• a story in which Abraham was given a command by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. This was a test from God, a test to see if Abraham was willing to kill his only son as a sacrifice to prove his loyalty to God. In the end Abraham was told not to kill his only son and sacrificed a ram instead

• Absalom was the third son of King David.
• Contrary to his name, Absalom was not a man of peace. His personal vanity and disloyalty to his father due to selfish ambition caused great strife and open warfare in the royal family.
• Triggered a civil war b/w him and his father because of his selfish ambition, but in the end he was killed becasue he was not the one to succed King David.

• Armageddon, also known as Har-Megiddo in Hebrew, is the site of the final battle between God and Satan.

• Blind leading the blind is a phrase in the Bible, Matthew 15:14, that means the person in charge of the situation knows no more about it than those whom he is leading.
• "Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."

• The Burning bush is an allusion in which God appears to Moses. In this biblical scene God asks Moses, in the form of the burning bush, to be the leader of the Israelites and to bring them out of Egypt and out of opression.

• In the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy: “Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.”
• The expression "by bread alone" is frequently used to point out that worldly goods are not enough for most people; they need spiritual fulfillment as well.
  

• Cain and Abel were two brothers and the first sons of Adam and Eve
• Cain the oldest became the worker of soil and Abel was a shepherd. Both made an offering to God and Abel offering was accepted by God instead of Cain's. Cain became very jealous of Abel and that jealousy eventually turned to anger. So in his rage, Cain killed his own brother Abel and committed murder

• "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of G-d."
• Some Christians believe that Jesus uses the physical impossibility of a camel passing through a needle to hyperbolically express the difficulty of entering heaven.

• "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone."
• This phrase basically means be the first to attack a sinner. Jesus says this to the Pharisees in order to show that he is the only one without sin because they tried to discredit him by judging a women who a committed adultery.

• "Cast your bread upon the waters and you shall find it" (Ecclesiastes 11: 1-2)
• This is a saying from the Bible, which means that one's good deeds will be returned.

• Born in Tarsus, Saul was a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin. He was a Pharisee who persecuted the Christians with great hatred – he even led the crowd in stoning St. Stephen, the first martyr.
• He was sent to Damascus to continue his persecution of the Christian religion when he was visited by a bright light and this caused his conversion to Christianity.  He was baptized, changed his name to Paul. He was the Lord’s chosen instrument to take the faith to the Gentiles.

• Crucifixion is an ancient method of execution, whereby the condemned person is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross and left to hang until dead.
• Jesus Christ, is the most famous victim of crucifixion. And the image of Christ crucified on a cross, is for Catholic Christians the main symbol of their religion.

• Daniel is a figure appearing in the Hebrew Bible and the central protagonist of the Book of Daniel
• At a young age, Daniel was carried off to Babylon where he was trained in the service of the court.
• He became famous for interpreting dreams and rose to become one of the most important figures in the court and lived well into the reign of the Persian conquerors. He retained his high position there and had influence in the decision to restore the Jews to their homeland.
• He is commemorated as both a saint and a prophet.

• Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah and beloved of King David. After Bathsheba became his mistress and pregnant, King David had Uriah placed in the front lines to be killed in battle. David subsequently married her and as a result Solomon was their son of union.

• Punishment in which the offender suffers what the victim has suffered
• "Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Deuteronomy 19:21)

Four horsemen of the Apocalypse

• "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is a term used to describe four horsemen that appear in the Christian Bible in chapter six of the Book of Revelation. As the verses traditionally describe, the four horsemen are named after what they bring – Conquest, Violence, Famine, and Diseases – all four contributing to death in the Book.

• Gethsemane is a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem believed to be the place where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before Jesus' betrayel (crucifixion).

• a good samaritanin, a parable of Jesus, was only one of several bypassers to come to the aid of a Jew who had been robbed, beaten, and left to die on the road side.  The kindness of the Samaritan was particularly admirable because the Jews and the Samaritans were generally enemies.  Figuratively a Good Samaritan is one who goes out his way to perform acts of kindness to strangers in distress.

• According to Christian mythology, the Holy Grail was the dish used by Jesus at the Last Supper, it is also said to possess miraculous powers

• For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head
• To heap coals upon someone's head refers to an oriental custom in which a youth would carry hot coals in a container on his head and carry from house to house so the villagers could start their fires. This would warm the youth on a cold day as well.
• To heap coals of fire on someone's head, then, means to warm him, and, by extension, to bless him.
  

• Herod, the ruler of Isreal at the time, was the one who tried to have the infant Jesus Christ killed
• With reports of the birth of the "king of the Jews" (Matthew 2:2) it was entirely natural for his way of thinking to seek to kill the potential rival, including many other innocents in the effort. But even more suprising was the Herod himself had Jewish connections

• Isaac was son of Abraham and father of Jacob and Esau

• the Third patriarch and father of the twelve tribes of Israel. He is the son of Isaac and Rebecca, the grandson of Abraham and Sarah, and the twin brother of Esau.

• Jacob and Esau are the sons of Isaac; it was Esau who sold his birthright for a “mess of pottage” when he was too hungry to consider what he was throwing away. Thus in Esau's desperation Jacob gained the birthright of the firstborn and even tricked his father into giving him a blessing by dressing himself as Esau. 

