Bible Trivia Quiz | 6 Books and Figures You Don't Hear About | Digging Deeper

Question 1. Which entire book of the Bible is devoted to a righteous man who suffers terribly, though he's done nothing to deserve it, and never once sins with his lips?

Answer: Job. Scripture calls him "perfect and upright" before his suffering even begins (Job 1:1), and after losing everything, "in all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly" (1:22; see also 2:10).

Context & Exhortation: Job loses his children, his wealth, and his health in a single chapter. 

His friends show up and, for seven days, say nothing at all (2:13) — that's actually the most helpful thing they do in the whole book. Once they start talking, they spend chapter after chapter insisting Job must have sinned to deserve this. But he hadn't. God says so directly at the end (42:7).

Job never gets a tidy explanation for his suffering. What he gets instead is God Himself, showing up in a whirlwind and asking questions Job can't answer. He asked about the foundations of the earth, the stars, the animals. It's not an answer to "why." It's a reminder of who's actually in charge.

Sometimes we want God to explain Himself. Job suggests we may not get that. What we can get is His presence, which turns out to be what Job actually needed all along. 

If anyone of us is in a Job season right now, we may not get our answers either. But we can still have God.

It's also worth noticing how the book ends. God restores Job's fortunes, doubling what he had before (42:10), and gives him new children. But Scripture never treats the first ones as simply replaceable. 

Job actually names his daughters individually, in more detail than any other passage bothers with for daughters (42:14). It was almost as if the text wants us to see them as their own people rather than stand-ins for grief. 

Family, restoration, even when God gives it generously, doesn't erase what was genuinely lost. It coexists with it. In our human selves, we might not be able to erase the hurt, but we can move right along in forgiveness and restored in Christ Jesus. Amen!

Question 2. Which mysterious king and priest blessed Abram and received a tenth of everything from him, centuries before the Levitical priesthood ever existed?

Answer: Melchizedek, king of Salem and "priest of the most high God" (Genesis 14:18–20). He's mentioned again in Psalm 110:4, and Hebrews 7 spends an entire chapter on him.

Context & Exhortation: Melchizedek appears for just three verses in Genesis, then vanishes from the storyline entirely. No genealogy. No record of his birth or death. He simply meets Abram after a battle, brings out bread and wine, blesses him, and receives a tithe. And Abram, father of the entire priestly line to come, submits to him.

Hebrews 7 makes a big deal of this. It argues that Melchizedek's priesthood was greater than the Levitical priesthood that came later through Abraham's own descendants, since Levi was still "in the loins of his father" when Abram paid the tithe (7:9–10). 

And Hebrews uses Melchizedek as a picture of Christ: a priest with no recorded beginning or end, a king of righteousness and peace, a priesthood that doesn't depend on bloodline at all (7:1–3).

A man who shows up for three verses becomes one of the richest pictures of Jesus in the whole Old Testament. God doesn't need a long resume to make a point. Sometimes a single, well-placed encounter says everything.

There's another detail Hebrews draws out that rarely gets mentioned: Melchizedek's own name means "king of righteousness," and "king of Salem" translates to "king of peace" (Hebrews 7:2). 

Two qualities, stitched into a single figure, centuries before either one would consistently define Israel's own kings. 

It's easy to read past a name in Scripture as just a label. Here, the name itself was already doing theological work long before the New Testament ever caught up to it.

Question 3. Which book of the Bible is traditionally credited to Solomon in his later years, famous for its refrain, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity"?

Answer: Ecclesiastes (1:2, repeated in 12:8). The writer calls himself "the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem" (1:1), which is why the book has long been attributed to Solomon.

Context & Exhortation: Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest books in the Bible, because it spends most of its length sounding almost like doubt. 

The Preacher tries pleasure, wealth, wisdom, hard work, and legacy, and calls every single one of them "vanity," or vapor, something that slips through your fingers the moment you try to hold it (2:1–11).

This isn't the Bible contradicting itself. It's the Bible being honest about a real experience: a man who had everything — Solomon reportedly had more wealth and wisdom than any king of his time — and still found it empty without God at the center. 

Chasing meaning through achievement or pleasure alone runs out eventually, no matter how much we accumulate.

The book doesn't leave us there, though. Its final word is simple: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man" (12:13). 

Everything else, tried on its own, eventually falls apart. If your own pursuits have started to feel like vapor lately, Ecclesiastes says you're not crazy — you may just be circling the same conclusion Solomon already reached.

One detail worth noticing: the phrase "under the sun" appears nearly thirty times through the book, and almost everything Solomon calls empty is specifically observed "under the sun" — examined only from ground level, without reference to anything beyond it. 

That's not a loophole so much as the whole argument. 

Solomon isn't disproving that life has meaning. He's showing exactly what conclusion you're stuck with if we only ever look at it from that one vantage point.

