Teaching the Bible for Cultural Literacy

By Deborah Markus, from Secular Homeschooling, Issue #10, January/February 2010

As a non-religious homeschooler, I am sometimes hesitant to talk about the fact that I consider Bible study of importance. If I say this to someone who doesn't know me well enough to understand my worldview, I worry that I'll sound like a homeschooling stereotype. And if I say it to someone who's better acquainted with my family, I run the risk of getting into a huge debate.

On a non-religious homeschooling loop, I once read a posting about how relieved the poster was to be non-religious and therefore not have to waste any time reading the Bible. To me, this points to a fundamental misunderstanding. The Bible is a religious text, true; but it's also the single greatest source of cultural references we have. I can't imagine someone saying that she doesn't study Shakespeare because, after all, she's not a late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century English citizen.

The fact is, being a non-religious homeschooler isn't a free pass out of studying the Bible. It's not just that you don't want your child looking blank when someone mentions Moses or refers to a doubting Thomas, although basic references are certainly important. Non-religious Americans are a minority, and if your child may grow up to be one, she needs to have some basic understanding of the people all around her.

For a non-religious parent, teaching your child about the Bible is like teaching the facts of life. You can take on the job yourself, difficult and awkward though it may sometimes be; or you can refuse to accept responsibility for an important aspect of your child's education, and wait for someone whose ideas you may not share to come along and do it for you. The fact is, the Bible, its stories, its teachings, and the many religions based on various interpretations of those teachings are too big to ignore.

Exactly because it is so big in every sense, the Bible represents a challenge for the teacher — and the student. All very well and good to say that it ought to be studied; but when, and how?

This is a huge question. I can offer some advice based on my own experiences both as independent student and homeschooling teacher; but the most important thing is that Bible study be carefully tailored to a child's intellectual and emotional needs. Better take it on a little late than too early. It's not easy, happy reading.

The Bible isn't a book a young reader can just sit down and start studying. Both the language and the content can be baffling. And keep in mind that this book is packed with sex and violence. Parental guidance is most certainly suggested.

Libraries often carry collections of Bible stories for children. These can be very uneven in quality. The problem with many of them is that they don't present what the Bible actually says, but what the interpreter thinks the Bible says, or thinks it ought to have said.

For instance, Bible Stories for the Young by Sally Grindley and Jan Barger is an excellent collection. The illustrations are winning, and the creation story is shown just as it is in the Bible. First, after creating everything else in the world, "God made man and woman. He put them in charge of his world and told them to fill it with their children." Then, in the next story, the tale of Eve being created out of Adam's rib is told. This is exactly how it's presented in the Bible: one story told in two different ways.

The story of the temptation of Eve, however, is misrepresented slightly. The rephrasing of the King James Version has up to this point been perfect . But after the serpent tempts Eve, "she called Adam over to her and held out the fruit to him." This is generally how the story is understood and presented in paintings and poetry: Eve is alone when the serpent talks to her, and seeks out Adam to share her ill-gotten goods. As a child, I got the impression that Adam might not have known just what fruit Eve was offering him, which made her doubly to blame — first she disobeyed, then she deceived. Asking around a bit, I found that others had similar memories of learning this story.

But this is incorrect. In the King James Version, Eve "gave [the fruit] also unto her husband with her." I was struck by this phrasing a few years ago, and studied the verse further. The New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible both translate this phrase as "She also gave some to her husband, who was with her." The New Interpreter's Bible, a twelve-volume scholarly commentary that explores every aspect of the Bible in great detail, confirms that Adam was in fact present for Eve's conversation with the serpent and her decision to eat the fruit. He "puts up no resistance, raises no questions, and considers no theological issues; he simply and silently takes his turn. The woman does not act as a temptress in this scene; they both have succumbed to the same source of temptation."

This brings up a key issue regarding Bible study for cultural literacy: it is as important to understand what people think the Bible says as it is to understand what the Bible really says. The solitude of Eve during the temptation is a social convention at this point, bolstered by great works of art such as Paradise Lost, in which Milton goes out of his way to show that Eve was not just alone with the serpent but willfully so, and that Adam only gave in and ate the fruit out of selfless love for her. It's important to understand that this is what many people think, even if it isn't textually accurate.

