Bible Trivia | Bible Trivia: 6 Leaders With Stories You Forgot | Digging Deeper

Question 1. Who was Moses’ father-in-law, and by what other name is he also called in Scripture?

Answer: Jethro, also called Reuel — introduced in Exodus 2:18 (Reuel) and Exodus 3:1 (Jethro).

Context & Exhortation: Exodus 2:18 first names Moses’ father-in-law as “Reuel,” a Midianite priest whose seven daughters Moses helps at a well.

By Exodus 3:1, the same man, or possibly Reuel’s son, with “Jethro” understood as a title meaning “excellency” rather than strictly a personal name, is called Jethro. 

Most traditional readings treat them as the same person under two names, though careful readers should note the minor ambiguity scholars raise here. 

What is clear, though, is Jethro’s importance to Moses’ story. It is Jethro who gives Moses shelter, work, and a wife during his forty years as a fugitive from Egypt (Exodus 2:21); and it is Jethro, much later, who visits Moses in the wilderness after the Exodus and gives him arguably the most practical piece of leadership advice in the entire Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). 

Watching Moses personally judge every dispute among hundreds of thousands of people from morning to evening, Jethro tells him plainly, “the thing that thou doest is not good… thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee” (Exodus 18:17–18). Jethro therefore advised Moses to delegate judgment to trustworthy leaders over smaller groups. 

Moses, the man who spoke face to face with God, still needed a father-in-law’s outside, practical wisdom to keep from burning himself out. 

Can we notice something here? Even the most spiritually gifted leaders benefit from someone outside the situation who’s willing to say plainly, “what you’re doing isn’t right or isn’t sustainable.” 

Who has ears to hear, let them hear the Spirit of the Lord again today: Don’t let spiritual authority make you too proud to receive that kind of counsel.

Question 2. Which prophet anointed both of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David?

Answer: Samuel. He anointed Saul in 1 Samuel 10:1, and David in 1 Samuel 16:13.

Context & Exhortation: Samuel anoints Saul reluctantly, having already warned the people plainly what a king would cost them in taxation, conscription (what we know today as drafting into military service), and lost freedom (1 Samuel 8:10–18).

The people wanted a king “like all the nations,” and God told Samuel, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (8:7). 

Saul starts promisingly and ends catastrophically, and by 1 Samuel 16, God sends the same prophet who anointed him to secretly anoint his replacement. And who was this replacement? A shepherd boy, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, so overlooked that his own father hadn’t even called him in from the fields when Samuel arrived (16:11). 

“Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (16:7), God tells Samuel as each of David’s more impressive-looking older brothers is passed over. One prophet’s hand anointed both a king the people demanded out of their own insecurity, and a king God chose according to His own purposes. And the same oil, poured by the same man, produced radically different trajectories, because what mattered was not the anointing ceremony but the heart underneath it. 

Family, being chosen, commissioned, or even prayed over doesn’t guarantee the outcome. Saul had all of that as well. What matters far more is the condition of the heart the calling lands on.

Question 3. Which of David’s mighty men is recorded as having killed a lion in a pit on a snowy day?

Answer: Benaiah.

Context & Exhortation: “Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man, of Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow” (2 Samuel 23:20). 

This is one verse, almost thrown away in a longer list of David’s elite warriors and what a detail to include. Not a lion encountered by accident in open country with room to maneuver, but a lion cornered in a pit, in snow, in conditions that would have made footing treacherous and retreat nearly impossible. 

Benaiah didn’t choose the terrain; he simply didn’t back down from the fight in front of him because the conditions were bad. This same Benaiah goes on to become captain of David’s bodyguard, remains loyal through Solomon’s contested succession, and is eventually promoted to commander of Israel’s entire army (1 Kings 2:35).

This is a trajectory that started, as far as Scripture records it, with a nameless act of raw courage in a snowy pit that nobody commissioned him to be in. 

Most of us will never fight a literal lion, but we all face our own version of Benaiah’s pit — a hard, disadvantageous, unglamorous situation that shows up uninvited, with no good footing and no easy exit. 

How we handle that moment, when no one may even be watching, has a way of shaping what we’re trusted with later. Benaiah’s promotion started in a pit nobody saw.

Question 4. Which of David’s own sons led an armed rebellion against him?

Answer: Absalom, recorded across 2 Samuel 15–18.