Question 4. The book of Proverbs contains wisdom from more than just Solomon. Name at least two other contributors.

Answer: Agur, son of Jakeh (Proverbs 30:1), and King Lemuel (Proverbs 31:1). Proverbs 22:17 and 24:23 also point to sayings from unnamed "wise men," meaning the book is a compiled collection, not a single author's work.

Context & Exhortation: Most people assume Solomon wrote the whole book, and most of it does come from him — Proverbs 1:1 and 10:1 both credit him directly. 

But tucked into the final chapters are two named outsiders. Agur opens with an unusually humble confession: "Surely I am more brutish than any man" (30:2). He's not writing from a place of royal confidence. He's writing from humility.

Then there's Lemuel, whose entire chapter is actually his mother's instruction to him — a king being taught wisdom by his mom, including the famous closing description of a virtuous woman (31:10–31).

Wisdom in Scripture doesn't come from one royal voice alone. It comes from a king who built a temple, a man confessing he barely understands anything, and a mother teaching her son. 

God gathers wisdom from wherever real wisdom is actually found — palace or no palace. Don't assume your own voice has to be prestigious before it's worth contributing. Again. That’s a message for some of you here.

It's easy to skip past whose voice chapter 31 actually is. It isn't Solomon's advice to a son; it's Lemuel's mother's advice to him, preserved word for word as inspired Scripture (31:1). 

A king being taught wisdom by his own mother, with her instruction judged worthy enough to close out an entire book, says something. It says something about how seriously God takes wisdom passed down through a mother's voice, not only a father or a king.

Question 5. Which Old Testament book of mourning is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, written as five poems grieving the fall of Jerusalem?

Answer: Lamentations. The book itself doesn't name its author, but 2 Chronicles 35:25 records Jeremiah composing laments. Both Jewish and Christian tradition have long connected this book to him.

Context & Exhortation: Lamentations is unusual because it's structured, almost mechanically, as an acrostic. 

The first four chapters each move through the Hebrew alphabet, letter by letter, as if grief itself needed some kind of container to keep from spilling out formlessly. Even chapter 3, the longest, cycles through the alphabet three times.

And in the middle of all that devastation — a city destroyed, a temple burned, children starving in the streets — sits one of the most quoted lines of hope in the whole Bible: "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness" (3:22–23).

That's not hope arriving after the grief ends. It's hope spoken from directly inside the wreckage, in the very same chapter as the worst of the pain. 

Lamentations gives us permission to grieve fully and honestly, without rushing past it — while still reaching, in the same breath, for the mercy that's still there every single morning.

There's a structural detail that seldom gets pointed out though. While the first four chapters are alphabetic acrostics, chapter five breaks the pattern. It still has twenty-two verses, matching the Hebrew alphabet's length, but it no longer marches letter by letter. 

Some readers take that as a literary signal. It is as if by the final poem, the writer's carefully ordered grief has finally run out of order altogether, leaving only a plain, unstructured cry for God to remember and restore (5:21). 

Some of us need to stop complaining and moaning and groaning and start accepting the goodness of God in our lives. Some of us need to be more grateful because indeed God’s mercies are new every morning.

Question 6. Genesis 6 describes mysterious beings called "the sons of God" intermarrying with human women. What were their offspring called?

Answer: The Nephilim (Genesis 6:4). The same Hebrew word appears again in Numbers 13:33, when the spies report giant Nephilim living in Canaan.

Context & Exhortation: "There were giants in the earth in those days" is how the King James renders it (6:4).

This handful of verses is one of the most debated passages in the entire Old Testament. Who exactly were the "sons of God"? 

Fallen angels, according to one ancient reading. Powerful human rulers, according to another. 

Scripture doesn't spell it out, and honest readers disagree.

What isn't debated is what comes right after: "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth… and it repented the LORD that he had made man" (6:5–6). 

Whatever the Nephilim actually were, they're mentioned as part of a wider picture of a world gone so corrupt that God chose to start over with one faithful family.

It's worth sitting with that for a moment. 

Even in a book willing to record its strangest, least-explained details, the throughline never wavers: corruption spreads, and God responds to it. 

Some mysteries in Scripture stay mysteries. The moral of this one doesn't.

It's worth noticing where this word resurfaces. Numbers 13:33 has the twelve spies reporting giant Nephilim living in Canaan. It's specifically that report that terrifies Israel into refusing to enter the promised land. 

Whatever the Nephilim actually were generations earlier, by the time of the exodus they'd become a byword for an obstacle too large to face. 

That's what makes Israel's fear — and God's later patience with Joshua and Caleb's opposing report — land with even more weight. 

Family, whatever giant feels too large to face in our own lives right now, the question isn't whether it's real, it's whether we will trust God's report over our own fear.

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