Similarly, Bible Stories for the Young presents the story of Joseph and his brothers. Relying on the tradition started by the KJV, Joseph is described as having been given "a very beautiful coat woven with lots of different colors" — the famous "coat of many colors." But the term in the original Hebrew is obscure. Other translations suggest that it may have been a "richly ornamented robe," or "a long robe with sleeves." This is an interesting bit of trivia. But the fact is, our cultural reference — witness the musical "Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" — is to a coat of many colors.

It's interesting to examine whether, when the popular idea of a Bible story contradicts the original text, just how much of a difference it makes to the story. It doesn't matter, really, what Joseph's coat looked like — what's important is that it symbolizes the fact that his father loved him most. But in the story of Jonah, he is popularly described as having been swallowed by a whale. (There's even an '80s song about it.) The text, however, merely describes it as a great fish. Is this an important distinction? Is it simply a matter of how our ideas of animal classification have changed over time? Or is there something emotionally significant about the idea of a resistless deity sending forth a great, unprecedented fish, big enough not just to swallow a man but to have plenty of room to sustain him for three days? This is worth discussing, perhaps after reading Warwick Hutton's picture book Jonah and the Great Fish.

Often it's the stories of the Bible that are important so far as cultural literacy is concerned. Occasionally, the words themselves are the significant factor. The King James translation is often not the most accurate one, but it's the one we most often quote. It may be factually correct to say that the beginning of Psalm 23 should say something more along the lines of "God, like any great ruler, is the shepherd of his people; I won't be in need of food or water as long as he's in charge." But that's not the psalm we know. That one is poetry with a life of its own. It may simply be a dark valley that the Lord is guiding his people through, but for better or for worse, we will continue to call it "the valley of the shadow of death."

Possibly the best-known poem of the Bible is the famous "To every thing there is a season" chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes. I can't recommend Leo and Diane Dillon's incredible picture book rendition of it highly enough. The illustrations draw on art and cultural traditions from around the world — appropriately, for a poem from a book whose main point is that "there is nothing new under the sun." I was particularly impressed by how the Dillons handled "A time to love, and a time to hate."

I have mentioned only a handful of Bible picture books. As I said, many of them are problematic. Moses' Ark: Stories from the Bible by Alice Bach and J. Cheryl Exum mangles the story of the exodus from Egypt so thoroughly that a child would be better off not reading the story until adulthood than learning only this version. Several picture books render the story of Noah and the ark as absolutely adorable, which seems a strange way to present the death by drowning of so many people and animals.

Probably the best version of the Bible for young people to study or have read to them is Golden Books' The Children's Bible. This thick illustrated volume doesn't editorialize. It tells it like it is, which can make for some pretty intense reading. A Christian friend of mine asked, when she saw my copy, how they handled Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Obligingly, I checked. In a chapter entitled "The Flight Into Egypt," the following passage appears:

He [Herod] ordered that all the children under two years old in Bethlehem and the land around should be put to death, in accordance with the time he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet:

"In Rama was there a voice heard,
lamenting, and weeping and mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
and would not be comforted,
because they were no more."

No punches are pulled. My friend pointed out that the illustration to this chapter is of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus traveling to Egypt. "There's no visual," she said approvingly. "So if you're reading this to a four-year-old, you can skip the really scary parts until he's a little older."

This is part of why I waited as long as I did to introduce my son to Bible study of any sort: Like many significant literary works, this is not a cheerful book. My son was an emotionally wide-open sort. Anything grim or violent would have rocked him to his foundations. Time enough to study the Bible when he was a little sturdier.

We started out reading bits and pieces. The creation story is lovely, and there are some beautifully illustrated storybook versions. The adventures of Adam and Eve are fascinating fare for someone who doesn't already know how the story ends. We stuck to these, along with nonviolent fare like the tower of Babel, Jonah, and some of Proverbs. I enjoyed reading my son the passage about the woman whose price is above rubies. "She works her butt off" was our unromantic but enthusiastic conclusion.

As he got older, we started learning stories whenever references to them came up. When he was four or five, my son saw a picture of Rembrandt's painting "Belshazzar's Feast." For some reason, he fell absolutely in love with this image. So we went and read the story of "the writing on the wall" from the book of Daniel, so he would know what this painting was all about. Years later, when we were reading Helen Keller's autobiography, we read references to Esther and Ruth and diligently looked them up.

Very recently, my son and I were reading H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Wells made a reference to Delilah. My son looked blank, so we read the story of Samson from the Golden Books children's Bible. My son didn't come out of this storytelling session a big fan of Samson or Delilah, but he now knows their names. He has the cultural reference of Samson being strong so long as his hair wasn't cut, and of Delilah being beautiful and untrustworthy.

