A couple of weeks ago, I started a deep-dive series on The Story of All Stories — the new children’s story Bible from Word on Fire. In the first part, I covered the basic design and goals of this book and covered some of its key features (like the summary page after each Bible story, featuring a quote from a saint, pope, or other prominent Catholic writer and a “key connection” highlighting a typological link between the Old Testament and New Testament).
Today, I’ll survey my observations and takeaways after reading the full Old Testament section of this story Bible (which makes up slightly less than half of the pages in the book).
Big Picture Overview
As I noted in part one of this deep dive series, this story Bible is intended to give children an overview of salvation history and to inculcate in them how to read the Bible in line with Catholic tradition. Those goals are clearly evident in how the book approaches the Old Testament. First of all, it focuses on telling the story of salvation history, so it doesn’t attempt to include most of the wisdom literature and poetic books (like the Psalms). It includes the story of Job, summarizing key points in a few pages. The prophets are also given extremely brief treatment. Isaiah and Jeremiah receive a few sentences in a brief nod to their role in Israel’s history. Daniel is the only major prophet to receive a full story of his own in the book. Of the twelve minor prophets, only Jonah is mentioned. In a similar vein, the book skips over Deuteronomy entirely (with its speeches and legal codes), except for mentioning the death of Moses.
The second primary goal of this book (teaching children how to read the Bible in line with tradition) also comes across throughout the book. The author (Emily Stimpson Chapman) does not simply recount standalone episodes from salvation history in a simplified way; she presents them as part of God’s broader plan, and she often explicitly tells how an episode fits into God’s plan of salvation, or what God’s intentions toward his people were from the beginning. As such, she is providing an interpretive key for children to understand how the Bible fits together which they can apply later in life when they begin interacting more frequently with the full biblical text.
Notable Details
Chapman impressed me at various points throughout the Old Testament by telling difficult details of key stories when she could have easily omitted them or dumbed them down. Her rendition of the story of Job does not shy away from Job’s suffering or from his difficulty understanding why God allowed it. She does a great job of highlighting Job’s persistent faithfulness in spite of his suffering and questions. She also does not shy away from the deception by which Jacob stole his father’s blessing from his brother Esau.
In a similar vein, she gives the following explanation of the conquest of Canaan and God’s command that the Israelites not mix with the Canaanites:
Now, sharing is usually a good thing. But it would not be a good thing for the Israelites to share the Promised Land with the people already living there. Those people worshiped pretend gods and didn’t follow God’s laws. God knew that if the Israelites lived among them, all His work would be undone, and the Israelites would start worshiping pretend gods again. He needed to keep Israel apart from other nations for a time so that He could continue preparing them for their role in leading the world to Him. Which meant that before Israel could claim this land as their own, they had to drive out the Canaanites.
Emily Stimpson Chapman, The Story of All Stories, p. 117
This quote is a good example of multiple features of Chapman’s writing in a few sentences. It highlights how she makes the broader story of salvation history explicit in her telling of individual Old Testament episodes (clarifying God’s ultimate goal for Israel). It also highlights how she uses simplified language (“pretend gods” instead of “idols”) for a younger audience.
Aside from the poetic and wisdom books, Chapman omits a variety of episodes and details which occur in the biblical story. This is inevitable in a limited retelling of the key moments in salvation history. But I noticed two missing details which jumped out at me by their absence from the story:
- In the story of Abraham, Chapman does not mention Ishmael at all. A person with no knowledge of the Bible outside of this story Bible would come away thinking that Abraham only had one son: Isaac, the son of the promise.
- Moses’s brother Aaron is mentioned briefly, but his role as Moses’s interpreter before Pharaoh is not included, and his role in making the golden calf is also not mentioned. Chapman tells the story of the golden calf, but not Aaron’s involvement.
Interpretive Choices
Chapman makes multiple interpretive choices beyond making God’s plan of salvation history explicit. In some cases, her interpretations strike me as entirely appropriate, and in other cases, I found myself questioning or disagreeing.
