Instructions Not Included (Or Maybe They Were)
Open Judges 21 and you will eventually land on a passage where a group of men called the Benjaminites are told, in effect, to hide near a festival, wait for women to start dancing, then grab one and carry her off. The verse is 21:19–25, and it sits right there in a text billions of people treat as a moral foundation. What makes it stranger is that it is nowhere near the only passage like that.
Wait, How Many Methods?
A blogger named Ian McKenzie, writing on “Ian’s Messy Desk,” went through the Old Testament and catalogued 14 distinct, verse-cited methods by which a man could obtain a wife. The list was picked up by Neatorama on April 8, 2008. A version had appeared even earlier: on December 19, 1994, a piece titled “Top 16 Biblical Ways to Acquire a Wife” circulated on a humor mailing list at MIT, attributed to Meng Weng Wong. The same territory, revisited more than a decade apart, by people who clearly found something worth pointing out.
McKenzie’s approach is thoroughly deadpan. Each entry names a figure, cites a verse, and describes the procedure. The contrast between that flat tone and the content is where the dark comedy lives.
The Mechanics: A Sampler
Deuteronomy 21:11–13. Find an attractive prisoner of war. Bring her home, shave her head, trim her nails, give her new clothes. She is now your wife.
Exodus 2:16–21. Impress a man who has seven daughters by watering his flock. This is the Moses method.
Ruth 4:5–10. Buy a piece of property and receive a woman as part of the deal.
1 Samuel 18:27. Deliver 200 foreskins from your future father-in-law’s enemies. David used this to earn Saul’s daughter.
Genesis 29:15–30. Work seven years for a woman’s father. If he hands you the wrong daughter on the wedding night, work seven more. Jacob’s total: 14 years.
Hosea 1:1–3. Marry a prostitute. God instructs the prophet Hosea to do exactly this.
1 Kings 11:1–3. Make up for quality with quantity. Solomon is the cited figure. And then there is Judges 21:19–25, the Benjaminite festival method described above.
Why Does the Text Read This Way?
Biblical scholars draw a clear line between descriptive passages, which record what happened or what a particular era’s law permitted, and prescriptive passages, which state what must be done. McKenzie’s list collapses that distinction for comic effect. Some entries describe legally codified practices of the ancient Near East; the Deuteronomy 21 provision was a formal rule about captive women in wartime. Others, including the Benjaminite abduction and David’s arrangement with Saul, are narrative events the biblical text itself portrays as morally complicated. Westminster Seminary California has noted explicitly that items on McKenzie-style lists describe acts the Bible often presents as sinful, and that they are “in no way exemplary.”
Ancient Israelite marriage was generally a family-level transaction. Arranged marriages were standard, a dowry paid to the wife’s family was typical, and polygamy, while never formally condemned in the Old Testament, appears to have largely disappeared among Jews by the time of Jesus.
The Comedy Works Because the Distance Is Real
The list generates its effect by presenting ancient social structures as practical modern-day advice, which is absurd precisely because the cultural gap is so enormous. The same collection of texts that contains the Benjaminites’ festival raid also contains legal principles that shaped centuries of jurisprudence, complex poetry, and ethical frameworks still being argued over. Treating any ancient text as a flat instruction manual, whether to follow it or to ridicule it, flattens the material into something it never was. McKenzie’s list is funny and, if you follow the citations, accurate to what the text says. Both things can be true, and the fact that versions of this list have been circulating since December 1994 suggests a lot of people have found that combination difficult to set aside.