Religions within the Bible Trivia Quiz

Answer: When Enosh was born

"Adam made love to his wife again. She gave birth to a son and named him Seth, because she said, 'Elohim has given me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.'
A son was also born to Seth, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to worship Yahweh" (Genesis 4:25-26, Names of God, NOG).

Other translations of verse 26 provide similar ideas, but some refer to prayer instead of worship. For examples, the Expanded Bible (EXB) says, "Seth also had a son, and they named him Enosh. At that time people began to pray to [call on the name of] the Lord." The Message (MSG) translation uses both: "And then Seth had a son whom he named Enosh. That's when men and women began praying and worshiping in the name of God."

According to the Bible, Adam was the first man. He wasn't exactly born because God created him directly, as an adult, from the dust. Adam's son Seth, his son Enosh, and Enosh's descendants are sometimes called "the righteous line" because, according to Luke 3, Jesus Christ (God in the flesh, based upon John 1 and other parts of the Bible) descended from them. As Luke 3:38 states, Jesus was the son of Enosh; the son of Seth; the son of Adam; the son of God.

Answer: A golden calf

Exodus 32 states that Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments from the LORD, but the Israelites thought that he was gone too long. They thought that he was dead or that something happened to him, so they made themselves a golden calf. Well, actually, Aaron made the idol, but they asked him to. Interestingly, the people apparently thought that they were worshipping the LORD by worshipping the idol, but they were worshipping Him completely wrong. According to verse 6 of the Names of God translation, they even performed an orgy! You can imagine Moses's anger when he came down from the mountain and saw that the people had already broken the laws he just received. One might argue that they were ignorant so they were innocent, but that's not the way that God's laws work.

According to Numbers 21, God told Moses to build a bronze serpent. It wasn't an idol but rather a form of God's salvation because it healed people who were bitten by snakes. As far as I am aware, there is no silver monkey in the Bible.
Here's a funny bit of trivia: I threw "a red mermaid" in the mix because I began thinking about Disney's red-haired mermaid Ariel. I don't know why.

Answer: Solomon

Solomon was supposed to be the wisest man who ever lived (see 1 Kings 3 and 4), but when he grew old, he didn't act wise at all. 1 Kings 11 states that he took many, many idolatrous wives and concubines from polytheistic cultures and instead of at least telling them about Yahweh, he allowed the women to turn his heart away from the LORD. In other words, he didn't convert them; they converted him. Solomon did what the LORD considered evil, by worshipping Astarte (a goddess of the Sidonians), Milcom (an idol of the Ammonites), Chemosh (an idol of Moab) and Molech (also an idol of the Ammonites). It's actually possible that Milcom, Molech, and Chemosh were the same deity, but just worshipped under different titles or different cultures.

The LORD let Solomon know that He was going to punish him for his wickedness, which I have no doubt included the horrible murder of children--most likely his own children that he had with those 700 wives and 300 concubines. (Insert sad face here!) Nonetheless, Solomon had at least one living son, Rehoboam, who became king after Solomon died. God told Solomon that He was going to rip the kingdom from Rehoboam and this was fulfilled in 1 Kings 12. Tragically, however, Jeroboam, the man who replaced Rehoboam as the king, eventually became idolatrous too!

Answer: True

Nebuchanezzar made a 90 feet high golden statue and expected everybody to worship it. The text doesn't clearly say this, but some readers believe that the statue represented the king himself because he saw himself as a god. But he was also a polytheist, a worshipper of Babylonian deities. When he find out that the three Hebrew men weren't worshipping the statue or the other gods, he was livid and demanded that they be thrown into a blazing hot furnace. The three men boldly told the king that their God would rescue them from the fire, but even if He didn't, they still wouldn't bow down to the statue or gods. The comment made him even angrier and he demanded that the fire be made even hotter than it usually was.

"Then Nebuchadnezzar was startled. He sprang to his feet. He asked his advisers, 'Didn't we throw three men into the fire?'

