adam's children. And many consider Seth to be the inheritor of Adam's righteousness and holiness.
Ryan Dunn [00:04:52]:
So what you have then are two groups, those from Seth who inherited goodness and those from Cain who inherited the curse of Cain's actions. So symbolically, the women of Cain are tempting the men of Seth. The righteousness of Seth is being symbolically compromised in this story, and therefore, we're getting God's judgment. Alright. You want some more fantastical beasts and where to find them? Psalm one forty eight says this, quote, praise the Lord from the earth. You see monsters in all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy winds fulfilling his command, end quote. Then Isaiah 27 says this, quote, on that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent. Leviathan, the twisting serpent.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:47]:
And he will kill the dragon that is in the sea. And then there's this whole chapter of Job 41, which describes this creature, Leviathan, and it ends with this. On earth, it has no equal, a creature without fear. It surveys everything that is lofty. It is king over all that are proud. In one instance, Leviathan is described as having many heads. So it might sound startling to suggest that many through the ages believe that Leviathan refers to alligators. It would have to be like a major mutant alligator.
Ryan Dunn [00:06:23]:
Right? What's most likely happening is that the biblical writers are calling upon stories that may have been well known to the people of their time, but aren't really familiar to us today. There are Mesopotamian stories about the Leviathan. It represents the forces of chaos in these stories. So in the biblical accounts, we have God overcoming Leviathan or metaphorically overcoming the forces of chaos and evil. It might be like us today saying, well, God has the power to keep, I don't know, Thanos in check, or God is mightier than a fleet of nuclear submarines. It's a metaphorical comparison. Let's look at another fantastical beast. Did you know that Shrek's talking donkey is a biblical character? It's true.
Ryan Dunn [00:07:10]:
It's in numbers 22 verses 28 through 30 that says, then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey and it said to Balaam, what have I done to you that you have struck me these three times? Balaam said to the donkey, because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand. I would kill you right now. But the donkey said to Balaam, am I not your donkey which you've ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you this way? And he said no. The Balaam in this story was a prophet who could offer blessings and curses. Now a Moabite king promised a reward if Balaam cursed the Israelites. So Balaam was gonna curse the Israelites, but God kept making the donkey Balaam rode turn aside. Three times actually.
Ryan Dunn [00:08:01]:
So Balaam continually beats the donkey each time. And then finally, I guess out of exasperation, the donkey opens its mouth to say something like, I've always taken you where you wanna go. Why do you think I might be turning aside now? It's a gut check moment for Balaam. Should he actually be going to curse people who God has proclaimed to be blessed? Balaam ultimately in the story relents and does not curse the Israelites, although still joins in a battle against the Israelites and dies. But, yeah. I guess that's not the message of the story. I suppose the donkey could have straight up spoken with Balaam. That's one way of actually looking at the story.
Ryan Dunn [00:08:41]:
It's also possible that Balaam heard the voice of his donkey in the same way that I kind of hear the voice of my dogs when they're scared by thunder. Like, they don't actually say anything, but I get it that they need to know that things are gonna be okay. My dogs offer me a sense of perspective too. When I'm often having some internal dialogues, I imagine their voices taking a certain point of view. And while it's most often the most reasonable point of view, and I know I'm far from the only person who does that, who gives voices to my dog and sometimes personifies their voices in my own internal dialogues. Please tell me I'm not the only one that does that. Anyways, there are other mythical creatures that may find their Genesis in the Bible as well, like the unicorn. Well, in early translations of the Bible, editors translated the word Re'em as unicorn.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:37]:
We don't know exactly what animal the word re'em refers to except that it was a horned animal. So I guess some people just assumed horned animal is gonna be unicorn. However, today, most translators bring that word into meaning ox. But if you prefer a unicorn version, you can stick with the King James version of the Bible and, you know, it's it's unicorns. The unicorn inspiring word appears in several places in the Bible, that word re'em. Also appearing in several places in the Bible are giants. Goliath is probably the most famous giant. It speculated that Goliath was about nine and a half feet tall, but there was another famous giant named King Og.
