Biblethump

2012emoteclassic

BibleThump is a Twitch chat emote showing the crying face of Isaac from the indie video game The Binding of Isaac, added to the platform in 2012 as a shorthand for sadness. It became one of the core emotes in Twitch's early chat vocabulary, spammed in walls whenever a streamer fails or a sad moment plays on stream.

twitch emotesgamingtwitch chat memesearly 2010s memesreaction memes

Overview

BibleThump is a Twitch chat emote showing the tearful face of Isaac, the bald crying child from Edmund McMillen's indie game The Binding of Isaac. Viewers post it by typing the word "BibleThump" into a stream's chat box, and the site swaps the text for the small pixel image of Isaac's face streaked with tears1.

The emote is Twitch shorthand for sadness. It gets spammed when a streamer dies in a run, when a beloved pet dies mid-broadcast, or when anything on stream is meant to be emotionally rough1. Alongside Kappa and PJSalt, BibleThump sits in the small cluster of first-wave Twitch emotes that outsiders have to look up before they can read a Twitch chat1.

How It Spread

On January 13th, 2013, a single-purpose site called ICryEveryTime launched, playing a violin loop while BibleThump emotes rained down the screen, an early sign the emote had escaped Twitch chat and become a joke in its own right2. Ten days later, on January 23rd, 2013, a GameFAQs user posted a thread titled "What does Kappa and biblethump mean seriously?", one of the earliest recorded "what is this emote" questions from outside the Twitch bubble4.

The confusion kept spreading. On February 19th, 2014, a Redditor asked /r/OutOfTheLoop what BibleThump meant, and another commenter traced it back to the Twitch emote and The Binding of Isaac3. Later that year, on August 8th, 2014, Mashable published "Twitch-speak: A Guide to the Secret Emoji Language of Gamers," which listed BibleThump alongside Kappa and PJSalt as one of the emotes a Twitch newcomer would immediately see, and defined it plainly as meaning "sadness"1.

BibleThump stuck around as a global Twitch emote long after 2014, and Isaac's crying face is still one of the most familiar images tied to Twitch chat culture5.

How to Use This Meme

Typical use is to type "BibleThump" (case sensitive) into a Twitch chat during a sad or disappointing moment on stream, often repeated to form a wall of tiny crying faces. A common convention is to pair it with a short caption, for example "my run BibleThump" after a streamer dies, or to spam it alone in reaction to bad news the streamer shares on camera1.

Frequently Asked Questions

Biblethump

2012emoteclassic

BibleThump is a Twitch chat emote showing the crying face of Isaac from the indie video game The Binding of Isaac, added to the platform in 2012 as a shorthand for sadness. It became one of the core emotes in Twitch's early chat vocabulary, spammed in walls whenever a streamer fails or a sad moment plays on stream.

twitch emotes gaming twitch chat memes early 2010s memes reaction memes

Overview

BibleThump is a Twitch chat emote showing the tearful face of Isaac, the bald crying child from Edmund McMillen's indie game The Binding of Isaac. Viewers post it by typing the word "BibleThump" into a stream's chat box, and the site swaps the text for the small pixel image of Isaac's face streaked with tears1.

The emote is Twitch shorthand for sadness. It gets spammed when a streamer dies in a run, when a beloved pet dies mid-broadcast, or when anything on stream is meant to be emotionally rough1. Alongside Kappa and PJSalt, BibleThump sits in the small cluster of first-wave Twitch emotes that outsiders have to look up before they can read a Twitch chat1.

How It Spread

On January 13th, 2013, a single-purpose site called ICryEveryTime launched, playing a violin loop while BibleThump emotes rained down the screen, an early sign the emote had escaped Twitch chat and become a joke in its own right2. Ten days later, on January 23rd, 2013, a GameFAQs user posted a thread titled "What does Kappa and biblethump mean seriously?", one of the earliest recorded "what is this emote" questions from outside the Twitch bubble4.

The confusion kept spreading. On February 19th, 2014, a Redditor asked /r/OutOfTheLoop what BibleThump meant, and another commenter traced it back to the Twitch emote and The Binding of Isaac3. Later that year, on August 8th, 2014, Mashable published "Twitch-speak: A Guide to the Secret Emoji Language of Gamers," which listed BibleThump alongside Kappa and PJSalt as one of the emotes a Twitch newcomer would immediately see, and defined it plainly as meaning "sadness"1.

BibleThump stuck around as a global Twitch emote long after 2014, and Isaac's crying face is still one of the most familiar images tied to Twitch chat culture5.

How to Use This Meme

Typical use is to type "BibleThump" (case sensitive) into a Twitch chat during a sad or disappointing moment on stream, often repeated to form a wall of tiny crying faces. A common convention is to pair it with a short caption, for example "my run BibleThump" after a streamer dies, or to spam it alone in reaction to bad news the streamer shares on camera1.

Frequently Asked Questions