Divine Humor
God's Top Seven Jokes from the Bible
tldr;
If humans are made in God’s image, and humans have a sense of humor then, a forteriori, God must have a sense of humor.
One of the best farces in the Bible must be when Elohim asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, after making it pretty clear to Abraham that Isaac was the fulfillment of all Their promises. After Abraham, like a shmuck, goes ahead and tries to sacrifice Isaac, Yahweh has an angel stop him at the very last moment, like dude why don’t you just sacrifice a goat instead, and says, with irony, “Now I know you are a god-fearing man”.
I remember after some Arab terrorist named Yahya was in the news, Jon Stewart made fun of the name, “comically” mispronouncing it “Ya-ya” (correct pronunciation is Yahiyah). And yet the Jews have become far too precious about a truly goofy name: Yahweh. Numorous theologians and schizos (not mutually-exclusive categories) have come up with numerous etymological, numerological, historiographical theories for the so-called tetragrammaton (oooh, sounds serious). But I like to think God was just having a little joke with Moses who was probably so excited to associate a couple of meaningless, silly-sounding consonants with the supreme deity. I like to imagine Them going home after drilling it into Moses’ thick skull what he actually needed to do, and having a good laugh about that one.
God gives Jonah a sunburn because he’s being an incorrigible hater, and Jonah becomes suicidal because he gets a sunburn, and because Nineveh repented and was spared.
Pretty much everything Samson did was funny, killing a bunch of people with a jawbone, finally just telling Delilah the secret to his strength after she repeatedly betrayed him, and a fitting end (not exactly funny, but in a Coen brothers sense, kinda still funny).
Job is every bum’s favorite story because it reminds us that it may really not be our fault that our lives our going to shit. But maybe one easy way to untie the hermeneutical knot is that this life really is like a shimmery shadow of the hereafter, and all the pain and struggle is..holographic, almost like the pain you feel when you lose at a board game, which in this life is real and sucks. And every dumbass in the world comes out of the woodwork to kibbitz, to offer their bad advice.
Plus, Job had his entire family die in disasters and then God gave him hemerrhoids too.
Jesus going into a nerd-rage at the temple.
Jesus lacking chill about almost every single thing. To be fair the prospect of crucifixion was probably not very chill. But yeah, is it possible he just got what his super-unchill self-serious personality led him to.