Ryan Dunn [00:10:22]:
Og was said to be the last of the Rephaim. And then as we're being given the story of Og, we're given the large dimension of Og's bed, which I suppose implies that Og was also quite a large individual. Now the Rephaim were noted to be early inhabitants of the land of Canaan, which is the land that the Israelites would eventually move into. They were noted to be large in stature. So when Israelite scouts went out to check out the land of Canaan before the whole nation would enter it, they said that the land was full of giants. In some cases, people have suggested that these giants were descendants of the Nephilim, who we were just talking about. Though, I don't know how that could be if the Nephilim were wiped out by Noah's flood. There does seem to be a biblical theme regarding giants, however, that they tend to represent our brutish and our violent tendencies.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:18]:
In another way, they're a metaphor like Leviathan. They're personifying something chaotic and debased. They are a force for the better parts of our humanity to deal with and overcome. And speaking of extraordinary dimensions, I would like to know how so many people of the old testament overcame the aging process and lived insanely long lives. According to the Bible, Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years. Seth, who we just talked about, lived nine hundred and twelve years. Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty nine years.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:58]:
Even in later stories, more, I guess, recent to our current age, Abraham lived a hundred and seventy five years. And actually, Abraham had a kid when he was 100 years old. Moses lived a hundred and twenty years. We have now no scientific evidence to support these long lives. So we can only, again, offer conjecture as to what was going on here. One idea is that the world was simpler. It was less polluted and people were just more attuned with living according to our natural state. So naturally people lived longer.
Ryan Dunn [00:12:33]:
Another idea is that people use different means for calculating years in those days. Then there's the idea that these ages don't represent individuals, but they actually represent clans or tribes. It was kind of like a a royal dynasty. So for nine hundred and thirty years, Adam's clan carried God's chosen blessing. Then it passed to Seth's clan for nine hundred and twelve years and so on. Clans carrying the names of individuals is common in the biblical tradition. For example, the 12 tribes of Israel, they're all named after sons of Jacob. Right? You've got Dan, Naphtali, Reuben.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:11]:
Or there's the notion that these were really special people highly blessed by God. And so perhaps these people lived for nine hundred years because, well, God blessed them to live for nine hundred years because they were so special. There also could be a bit of an intercultural competition at play in the recounting of these long lives. Other civilizations around the time also reported long lifespans for their venerated leaders. So just maybe the individuals sharing these biblical stories wanted their great figures to be on the level of those in the surrounding cultures. So numbers got inflated over time, kinda like this ever evolving primordial fish story where, you know, you pull one out that's eight inches and, a year later, it's a 12 inch long fish. Anyways, on the note of extraordinary individuals, Moses is a figure that's familiar to most of us. He of the 10 commandments and he of Pharaoh let my people go.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:15]:
But did you know that Moses had horns? Yeah. Here's the story. Moses goes up to Mount Sinai to meet with God. God commands the Israelites to follow the 10 commandments, which Moses dutifully chisels out to share with the people. This meeting with God transforms Moses' face. The word Geron is used to describe Moses' face upon his return from Mount Sinai. Here's the thing though. We don't really know how to translate Gaon.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:45]:
Today, most translations use a word like shown, but some translations use the word horns because of Gaon's similarity to the Hebrew noun Geiran, which means, you guessed it, horns. It's kinda like, okay. So now he has horns sprouting out, or he just has something emanating from his face. In medieval times, it wasn't uncommon to see Moses depicted with horns actually. Today, though, we might accept that something like, a sense of holiness emanated from Moses, even light emanated from Moses. Moses stuck out is what we're trying to say. Kind of like, I don't know, kind of like horn stick out. I don't know.
Ryan Dunn [00:15:30]:
Anyway, we also can do a little ancient cultural comparison on this passage as well. Gods and goddesses of the Near East often were depicted with horns. So it's possible that the horns were used to suggest that Moses had exceptional power or exceptional influence, kind of like these other gods in the surrounding cultures. In another head scratcher get get it? Okay. In another weird Bible reference, the Israelites were told not to eat four legged fowl. Specifically here, we're looking at Leviticus eleven twenty through 23. Now I searched for four legged fowl. There are no naturally occurring species of four legged foul.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:14]:
We've never found any. Sometimes a genetically mutated individual foul appears with four legs, but normally that is not the case. So was there a rash of mutated foul messing up the digestive systems in the early days of the Israelites? Well, that seems highly unlikely. More likely is that this is another issue of translation. While our earliest English translations cling to four legged fowl, later translations say that the prohibition is against winged insects that crawl on all fours. This isn't all the more illuminating, though, if you're a biblical literalist because insects actually have six legs. So it could just be that it's a familiar turn of phrase like we might say, you know, something like crawling around on all fours. But, yeah, it's one of those things that's unclear.