• a ladder to heaven that Jacob sees in his dream where angels are climbing up and down it

• Jephthah was one of Israel's judges who made a vow to God in exchange for a victory against the Ammonites.
• He would sacrifice, as a burnt offering, the first person who came out his house to greet him on his return. As fate would have it, it turned out to be his only child, his virgin daughter. He kept his vow and sacrificed his only daughter.

• a New Testament prophet and relative of Jesus who declared, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”  Christians interpret this to mean that John was sent to prepare for the coming of the Messiah.
• John was called “The Baptist” because he called on his followers to demonstrate their repentance for sin by going through the ceremony of baptism. He was beheaded by King Herod for objecting to his illicit marriage.

• an Old Testament prophet called by God to preach in Nineveh.  He refused the call and fled his home by going on a sea voyage.  During a severe storm the sailors threw Jonah overboard suspecting that Jonah had angered God.  A big fish swallowed Jonah and saved him from drowning.  After the fish vomited Jonah up on the beach, Jonah submitted to God and went to Nineveh to preach.

• sons of Jacob 
• Joseph was the favored son and was given preferred treatment and a special jacket called the coat of many colors. His jealous brothers sold Joseph to slave traders who in turn sold him the pharaoh in Egypt. Joseph was promoted to a high office in the Egyptian government. As a result he was able to save his family from starvation during a famine in Israel. 

• Joseph after being sold resides in Egypt in prision for 2 years. After interpretating one of the pharaoh's dreams he was given viceroy over Egypt.
• As a result of this when his brothers came to Egypt because of the increaced famine, Joseph was able to save his family and revel himself to his brothers in the end.

• the traditional Passover meal that Jesus ate with his disciples the night before his death. The actions of Jesus at the Last Supper are the basis for the Christian Sacrament of Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, in which the faithful partake of bread and wine.

• a man brought back to life by Jesus after being in a tomb for four days

• was the nephew of the patriarch Abraham. He was the son of Abraham's brother Haran. He also resides in Sodom and Gomorrah which eventually is destoryed

the four wise men who visited Jesus soon after His birth

New Testament expression for material wealth/money

a female follower of Jesus from whom devils were driven

the Virgin Mary, who conceived Jesus while still a virgin

the great leader, lawgiver, and prophet of the ancient Israelites.  According to the Old Testament, Moses was born in Egypt, where the Hebrews were living as slaves.  He wads reared in the household of the pharaoh.  As a grown man he committed a murder and fled Egypt.  While living in exile Moses heard God speak to him from a burning bush, telling him to go to the pharaoh and demand that he release the Hebrews.  The pharaoh refuses and as a result God sent ten plagues to afflict the Egyptians.  Pharaoh finally let the Hebrews go and Moses led them out of Egypt across the Red Sea on a journey known as the Exodus.

he dreamed of a large, brilliant statue or idol standing before him. This statue had a head made of fine gold, a chest and arms of silver, a belly of brass, legs of iron, and feet made partly of iron and partly of clay.

Then a stone, cut out without the use of hands, enters the dream. It strikes the statue on its feet of iron and clay, smashing the entire idol into dust. As the wind blows the dust away, the stone becomes a great mountain that fills the whole earth.

God led Noah to build a great boat/ark, to take his wife and his son’s families, and a pair of each animal as safety from the earth’s flood.  After the flood he was commanded to repopulate the earth.

a group of teachers among the Jews at the time of Jesus;  Jesus frequently rebukes them for their hypocrisy.

Old testament enemies of the Israelites;  a Philistines has come to mean a person who is ignorant and uncultured.

the Roman governor of the Jews at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus

a character in a parable of Jesus told to illustrate how generous God is in forgiving sinners who repent.

Rachel –the second wife of Jacob; the mother of Joseph and Benjamin

Leah -is the first of the four concurrent wives of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, and mother of six of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, along with one daughter from Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible

lovers; Delilah betrayed Samson’s secret strength by telling his enemies that cutting his hair would make him no more strong than a normal man.

Turn to peaceful pursuits and away from war.

a tower that was intended to reach up to heaven, increase the reputation of the builders, and make them like God;  God prevented its completion by confusing their language so that they could no longer understand each other. From that time people spoke different languages

Mount of Olives is the hill facing the old city of Jerusalem, on the eastern side of Kidron valley.  Its name came from the olive trees that once grew on its hillside from ancient times. According to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will appear here and bring the dead back to life. Therefore, the hillside became the most holiest cemetery, and the hillside is covered by thousands of grave stones.

   Jesus had many encounters on Mount of olives, and the area has many Churches that glorify his acts in this part of Jerusalem (for example, see: Basilica of Agony). There are additional Christian sites on Mount of Olives (such as the Tomb of Mary).

Lamb to the Slaughter(1954) is a short story by Roald Dahl. It is a short story in the book "Skin" which has a series of short stories.

‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ demonstrates Dahl's ability to reflect aspects of human perversity, cruelty, and violence in adult fiction. His presentation features a cynically detached narrator, and elements of black comedy. The horror of this story prefigures the grotesqueness seen in the author's later work for children, including James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.