Questions I Ask of Children's Storybook Bibles
One of my favorite research projects I got to study involved me carrying tote bags of children’s storybook Bibles to coffee shops so I could analyze them. Until that time, I hadn’t put much thought into storybook Bibles at all. But when I started studying them, I realized that they didn’t tell stories the same, they didn’t emphasize the same things, they didn’t use the same language or even tell the same stories. Some differences were extremely minor, but some differences would have a greater impact on how a child would understand the story, Scripture itself, and how to interpret the Bible. If the point of reading storybook Bibles to kids is only to educate them on the stories themselves--the beginning, middle, end--then the questions I ask here probably don’t matter. But I believe that these storybook Bibles should do more. They should help provide kids with an understanding of what Scripture is and how to interpret it. It’s not enough for kids to merely know the stories. I wan