Ryan Dunn [00:17:11]:
While we're talking about Moses and Mosaic law, though, let's talk about the body of Moses. Jude one verse nine says this, but when the arch angel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, the Lord rebuke you. This is just kinda weird and not really something addressed anywhere else in the Bible. In fact, the accounts about Moses in the Old Testament don't offer an explanation of what happens to Moses body aside from it being buried in an unknown place. There was a bit of folklore that the angel Michael and the devil argued with one another about Moses's burial. It's possible that the story had Michael guarding the body and the devil trying to steal it for some reason. But what happens in the story is that Michael would not slander the devil. Instead, Michael was trusting God to rebuke the devil.
Ryan Dunn [00:18:10]:
In short, Michael didn't need to assume a role of judgment. The role of judgment was left to God, which is the lesson being brought up in the letter of Jude. The previous chapter was about pronouncing judgment on beliefs. And the writer, by recalling the story of Moses's body, is suggesting that it's not our human role to judge, it's God's role to judge. But while we're talking about dead bodies, can we also talk about the walking dead? The Bible has several people thought to be dead returned to life. There is of course Jesus, that's the big one, yay resurrection. There's also Lazarus, there's Jairus's daughter, there's the kid who fell asleep during a sermon and fell out of a window. These are all individuals, but apparently there was also a night of the living dead recall of the previous dead in Matthew twenty seven fifty two.
Ryan Dunn [00:19:03]:
It says this, the tombs were also opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised After his resurrection, Jesus' resurrection, they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. Now this occurs as Jesus dies on the cross, at least the part about the tombs being opened. The event is wrapped up in the larger stage of events that culminates, of course, in Jesus's resurrection. It is the ultimate sign then of God's love surpassing death. It's weird though because first, we have this image of them crawling out of their graves like some kind of George Romero flick. Now this same chapter in Matthew says that there was an earthquake, so maybe they were maybe they were thrown out of their graves, kind of pushed out of their graves by the earth, but that doesn't do much to explain then how the dead are being seen walking around the city later on. And then what happens to them after they're seen? Do they go back to the ground? Do people cut off their heads out while the walking dead? Do they ascend to heaven as Jesus ascended to heaven? Are they still walking among us? That's spooky. What were they doing in the city? Were they just walking around? Were they trying to go back to life as normal? There are so many questions that come out of this.
Ryan Dunn [00:20:23]:
This one is really tough for me because it's presented in a literalistic manner. Right? It's a recalling of an event. And to us, it's a huge event, but it gets so little coverage in the gospel. This warrants so much more press, Matthew. So we can gather that the gospel writer is trying to make a point about resurrection. The saints are resurrected, but none of the saints are named. No more details are offered. And so maybe this was a vision of some kind, like a foretaste of the time when all saints will be recounted amongst the living.
Ryan Dunn [00:20:59]:
I think it would be a, just like a cool novel idea that would share an imagining of life after being resurrected for the people mentioned? Like what was life like for Lazarus? Could Lazarus remember any experiences of being dead? Did, did Lazarus his presence really freak people out? Now according to tradition, Lazarus had to flee Judea because the authorities wanted him dead. It would have been a way to kind of put the rats on the whole Jesus story. It's like a grand cover up. So Lazarus went to Cyprus and later became a bishop in the early church. And also, he died again supposedly at the age of 60. Now in the Lazarus resurrection story, the mourners don't want to open the tomb for Jesus because the body would have been decomposing and smelly. What were the bodies of the resurrected people like in Matthew 27? Jesus' resurrected body still bore the scars of his execution, so did these other resurrected people bear the scars of decomposition? I'm not a King James version fanatic like some people, but I'll admit it's a far more colorful version than many of the modernized translations of the Bible that we utilize. Take, for example, this passage in first Samuel five six through 12.
Ryan Dunn [00:22:23]:
In the new revised standard version, which is I guess actually normally my version of choice, this passage recounts the citizens of the city of Ashdod of the Philistines being smote with a curse by God because they have taken the Ark of the covenant. In the new revised standard version, it says that the city is citizens, sorry, are struck with tumors in the King James version though. And actually in the Darby literal translation to which I sometimes defer to, it says the citizens are smoked with hemorrhoids in the King James version. It actually says that those hemorrhoids are in their secret parts. Now, you have to admit the idea of God cursing people with the plague of hemorrhoids is a little comical. It's comedic justice in a sense. But if we survey across all the translations, it seems likely that, well, in the end, Ashdod had a plague of STDs on their hands. One last weird thing to look at in the Bible and it has to do with aliens.
