The Child’s Story Bible

I recently purchased a story book bible for Noey after reading about it somewhere, where exactly I embarassingly can’t remember. It received rave reviews on Amazon and I love adding to Noey’s collection of Bible stories, so I decided to get it.

The Children’s Story Bible arrived a couple of weeks ago and goodness, I’ve been the one glued to this book ever since.

Told in a simple, gentle fashion, the book reads like a grandmother telling bible stories to her grandchildren, which incidentally was pretty much how it came to be written. As the preface of this revised edition, written by the original author’s daughter records, her mother had penned this book after failing to find a bible storybook for them to read that was “both faithful to the inspired Word of God and successful in conveying the dramatic excitement and human warmth of these most wonderful of all stories”. This book I feel, based on my reading of it so far, achieves this aim.

There are many things I love about this book. I love how the writer has worked in little explanations of things that had confused me when I was a child, reading the bible on my own. Why God rejected Cain’s offering and accepted Abel’s, for example. I also love the way she has picked out little facts that would have escaped the casual reader, like the fact that Cain’s descendants included Jabal, who was the first man own cattle, Jubal, the first man to create musical instruments, and Tubal-cain, who created implements of brass and iron. She also works in inferences explaining how the characters must have felt at different points of the stories — how sad Adam & Eve must have been to have been driven from the garden, or how amazing it must have been to see the animals flying two by two into the ark. Points that really highlight the drama of the event to the young undiscerning reader.

Best of all, I love that she highlights how Jesus is the focus of the Bible, and that Man’s redemption and salvation was pronounced by God right at the beginning, from the moment he declared enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, and foretold that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent, highlighting Jesus’ ultimate victory over sin and death.

All these should be obvious to the mature Christian and I came to learn and understand these as I grew older, but when I was a child, I didn’t.

I should add that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading Genesis afresh in this book because as a child, Genesis was my favourite book in the Bible. My parents had often left me in the care of my grandmother and in her home, there were few toys and no books, except a copy of the Good New Bible. I wasn’t much interested in television so when I wasn’t playing in the backyard, I had spent a lot of time reading the Bible. Back then, I read Genesis a lot. Mostly because I would lose interest midway through Exodus when God started instructing Moses in the details of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant! I would then either go back to Genesis again, or skip to sections in the New Testament and elsewhere in between. I was very familiar with the contents of Genesis therefore, but I didn’t realise their significance. There were also many things that puzzled me. On hindsight I guess I should have asked my parents about those things. I’m not sure why I didn’t! But if I had things as gently explained to me as they are in this book, I think I would have had less questions. And if I had known the significance of all the details and the rituals in Exodus, I believe I would have been less bored!

I’m only just past Exodus so I’ve still got some way to go to the end of the book, but it looks promising and I’m eager to continue. And when Noey is better able to listen and understand in future, this is the book I will turn to as an introduction to the bible. He’s not ready for it yet — to understand and be interested in this book, you have to be able to follow the story, so it’s probably more suitable for kindergarten age kids and above. There are also no pictures for the child to follow in this book, though there are several illustrations included in between.

This is not the Bible of course — only the narative historical sections are covered, in both the old and new testament — and is not a substitute for it. But for a child or new believer, it’s a good introduction.

I got my copy off Amazon, but I’ve since realised that the local home-bookshop Life Between the Covers carries the title.