Often, though, as our studies advance, it's not just a matter of looking up and reading a particular story. Cultural context becomes more and more important, and I find myself sometimes scrambling about in search of the pertinent information.

For instance: last December, I realized that my son had only the haziest notions of the story of Jesus' life and death. I decided that it would be the month's project to read the Golden Book's version, which streamlines the stories from the synoptic gospels. Some seasonal cultural literacy lessons — perfect.

The story started with the beginning of the book of Luke. "There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea —"

Stop. Explain about the Romans. (We know a bit about them already.) Get out the globe and show where "Judea" would be found.

"— a priest named Zacharias, and his wife Elisabeth. They were both righteous before God —"

Stop. My son is raising his hand.

"What's 'righteous'?"

I try to explain. I had no idea that righteousness would be such a tricky concept for someone who's been raised with non-religiously based morality.

"— keeping the commandments of the Lord. But they had no children —"

This time I'm the one to interrupt, explaining that it was important for the writer to point out that Zacharias and Elisabeth were good people. Their being childless would, in this context, have been taken by contemporary readers as a punishment from God; having children, on the other hand, is a blessing.

"— and they were both well advanced in years."

Stop again. Discuss what "well advanced in years" would mean at that time. We've read about the ancient Egyptians, and how the average lifespan was 28 years. Possibly Zacharias and Elisabeth were only in their forties. This would be late for a woman to have her first child, and would seem miraculous even if there hadn't been a heavenly messenger to bring the news.

"Now when it was Zacharias' turn to serve in the temple —"

Raised hand again. Turn to serve?

I explain that things are different now. If you're Jewish, you can go to your nearest temple, and services are led by the local rabbi. Back then, there was THE temple. Just the one. You didn't go to it every week to hear services. You went on important occasions. Zacharias belonged to a particular group whose members took it in turn to perform the necessary work in the temple — burning incense, as the illustration shows him doing, and so forth. This leads to a brief sideline into the bare fact of destruction of the temple by the Romans and resounding social and religious repercussions of this.

We continue with the story — how Zacharias sees the archangel Gabriel standing in the temple. Have to explain that there are various levels of angels, and Gabriel is a high-ranking one. He's also the angel of death, and so not someone you want to annoy.

"But I thought he was the guy who told Mary she was going to have a baby," my son said. I'm glad that he remembers this much from previous discussions, but don't know quite how to answer his question, other than to suggest that the beginning and the end of life are flip sides of the same coin and therefore might both fall into Gabriel's realm.

I mention that angel is derived from the ancient Greek word "angelos," which meant "messenger," and that angels in the Bible are not described as having wings, in spite of how Gabriel is shown in the book's illustration. Possibly Zacharias doesn't realize who and what Gabriel is on first seeing him, and that's why he's skeptical when the angel tells him the news that Zacharias and his wife will be having a child.

We've been here almost half an hour, and we've finished reading two whole paragraphs of one story of the Bible. At this rate, it's going to take until next December just to get through the gospels, even if we follow this book's streamlined version of them.

But this is the kind of discussion it's important to have. The Bible can't just be read. It has to be studied.

My son isn't particularly drawn to this course of study. It's work, frankly. I constantly have to remind myself that his idea of beautiful literature is not going to coincide with mine. We read a reference to Jacob wrestling with God; I dug up the story and read it to him. I'm not religious, but I find this story deeply compelling, and get the same pleasant chill from Jacob saying "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me" as I do from hearing beautiful music.

My son, however, did not see matters in this light. This was weird. Why were they wrestling? Why did the story make such a big deal about Jacob's thigh? Why wouldn't God tell Jacob his name, and why did Jacob want so much to know it? None of my answers seemed to satisfy him. It was like trying to analyze the beauty of a poem using scientific methods: right tools, wrong material to apply them to.

The only books of Bible stories that my son reads with pleasure are those by Brendan Powell Smith, creator of "The Brick Testament." Smith has a web site (www.thebricktestament.com), on which he tells stories from the Bible, illustrating them with bricks and other toys created by a company whose name rhymes with the word "shmeggo." (Note: the rhymes-with-shmeggo company does not in any way sponsor, authorize, or endorse the Brick Testament.) Smith has published three books of his work: Stories from the Book of Genesis, The Ten Commandments, and The Story of Christmas. Because of the illustrations, these books are sometimes found in the children's section of bookstores. Smith, however, does not make the Bible cute, or mince words in any way. Nor, to his credit, is he mocking the Bible. (Okay, the angel who comes to tell Mary that she'll be having a very important baby needs a shave. Which may not be mocking, but it's not exactly reverent, either.) His point is simply to present what the stories from the Bible really say, as opposed to what some might wish they said.