Ryan Dunn [00:23:25]:
Yeah. I'm just going to offer here that I did a whole episode of faith and extraterrestrial life. It was episode 85. It was fun. It started because I stumbled across some clips from a church radio call in show about UFO or, you know, UAP sightings. I then talked with a NASA consultant and an Episcopal priest as well as an astrophysicist and theology professor. So interesting. How does extraterrestrial life bear out theologically? So check it out if you're into that stuff.
Ryan Dunn [00:23:56]:
Anyways, there was a particular passage that I didn't mention in that episode that I'm gonna pull out here. It is the passage that conspiracy theorists will point to as evidence that extraterrestrials have been contacting us for millennia. It's Ezekiel one. It actually spills over to Ezekiel two, well, and beyond that actually. It paints the picture of heavenly beings appearing in the sky, and they're surrounded by various craft, which might be described as flying saucers, and the text that calls them wheels or rings. There's a lot of bright lights and there's strange noises, and it sounds a bit like what some today have recounted when they retell their stories of close encounters. However, the beings are described as having four faces, each of which represents an animal that we know well on earth. And Ezekiel for sure interprets the vision as being a message from God, one in which Ezekiel is instructed to be a prophet to the exiles of Israel.
Ryan Dunn [00:24:55]:
It's a personal vision. Ezekiel says he was among other people when the vision came to him, but he doesn't indicate at all that other people saw it too. He does seem to be transported during the vision, however, perhaps by an alien craft. Well, hardcore theorists looking for more biblical evidence of alien life might also suggest that our friends, the Nephilim, who we talked about in the very beginning, are products of human and alien, cross pollination, so to speak. And while we today can look back at all this stuff and make suggestions about extraterrestrials being present in these stories, the actual participants didn't seem to understand it that way. They were having an encounter with the divine. And, you know, here's a kind of lesson that I might infer from looking at these strangely fantastical Bible accounts. They're often offered by people who are struggling to comprehend and express the fantastical realities of their soul.
Ryan Dunn [00:25:56]:
And that's not easy to communicate. And when I look at these stories, I'm reminded that there are really two ways of looking at the Bible. This is according to my former professor Craig Hill. He noted that there are inductive and deductive mindsets when addressing or reading the Bible. A deductive view says there's a God. God gives us the Bible. Then that Bible is broken up into our different parts and stories like the Gospels and the book of Daniel and creation stories. And each part presents God trying to tell us something.
Ryan Dunn [00:26:30]:
It becomes very difficult to utilize deductive readings for understanding these fantastical passages that I've shared because we would have to accept these stories as literal recollections and accounts. An inductive view says that we have these different stories. They're pulled together to form the Bible, which in turn then tells us something about God. So to oversimplify, deductive viewpoints ask, what is God telling us while inductive viewpoints ask, what is this telling us about God? And so these stories and accounts become something more than fantastical, hard to believe stories if we take an inductive viewpoint. Instead, they tell us about the strangeness and majesty of the divine. They reintroduce us to mystery. They befuddle us and invite our curiosities. They encourage us to learn more.
Ryan Dunn [00:27:24]:
So I hope that this whimsical episode has been an invitation for you to maybe learn a little bit more. I appreciate your indulgence in digging into this rabbit hole. It's been good for my soul. And, hey, I mentioned episode 85 about UFOs and theology. Got other kind of, like, sidebars of curiosity on this podcast. Episode 95, an ongoing history of hell might be a good follow-up here or episode one twenty one about Israel and the end times. That might be a curiosity engaging listen as well. I'm Ryan Dunn.
Ryan Dunn [00:27:59]:
New episodes of compass are in the works. Speaking of end times, we have an episode about the evolution of end times theology on the way, as well as some spiritual practices that you're gonna wanna give a try in 2025. Next episode is gonna be out in two weeks. Again, on a Wednesday, compass is a production of United Methodist communications. You can find out more, check out episodes, check out show notes at umc.org/compass. Be well and party down. Peace.
