25 Interesting Facts about Bible You Didn’t Know

Methuselah, from the Bible, is accredited as being the oldest person to have ever lived, dying at the age of 969 years, but it is thought that this is a mistranslation and that he was 969 lunar months old when he died (78.5 years old) since early Judaic tribes used lunar months to gauge time.

2. Laws mentioned in the Bible required farmers to leave parts of their fields un-harvested for strangers, a practice that still exists in parts of the world.

3. In 1631, two London bible printers accidentally left the word "not" out of the seventh commandment, which then read, "Thou shalt commit adultery." You can buy a copy for over $90,000.

4. Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate birthdays because the only two accounts of birthday parties in the Bible resulted in the murder.

5. Swearing on the Bible is against the Bible.

In 2011, British calligrapher Donald Jackson and a team of calligraphers completed what is believed to the first handwritten Bible with illustrations since the invention of the printing press. It took 12 years to complete and cost $8 million.

7. In the Old Testament, Yahweh (God) actually sues Israel for breach of contract (the Sinai covenant). It is the only instance of God initiating a lawsuit against humans in the Bible.

8. The Seraphim (6 winged Angel of the Bible) could mean a Fiery Serpent because the word Seraph is a synonym for serpent. God could have an army of dragons. It is a subject of debate among theologians.

9. Jesus had four brothers and several unnamed sisters (mentioned in the gospels and other sources) and the Church has attempted to discredit this theory ever since the Bible existed.

10. The Bible says that the devil is handsome, while Jesus is not.

In the Bible, God sent two bears to murder 42 children because they had mocked a man for being bald.

12. There is a "Gospel of Judas" not found in the Bible that speaks of Judas as the only one of Jesus' disciples who fully understood his teachings. He turned Jesus over to the Romans because Jesus asked him to.

13. Hell in modern Bible translations refers to "Gehenna", an actual place outside Jerusalem where it is thought they used to burn garbage and thus there was always a fire burning there. Also, bodies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed.

14. There is an organization that illegally parachutes copies of The Bible into North Korea.

15. According to the stories in the Bible, God killed a minimum of 2,400,000 people, while Satan killed only about 10.

King David from the Bible offered 200 foreskins for his wife's hand in marriage.

17. Slave Bible is an abridged version of the bible made for slaves, in which the enslaved Israelites never left Egypt and lines that condemn slave owners were removed.

18. In the Bible, The New Testament mentions that from Heaven will descend an enormous city named New Jerusalem made of "pure gold, like clear glass" and gives its specific dimensions, 1.9 million square miles. If rested on the Earth, its ceiling would be inside the exosphere.

19. Satan was never named "Lucifer." The only use of the word Lucifer in the Bible was by Isaiah, who was referring to the fall of Babylon, not Satan.

20. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that exactly three magi came to visit the baby Jesus, nor that they were kings, or rode on camels, or that their names were Casper, Melchior, and Balthazar.

The most shoplifted book in the world is the Bible.

22. Thomas Jefferson made his own Bible out of scrapes from the New Testament in order to focus on the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth instead of impossibilities like the miracles and resurrection.

23. There is a 9th century Germanic 'Bible' which presents Jesus as a warrior-king.

24. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute or even overtly sexual.

25. There is no physical description of Jesus in the Bible.