'That's true, Your Majesty,' they answered.

The king replied, 'But look, I see four men. They're untied, walking in the middle of the fire, and unharmed. The fourth one looks like a son of the gods.'

Then Nebuchadnezzar went to the door of the blazing furnace and said, 'Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego - servants of the Elah Illa-ah [Most High God] come out here ... Nebuchadnezzar said, 'Praise the Elah of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He sent his angel and saved his servants, who trusted him. They disobeyed the king and risked their lives so that they would not have to honor or worship any god except their own Elah. So I order that people from every province, nation, or language who say anything slanderous about the Elah of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego will be torn limb from limb. Their houses will be turned into piles of rubble. No other god can rescue like this.'

Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to higher positions in the province of Babylon" (Daniel 3:24-28, Names of God).

Okay, so his decree about tearing people from limb to limb was a bit extreme. Yet he did praise the LORD. "Elah" is the Aramaic word for "God". The Hebrew word is "Elohim". Well, actually, "Elohim" is Hebrew for "gods". A plural word used for a singular God has led several Christians to believe that the Old Testament supports the Trinity.

Answer: Elijah

The wicked king of Israel, Ahab, went to meet Elijah on Mount Carmel. The Israelites had been worshipping false gods, including Baal, and there was a drought in the land. Elijah told the Israelites that he was the only prophet of Yahweh left (during that time) because Jezebel, Ahab's evil wife, had killed the rest of them. Nonetheless, he dared the 450 prophets of Baal to take a bull and sacrifice it to Baal. He did the same thing for the LORD. Elijah said that whoever responded with fire was the true God (Elohim). Sure enough, according to the Bible, Baal never responded, but the LORD did. After Elijah told the people to kill the wicked prophets of Baal, the drought ended.

What Elijah said in verse 21 is similar to what Jesus said in Matthew 6:24 when He said that nobody can serve two masters or lords.

Answer: "I can guarantee that if they are quiet, the stones will cry out."

Luke 19 states that Jesus asked two of His disciples (we can only speculate who they were--maybe Peter and John?) to bring Him a donkey. Jesus knew that nobody else had ever sat on the donkey before (see verse 30). Jesus told His disciples that if anybody asked them why they needed the donkey, to answer, "The Lord needs it" (also verse 30).

So Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. A large crowd of people, which evidently included many disciples of Jesus--I'm going to assume that they were males and females--started praising and worshipping. There were some Pharisees in the crowd, too. The Pharisees were offended by the worship and told Jesus to rebuke His disciples, but far from rebuking them, He actually responded with the interesting quote.

After this event, Luke reports that Jesus wept for the people of Jerusalem, because their temple would be destroyed and they would be judged. Jesus lamented, "One stone will not be left on top of another, because you didn't recognize the time when God came to help you" (verse 44, Names of God).

Answer: Samaritanism

John 4 includes Jesus having a conversation with a Samaritan woman. It was very unusual for a Jewish man to talk to Samaritans, let alone a Samaritan *woman*! But Jesus didn't care about that. He ended up convincing the Samaritan woman that He was the Messiah and then she went and told many other Samaritans about Him. They then heard Jesus speak themselves and they believed in Him. "Many more Samaritans believed because of what Yeshua said. They told the woman, 'Our faith is no longer based on what you've said. We have heard him ourselves, and we know that he really is the savior of the world'" (John 4:41-42, Names of God).

The Samaritans were mixed race; half-Israelite and half-Assyrian. In addition, they had their own religion. For both of these reasons, most of the Jews hated them. Regarding Judaism and Samaritanism, the biggest difference was that the Jews believed that they were supposed to worship on Mount Zion, while the Samaritans thought that the correct mountain for worship was Mount Gerizim. Even today, the religion of Samaritanism is similar to Judaism, but it still has its distinctions.

