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You were doing the right thing. Reading straight through, not skipping around, not just landing on the verses that get printed on mugs. And then you hit a chapter that stopped you cold.
You read it twice to be sure you had understood it. You had. You sat there with your phone in your hand feeling a little sick, and then you noticed something almost worse than the chapter itself: nobody had ever mentioned it. Not in a sermon. Not in a study. Not once.
And a question showed up that you would never say out loud in a small group. If this is God’s book, why is that in it?
Stay with that question. It is a better question than you think, and it leads somewhere almost nobody expects.
The Disturbing Bible Passages Pastors Never Preach
Let me name a few of them plainly, without staging them for shock. If you have been reading, you already know which ones I mean.
- Judges 19. A woman is handed over to a mob by the man who was supposed to protect her, and she does not survive the night. The chapter does not look away, and it does not soften a single detail.
- Judges 11. Jephthah makes a vow before a battle and his own daughter is the one who walks out the door to meet him. The text says he did with her according to his vow. Readers have argued for centuries about exactly what that means, and the text never settles it.
- Genesis 19. Lot offers his two daughters to a crowd at his door to protect his guests.
- 2 Kings 2. A group of young people mock the prophet Elisha, and two bears come out of the woods.
- Psalm 137. A song that starts with one of the most beautiful lines of grief in all of literature and ends with a line about enemy babies that most worship leaders quietly stop reading three verses early.
You will rarely hear any of these read aloud on a Sunday. I want to be fair about why. It is not usually a cover-up. It is that a passage like Judges 19 cannot be handled responsibly in a twenty-minute slot between two songs, and most pastors know it. So it gets left alone, year after year, until a reader finds it by themselves with no one to talk to about it.
Which is probably how you got here.
Judges Tells You Exactly What It Thinks — In Its Own Last Line
Here is the thing almost every angry internet list about these chapters leaves out.
The book of Judges is not neutral about what it records. It says so out loud. One sentence shows up four times in the book, and every single time, it lands right next to something going badly wrong.
Twice it appears in full. The first time:
“In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” — Judges 17:6, KJV
And the last time, as the closing sentence of the entire book:
“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” — Judges 21:25, KJV
Now look at where those two sentences sit. The first one opens chapter 17. The last one closes chapter 21. Everything most people find unbearable in this book — including chapter 19 — happens between those two lines. A shortened version of the same sentence appears again at the start of chapter 18 and again at the start of chapter 19, right before the worst of it.
That is not an accident of editing. The horror is sitting inside a frame, and the frame is a diagnosis. The narrator is essentially standing beside you while you read, saying: this is what it looks like when nobody is answering to anyone. This is not the plan. This is the collapse.
Which brings up the distinction that this entire article turns on, and the one that almost every argument about these chapters gets wrong in the first sentence.
There is an enormous difference between what the Bible records and what the Bible commands.
Read Judges 19 again with that in mind and notice what is missing. There is no “and God said.” Nobody in the story is praised. Nobody is held up as an example. No instruction is given to anyone, anywhere, to do any of it. The chapter is reporting a crime, in a book that has just told you four times that the nation had stopped listening to God entirely.
It is worth remembering that the same book holds Deborah, who led an army because the general would not go without her. Judges is honest at both ends. It reports the courage and it reports the collapse, and it does not flatter anyone.
The One Place the Scribes Flinched — And They Left the Fingerprint on Purpose
This is the part I did not expect to find, and it is better than anything I was looking for.
Go three verses earlier, to Judges 18:30. It names the priest who set up an idol shrine for the tribe of Dan: Jonathan, son of Gershom, son of Manasseh.
In the Hebrew text, in the name “Manasseh,” there is a single letter — the letter nun — that is not written on the line with the others. It is raised. It floats slightly above the line, and it has been copied that way, raised, for a very long time.
Take that raised letter away and the name no longer reads Manasseh. It reads Moses.
Let me be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of detail people overclaim. Scholars do not agree on what the original said. Every Hebrew manuscript we have reads Manasseh. Some Greek witnesses and the Latin Vulgate read Moses. The most common explanation — common, not universal — is that the raised letter was added to put distance between Moses and a grandson who ended up running an idol shrine. Some scholars argue against that reading. It is genuinely unresolved.
But here is what is not in dispute, and it is the part that matters.
Whatever was going on, they did not erase anything. They did not quietly swap a letter and move on. They put the mark above the line — in the one position where every future reader for the next two thousand years would see it and ask why.
Think about what that means. A cover-up hides the seam. This one is circled in ink and handed forward on purpose. In the single place where the people copying this book may have flinched, they made the flinch permanently visible.
That is not the behavior of an organization managing its image. That is the behavior of people who believed they had no right to tidy up what they had been handed.
A Book That Keeps Its Worst Pages Is Not Managing You
Now run the whole thing backwards for a second.
Imagine you are assembling a set of documents to recruit people into a movement. You have final say over what goes in. Judges 19 is on your desk.
Cutting it costs you nothing. It is five pages. No one alive would ever know it existed. Removing it makes your book cleaner, easier to teach, and dramatically easier to defend. Every incentive in the world points one direction.
It is still there.
And so is Noah passed out drunk in his tent right after the flood. And David arranging a man’s death to cover up what he did with that man’s wife. And Peter — the one they built the whole early movement around — swearing on a cold night that he had never met Jesus, written down and copied and carried by Peter’s own friends.
Every group that preserved these texts had the motive and the opportunity to clean them up. Across centuries, with everything to gain, they did not.
So here is the turn, and I would sit with it for a minute if I were you.
