Bible Synapse
If every word of God is pure, why does the Bible contain coarse language?
Hard question · Psalms, wisdom and the prophets · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
“The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.”
The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
“Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.”
Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.
The Assyrian Rabshakeh taunts the men on Jerusalem’s wall that they will be reduced to eating and drinking their own waste.
But Rab–shakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?
In Ezekiel’s parable, Jerusalem’s lust for her foreign lovers is described in crude sexual terms.
For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
God warns unfaithful priests that he will “spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts”.
Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it.
The objection
The Bible says that “Every word of God is pure” and that his words are pure as refined silver. Yet it contains passages about eating dung and drinking urine, crude sexual imagery in Ezekiel, and God threatening to spread dung on the priests’ faces. How can such words be called pure?
The answer
In these verses ‘pure’ means true and reliable, not polite. Proverbs 30:5 calls God’s word tserufah, ‘refined’ (from tsaraph, Strong’s H6884), the word for metal that has been smelted and tested until no dross is left. Psalm 12:6 makes the same comparison with silver purified seven times, and its word for ‘pure’, tahor, is the word used for the “pure gold” of the ark (Exodus 25:11). The psalm sets God’s words against people who speak “with flattering lips and with a double heart” (12:2). God’s words are pure because there is no falsehood mixed in them. That is a claim about their truth, not about their vocabulary.
The coarse passages fit that claim. In 2 Kings 18:27 the Bible is not commending the Rabshakeh’s words; it records them accurately, as an honest history must, to show the contempt of Judah’s enemy. Ezekiel 23, Habakkuk 2:16 and Malachi 2:3 are God’s own words, and they are meant to shock. Ezekiel’s parable shows how vile Jerusalem’s unfaithfulness to God was by comparing it to the most shameless lust. Habakkuk pictures the drunken conqueror stripped and disgraced. Malachi tells priests who offered careless sacrifices that God regarded their feasts as so much refuse. Hard words used to expose sin are not impure. They serve holiness, as a doctor’s blunt warning serves health. A Bible that spoke of sin only in soft words would be less truthful, not more.
Other answers Christians give
The words themselves
Some of the shock comes from the King James wording: in 1611 ‘piss’ was an ordinary word, and the WEB and BSB have ‘urine’ in 2 Kings 18:27. In Ezekiel 23:20 the Hebrew uses a cover-word, ‘flesh’ (basar, Strong’s H1320), for the private parts, and the KJV and WEB keep it, though the picture is deliberately graphic. The Rabshakeh’s own words were coarse. Keil and Delitzsch note that the Masoretes, the Jewish scholars who handed down the Hebrew text, set gentler expressions in their place for reading aloud: ‘their going forth’ and ‘the water of their feet’. The written text keeps what the enemy said; the reading spared the hearers.
From the classic commentators
Are pure words - That is, they are without any mixture of falsehood - for this idea is implied in the comparison which the psalmist makes when he says that they are like silver purified in the furnace, that is, from which all the dross has been removed.Albert Barnes, Notes on the Bible, on Psalm 12