Smith's work is often humorous. My son, a "brick" expert, loves to point out that, for instance, Herod is shown with the head of the emperor from the Star Wars brick set. Both of us always giggle at the page illustrating Luke 2:21, in which Jesus is circumcised and named. Joseph is performing the first half of that ceremony with a toy knife or dagger as big as the baby Jesus himself. It's not indecent or scary, thanks to the fact that these toys are blank bricks rather than anatomically correct models. But if you're as immature as my son and I, it's still hilarious.

I can understand that the humor I've mentioned might not be appreciated in every quarter (though Smith gets numerous requests from churches and other religious organizations to reproduce his images). But some of his pictures are humorous in ways that I can't imagine anyone objecting to. The plague of frogs has a scene in which a mini-figure man wearing a chef's toque hat looks dismayed at the toy frogs invading his kitchen. This is from Exodus 8:3 — "And [the frogs went] into their ovens and their kneading bowls." This is a wonderfully comic and human illustration. Imagine what the ordinary Egyptians, who had no control over the cosmic battle raging in their homeland, must have felt as they witnessed and lived through plague after plague.

Perhaps the most important thing that Smith does in his stories is accurately present stories that are often misremembered. Jacob does not wrestle with an angel, but with God. The image of wrestling with an angel is very poetic, but that's not what the book itself says. Similarly, my husband thought that Smith was editorializing when Smith showed God himself coming to Egypt to slay the firstborn. But Smith is simply illustrating what the Bible says, which is that God did it. My husband remembered this as being the work of the Angel of Death, and one might be able to have a lively theological debate as to whether God sending his messenger would still "count" as the work of God himself. But Smith as illustrator is a strict Bible literalist.

My son, who has at best tolerated our other Bible studies, will pick up the Brick Testament books for fun. At first I thought he was just looking at the pictures, and he readily admitted that as a serious student of the brick arts, he likes to get ideas from an artist like Smith. But he reads the stories as well. And as Smith's work is strictly accurate so far as the text is concerned, then so far as I'm concerned, this is a perfectly valuable part of my son's cultural literacy studies.

My son also enjoys another popular culture take on the Bible: the lolcat Bible Translation Project, which is working toward translating the entire Bible into lolspeak. I don't have the energy to explain the lolspeak phenomenon, but for the record I'm not one of the people who thinks it's the end of civilization as we know it. (Full disclosure: I think lolcats are hilarious, and as you can see, my speling is just fin.) You can visit the "I Can Has Cheezburger?" site (http://icanhascheezburger.com) to check out the lolcat universe. Then, if you are so inclined, take a look at the lolcat Bible (www.lolcatbible.com).

The reason I'm bringing this up in the first place is that I believe this project — which, again, is humorous without being mocking — has great potential in fostering Biblical cultural literacy. For instance, here are a few verses from the lolcat book of Genesis. (Bear in mind that in the lolcat universe, the great powers for good and evil are Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat, respectively.)

In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

...An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has lightz in the skiez for splittin day An no day. It happen, lights everwear, like christmass, srsly. An Ceiling Cat doeth two grate lightz, teh most big for day, teh other for no day.

This may not be your idea of a good time. My son and I think it's a scream. And the more you understand the original work, the more there is to enjoy here. My son is allowed to read the lolcat version of any story in the Bible that he has also studied in a more conventional text. My reading to him counts — he just needs to be able to demonstrate to me that he knows what the real story is. And then he can go and giggle all he wants over the lolcat version. He's learning Biblical literacy, and that's what's important to me.

And it is important. Just a few weeks ago, my son's violin teacher lamented that the college students to whom she was teaching classical music appreciation looked blank when she referred to Orpheus and Mary Magdalene. I was astounded by that last one. Maybe not everyone was as much of a Greek myth nerd as I was; but how could these young adults have missed Mary Magdalene?

They missed her because they weren't taught about her. Maybe because the people who should have been teaching assumed that her name and cultural significance were too obvious to require explanation.

These young people should have been taught about Orpheus, too, of course. Greek mythology is hugely important in our culture and should be studied as literature, hand in hand with history studies. And so should the Bible, regardless of one's philosophical or religious standpoint.

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