If Absalom hadn’t worn his own hair, He’d ne’er been found a hanging there. “Money is the root of evil.” Paul said, I. Timothy, vi. 10, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” Gen. iii. 19. Commonly quoted “brow.” “Cleanliness akin to godliness.” Not in the Bible. Our Lord’s hearing the doctors in the Temple, and asking them questions, is frequently called his disputing with the doctors. A SCRIPTURAL BULL. In the book of Isaiah, chapter xxxvii. verse 36, is the following confusion of ideas:— Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and _when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses_. WIT AND HUMOR IN THE BIBLE. “Shocking!” many a good old saint will cry, at the very thought of it. “The Bible a jest-book! What godless folly shall we have up next?” No, the Bible is not a jest-book. But there is wit in it of the first quality; and a good reason why it should be there. Take a few specimens. Job, in his thirtieth chapter, is telling how he scorned the low-lived fellows, who pretend to look down on him in his adversities. They are fools. They belong to the long-eared fraternity. Anybody, with less wit, might come out bluntly and call them asses. But Job puts it more deftly (xxx. 7): “Among the bushes they _brayed_; under the _nettles_ they were gathered together.” If that is not wit, there is no such thing as wit. And yet the commentators don’t see it, or won’t see it. They are perfectly wooden when they come to any such gleam of humor. Take another instance—Elijah’s ridicule of the prophets of Baal. They are clamoring to their god, to help them out of a very awkward predicament. And, while they are at it, the prophet shows them up in a way that must have made the people roar with laughter. The stiff, antiquated style of our English Bible tames down his sallies. Take them in modern phrase. These quack prophets have worked themselves into a perfect desperation, and are capering about on the altar as if they had the St. Vitus’s dance. The scene (I. Kings xviii. 26, 27) wakes up all Elijah’s sense of the ridiculous. “Shout louder! He is a god, you know. Make him hear! Perhaps he is chatting with somebody, or he is off on a hunt, or gone traveling. Or maybe he is taking a nap. Shout away! Wake him up!” Imagine the priests going through their antics on the altar, while Elijah bombards them in this style, at his leisure. Paul shows a dry humor more than once, as in II. Cor. xii. 13: “Why haven’t you fared as well as the other churches? Ah! there is one grievance—that you haven’t had _me to support_. Pray do not lay it up against me!”