To begin with the positive, Chapman routinely depicts God’s punishment for sin as a natural consequence of people’s sinful actions, not an angry, retributive act on God’s part. This strikes me as a good, sound way of navigating the difficulty of attributing rage to God as the biblical writers do, especially in a text that is designed for children. Here is how Chapman narrates God’s punishment of Adam and Eve after their sin:
“I love you so much,” God said, “but you’ve broken the whole world by turning your back on me. Repairing the damage will take time, and for now, life will be so much more difficult for you. You’ll struggle to love one another as you should. You’ll try to control, manipulate, and use one another. Bringing children into the world will be painful. Work will be toil. All creation will fight against you. And sickness and death will come for all.”
Emily Stimpson Chapman, The Story of All Stories, p. 28
An interpretation which I feel ambivalent about is Chapman’s explanation for why God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but did not accept Cain’s sacrifice. This is notoriously open-ended in the biblical text of Genesis. Chapman explains that Cain did not give God the best of his crops, while Abel brought “the very best meat from his very best animals.” This is a common way of explaining why God didn’t accept Cain’s sacrifice, and in a children’s Bible, I can understand why Chapman wanted to include an explanation. But I also think it is a missed opportunity to tell the story in the same way as the story of Job: we don’t always understand why we suffer and feel distant from God, but we are called to faithfulness in good times and bad.
Finally, I found myself disagreeing with Chapman’s telling of the bronze serpent, which God commanded Moses to make in the desert (and anyone who looked at it would be healed from the bites they suffered from the seraph serpents). In this case, Chapman adds an extra episode of disobedience which does not occur in the biblical text. When she narrates the Israelites looking at the bronze serpent for healing, she says:
Many did trust and were saved. But not all. Some still refused to raise their eyes to the one lifted high above them on a pole of wood.
Emily Stimpson Chapman, The Story of All Stories, p. 112
This detail does not occur in Numbers 21:9, where the story is recounted. The NABRE translation reads simply: “…Moses made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever the serpent bit someone, the person looked at the bronze serpent and recovered.”
As is evident from Chapman’s language, she is highlighting the typological parallel between the bronze serpent and Jesus. Perhaps she wanted to also highlight a parallel between those who accept God’s salvation with faith and those who do not. But in this case, it goes beyond the details of the story of the bronze serpent.
A Couple of Editorial Errors
In two places, I noticed a mismatch between a story and the typology highlighted in the review page at the end of the story:
- In the story of David and Goliath, Chapman mentions that David slew Goliath with a single stone from his slingshot. But on the review page, a quote from Venerable Fulton Sheen and the “key connection” section both highlight the typological connection between the five stones which David carried and Jesus’s five wounds. Chapman does not mention that David was carrying five stones anywhere in her story.
- Chapman’s story of the Maccabees mentions Judas Maccabeus in passing but focuses on the story of the martyrdom of the seven brothers (complete with gory details). But on the review page, the typological connections highlight the parallel between Judas Maccabeus’s cleansing of the temple and Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. Chapman does not mention Judas’s role in cleansing the temple at all in her story.
Conclusion
I’ve noted a few disagreements and editorial mistakes here, but those should not take away from the overall good quality of this book, Chapman’s storytelling, and the artwork by Diana Renzina. In the vast majority of cases, Chapman succeeds in telling the key episodes of salvation history with both simplicity and faithfulness to the underlying text and a Catholic view of Scripture. She makes editorial decisions about what to include and what not to include, as anyone must in a project like this. But she includes more detail than I would have expected, especially in stories that are difficult (Jacob and Esau, Job, the Maccabees, etc.). There is plenty of food for thought here and fodder for questions from children who want to know more and understand why things happened the way they did.
Finally, I strongly applaud Chapman and Word on Fire for emphasizing the typological connections between the Old Testament and New Testament and introducing children to the rich tradition of reading the Old Testament in light of the New. This book builds a foundation for how to read the Bible in young readers which will be useful to them later in life and helps them to approach Scripture through the eyes of the early Church fathers.