Spider Bites

False teachers tell stories of seemingly miraculous events in order to impress others. Unlike the miraculous accounts in the Bible, however, these stories often fall apart under close examination.  As the scriptures instruct us, we are to “prove all things, hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). May God help us to be obedient to His call.

Consider the following excerpt from the book, Unbroken Curses in which Rebecca Brown tells of a “miracle” which her husband Daniel experienced. Much as Benny Hinn told of his father being a mayor in Israel, a story easy to verify if true (it wasn’t), Brown does not begin with a simple story of a simple man, in circumstances not very different than ours. Instead, Daniel was born to “a very wealthy Jewish family of international bankers,” He was sent to Switzlerland to be under Rabbinical and Cabalistic teachers in an “exclusive boarding school.” 

The six year old child was imprisoned “in a small windowless room.” Later, as punishment for trying to escape, Daniel was placed in an even smaller “round room, just a few feet in diameter.” His room may have gotten smaller, but the tale grew. Once in this room, the cruel Rabbis holding him “dumped thousands of spiders down on top of him, many of them poisonous.” 

The spiders began to crawl over him. As they began biting him, Daniel cried out in pain. “Immediately, a brilliant shaft of light pierced down through that building, down into the cold little room where Daniel was cowering, shivering and crying....Two arms reached forth from the light and held him as he “slept in the arms of Jesus. When he awoke, all of his spider bites were healed,” according to Brown (Brown, Yoder, Unbroken Curses, pp. 149-175).

Spiders by nature are solitary creatures and when too close together, tend to devour each other. It is a real miracle for the Rabbis to have a large stock (thousands according to the author) of spiders to dump on their captives. And, as any child who has attempted to corner an active spider in a jar can tell you, they move rapidly and can be quite difficult to catch.  Imagine trying to gather “thousands” in a bucket or other container and then try to get from the spider holding area to the prisoner’s cell without losing most of them. And this is just one example of the tall tales one may encounter in Brown’s book.