Context & Exhortation: Absalom’s rebellion did not erupt overnight. 2 Samuel 13–14 shows the slow build: his sister Tamar is raped by their half-brother Amnon, David is furious but does nothing to actually discipline Amnon (13:21), and Absalom, after two years of simmering, has Amnon murdered in revenge (13:28–29). 

David eventually allows Absalom back from exile but refuses to see his face for two more years (14:28) A cold, unresolved estrangement between father and son that Absalom eventually channels into open political rebellion, spending years deliberately courting the loyalty of the people at the city gate, telling them, in essence, that he would judge their cases better than his own father would (15:2–6). 

By the time Absalom marches on Jerusalem, David has to flee his own capital, weeping, barefoot, covering his head (15:30). I tell you, by the time some people finish scandalising your name, you feel like you want to dig and hole and disappear in it, but thank God for redemption through the Blood of Jesus Christ!.

Back to the David and Absalom story. It’s interesting, David’s own final instruction to his commanders as war breaks out: “deal gently for my sake with the young man, even with Absalom” (18:5).

This is a father’s love surviving even open rebellion. When Absalom is killed against David’s explicit wishes, David’s grief is one of the rawest expressions in all of Scripture: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee” (18:33). 

This is a sobering study in what unaddressed family wounds can grow into over years of silence and unresolved anger. Wow!

Family, whatever estrangement/separation or boiling hurt exists in our own family right now, we should try as best as we can to sort it out. I’ve been there, with family and friends too. But some of these people, Christian and non-Christian, are on a different level, and we just have to continue to pray and love them anyway.

Absalom’s story is a warning about what two more years of silence can cost.

Question 5. Which prophet confronted King David about his sin with Bathsheba, and what parable did he use to do it?

Answer: Nathan, using the parable of the poor man’s one ewe (u) lamb, in 2 Samuel 12:1–7.

Context & Exhortation: After David’s affair with Bathsheba and the engineered death of her husband Uriah, an entire year passes with David apparently unrepentant and unconfronted.

Psalm 32:3–4 gives us a glimpse of what that silent year felt like internally: “my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long”. 

Then Nathan arrives with a story, not an accusation: a rich man with many flocks who, rather than take from his own abundance to feed a traveler, steals and slaughters the one single lamb belonging to a poor neighbor, a lamb the poor man had raised like a daughter. 

David, still not seeing himself in the story, erupts in righteous anger: “the man that hath done this thing shall surely die” (12:5). And Nathan’s response is four of the most devastating words in Scripture: “Thou art the man” (12:7). 

David, a man capable of tremendous moral clarity when looking at someone else’s sin, needed a story to see his own. There’s real wisdom in Nathan’s method here. He didn’t walk in and simply declare David guilty; he let David’s own sense of justice condemn him first, before revealing that the accusation pointed inward. 

Family, confronting someone we love about sin sometimes requires exactly this kind of patient, indirect wisdom rather than a blunt accusation that triggers immediate defensiveness. 

And notice David’s response once he does see it: not excuse-making, but immediate confession: “I have sinned against the LORD” (12:13). 

Family, the measure of a person isn’t whether they sin; it’s how fast and how honestly they respond once a Nathan finally shows up in their life.

Question 6. Which prophet was fed by ravens beside the brook Cherith during a famine?

Answer: Elijah, in 1 Kings 17:2–6.

Context & Exhortation: Right after Elijah announces a coming drought to King Ahab, God sends him into hiding: “Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith… I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there” (1 Kings 17:2–4). 

And they do. “the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook” (17:6). 

Now, some may know, I didn’t, that ravens are unclean birds under the Levitical law (Leviticus 11:15); they are scavengers, not exactly the delivery method most of us would expect God to choose for His prophet’s daily meals. Today, we would reject food from a raven, not so?

We know that God could have sent an angel, a caravan, a miraculous multiplication of food. Instead, He commissioned scavenger birds to serve as room-service staff, twice a day, for as long as it took. 

There’s something worth noticing in how God chose to provide here: not always through the clean, respectable, expected channel, but sometimes through the exact source we’d assume was unfit for the job. And notice, too, where this provision happened: hidden, alone, beside a shrinking brook, with no audience and no ministry visible to anyone. 

Elijah’s greatest public moment, the fire on Mount Carmel, was still to come; but it was preceded by an obscure season of being fed, unglamorously, unseen, by unclean birds beside a drying stream. 

Family, God’s provision in our not well-known, difficult-to-understand, or hard-to-see seasons is not a lesser or less spiritual chapter of our story. Rather, it is often the exact preparation for the public one still ahead.

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