That sick feeling you had reading Judges 19 is not a flaw you discovered in the Bible. It is the reaction the book was built to produce. You were supposed to be horrified. The narrator is horrified. That is the entire point of the sentence he wrapped around it four times.
And notice what that final sentence actually complains about. It is not “look how strong they were” or “look how bad other nations are.” The complaint is an absence. There was no king. Nobody was answering to anyone. Everyone had become their own final authority on right and wrong, and this — this — is what that place looks like from the inside.
Judges is not a book about God commanding horror. It is a book about what happens in a room God has been shown out of. And the rest of scripture, from that point on, is the story of God walking straight back toward that room instead of away from it.
A book that only kept its flattering pages would be a book that wanted something from you. This one keeps the pages that make it harder to believe. That is not the mark of propaganda. That is the mark of testimony.
What To Do With a Passage That Bothers You
You will hit another one. Probably soon. Here is what actually helps, and none of it costs anything or takes long.
Read the last verse of the book before you judge the middle of it. Biblical books are usually framed. The narrator’s verdict is often sitting in the opening or closing lines, and if you only read the chapter that upset you, you read the evidence and skipped the ruling.
Ask one question: does the text command this, or record it? Look for three things — does God speak here, is anyone praised, is anyone told to do this? If all three answers are no, you are reading a report of what people did, not an instruction for what you should do. That single question dissolves a surprising number of these passages.
Say the doubt out loud, to God, in plain words. Not a polished version. The actual one. If that feels like the last thing a faithful person should do, it is worth knowing that Job, Habakkuk, and half the Psalms do exactly that — and God kept every word of it in the book.
And if part of what is bothering you is not the ancient text at all but the people who handed it to you, that is a real and separate wound worth naming. The Bible does not pretend that one away either — it names religious leaders behaving badly, by name, in its own letters.
If you want to keep pulling at a specific passage, you can also work through it with our free Bible Answers assistant — it opens in ChatGPT, and it will not flinch at the hard chapters.
Actions To Take Today
- Open Judges 21 and read the very last verse. One line. Ten seconds. Then read the chapter that bothered you again knowing that is how the book ends.
- Run the three-question test on the passage you find hardest. Does God speak in it? Is anyone praised? Is anyone commanded? Write the three answers down.
- Tell one person about the chapter that unsettled you. Not to get it solved — just to stop carrying it alone. A text message counts.
Journaling Prompts
- Which passage was it, specifically? Write down what you actually felt when you read it, before you tried to explain it to yourself.
- What were you afraid the answer might be? Name the fear underneath the question, not just the question.
- Where else in your life do you handle hard things by keeping them out of the room instead of letting them be seen?
A Prayer For When the Bible Troubles You
God, I read something in your book that I did not know how to hold, and I have been carrying it around quietly ever since. I am not going to pretend it did not bother me. Thank you that you did not delete the pages that make you harder to explain — that tells me something about who you are. Help me stay honest with you instead of going quiet. And when I do not understand, keep me reading anyway.
One Question Worth Talking About
Do you think the church should read the hard chapters out loud on a Sunday, even without a tidy explanation ready — or does that do more harm than good? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Share This
- The book of Judges wraps its worst chapters in one sentence, four times: there was no king, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. That is not approval. That is a diagnosis.
- Anyone assembling a book to recruit people would have cut Judges 19 first. It costs nothing to remove and nobody would have known. It is still there. That is worth thinking about.
- There is a difference between what the Bible records and what the Bible commands, and almost every argument about the hard chapters gets that wrong in the first sentence.
Questions People Ask
Why do pastors never preach on the disturbing Bible passages?
Passages like Judges 19, Judges 11, and the end of Psalm 137 involve sexual violence, human sacrifice and calls for vengeance, and they cannot be handled responsibly in a short Sunday message with children present. Most pastors avoid them for practical and pastoral reasons rather than to hide them. The result is that many readers encounter these chapters alone, with no context and no one to ask.
Does the Bible approve of the violence it describes in Judges?
No. There is a difference between text that records an event and text that commands it. In Judges 19 God does not speak, no character is praised, and no instruction is given to anyone. The book repeats a single verdict four times — that Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes — and the two full versions of that sentence, at Judges 17:6 and Judges 21:25, bracket the exact section containing the worst material.
What does “there was no king in Israel” mean in Judges?
It is the narrator’s explanation for the chaos in the book. In Judges 17:6 and 21:25 the King James Version reads that there was no king in Israel and every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Shortened versions of the same line appear at Judges 18:1 and 19:1. It describes a period with no central authority and, more importantly, a people no longer consulting God — which the book presents as the cause of the collapse it records.
What is the raised letter in Judges 18:30?
In the Hebrew Masoretic Text of Judges 18:30, the letter nun in the name “Manasseh” is written suspended above the line rather than on it. Without that letter the name reads “Moses.” Scholars disagree on the original reading: all surviving Hebrew manuscripts read Manasseh, while some Greek witnesses and the Latin Vulgate read Moses. The widely held explanation is that the raised letter distanced Moses from a descendant who served an idol shrine — but rather than erasing the text, the scribes left the alteration permanently visible.
Should I skip the hard chapters when reading the Bible?
Reading them is usually better than skipping them, provided you read the whole book they sit in rather than the chapter alone. Biblical books are typically framed, with the narrator’s verdict placed in the opening or closing lines. Reading only the disturbing chapter means reading the evidence and missing the ruling. A simple test helps: ask whether God speaks in the passage, whether anyone is praised, and whether anyone is commanded to act that way.