Even though Jesus showed kindness to the woman, He disagreed with the religion of Samaritanism. He told her that Samaritans don't know who or what they worship and that salvation comes from the Jews (this was probably a reference to Himself, because He descended from Jews). However, He also told her that a day would come when people wouldn't worship the Father on either Mount Gerizim or Mount Zion.

Answer: False

First of all, these groups followed two different forms of Judaism. The statement is false because it was the other way around. The Pharisees believed in angels, demons, afterlife, and resurrection of the dead (but not Jesus's, apparently). The Sadducees didn't believe in anything supernatural or spiritual. While the Sadducees only followed the Written Law or the Torah, the Pharisees followed the Torah and the Talmud or Oral Law.

Jesus was often at odds with both the Pharisess and the Sadducees. Like Pharisees, He believed in afterlife, angels and demons, and resurrection. In fact, much of His ministry involved casting out demons from people. Unlike the Pharisees, however, Jesus condemned some Jewish traditions. Like the Sadducees, Jesus agreed with only accepting the Word of God, but again, He believed in the supernatural. According to the New Testament, Jesus came from Heaven and resurrected Himself.

Answer: Because Paul spoke much more than Barnabas did

They thought that Paul was Hermes because he did most of the speaking. Hermes was considered the messenger of the Greek gods. The people thought that Paul and Barnabas were gods because of a miracle that they performed. They told a lame man to "stand up" and he stood up! Of course, the apostles would say that God worked through them, not that they were gods. When Paul and Barnasbas realized that the people were worshipping them, they were horrified and told them to stop. They told them that they were mortal human beings just like them and that they didn't deserve worship. Paul and Barnabas told the people that they came to preach the good news about God to the people, but even though they told them that, the people continued to sacrifice to them! Wow!

So Hermes was the Greek gods' messenger, but did you know that the LORD also had a messenger? Most English Bible translations use "angel", but the original Hebrew word is "malak", which as several sources have noted, is better translated as "messenger". A "malak" messenger could be a human, an angel like Gabriel, or any kind of messenger; the context will tell you. The Hebrew word "cherub" refers specifically to a heavenly being normally called an angel.

Below are a few verses about the LORD's messenger. I'm NOT going to be dogmatic about my beliefs here. In fact, I'm not even going to say how I interpret these. You are free to interpret them as you want.

Exodus 23:20-21, Names of God: In the context, God is talking to Moses about His Messenger and the Israelites.
"'I'm going to send a Messenger in front of you to protect you on your trip and bring you to the place I have prepared. Pay attention to him, and listen to him. Don't defy him, because he will not forgive your disobedience. He is acting on my authority.'"

Isaiah 63:8-9: In the context, Isaiah is writing about God and the Israelites, as an allusion to Exodus.
"He said, 'They are my people,
children who will not lie to me.'
So he became their Savior.
In all their troubles he was troubled,
and he was the Messenger who saved them.
In his love and compassion he reclaimed them.
He always held them and carried them in the past."

Answer: The serpent

Revelation 13 describes what is sometimes called "the unholy trinity". The first creature mentioned is the serpent or Satan. Most translations use "dragon" instead of "serpent". He is depicted as a perversion of the Father. He gives authority to the first beast, who is typically titled "the Antichrist".

The first beast or Antichrist looks (probably figuratively) like a leopard with bear's paws and a lion's mouth. He also has seven heads with ten horns and ten crowns on the horns. According to Revelation, everybody who isn't in the Lamb's Book of Life will worship Satan and the Antichrist.

The third of the unholy trinity is the second beast (remember that we have the serpent, the first beast, and the second beast). He is the perversion of the Holy Spirit, or should I say, he is the unholy spirit. He is typically called "the false prophet". He looks like a lamb, but speaks like a serpent. He causes people to want to worship the Antichrist, the first beast. The false prophet marks people with 666.

According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary, an archaic definition of "dragon" was "a huge serpent".