The Bible really changes when we get to Genesis 12 and so I wanted to take a week to talk to the kids about what the Bible is and isn’t and why there are so many different kinds of writings by so many different people in it, and why we can trust it.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, most scripture I use comes from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded and expanded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.
Our Bible lessons are really about to change, big time. You guys have now learned more about the first eleven chapters of the Bible than most adults know about the entire Bible. These chapters are some of the hardest to understand, easiest to misunderstand, and hardest to teach in the whole Bible and we only just scratched the surface. When you grow up, you can use what I have taught you and you can go out and study for yourselves. There are so many wonderful scholars and theologians and teachers writing amazing books about the beginning of the Bible. But before we move on, we need to answer a very important question—what exactly is the Bible? Can you give me a good definition? Can you give me an answer besides “God’s word?” It isn’t as easy as we think and sometimes, when we really think about it, that question isn’t as easy to answer as we first thought.
First of all, let’s talk about what the Bible isn’t. The Bible isn’t just a book. The Bible is actually a whole library of books—sixty-six books, to be exact! If the Bible was one book, it would have one author and it would all sound like it was written by the exact same person. However, when we open up our Bibles and begin reading, it doesn’t take too long before we notice that the books of the Bible are often wildly different from each other. One book will be filled with a whole lot of good advice, and another has beautiful songs and poetry. Keep turning pages and you will find stories about people’s lives and other books filled with confusing and even scary symbols and dragons and disasters. One of the authors wrote a whole bunch of personal letters to different groups and others just to people. Some books record the warnings and the promises that the prophets spoke to Israel. Then there are books with lists and lists of people’s family trees—we’ve already seen some of those. What about the book with all the blueprints for making a Tabernacle? Or the detailed instructions for the priests who serve in the Tabernacle. Have you noticed the legal sayings, given to the judges of Israel so that they can make wise decisions when people bring problems to them? And Jesus, some of the stuff from Him includes sermons like you would hear in Church (only a lot better) or teaching stories called parables.
Sounds like a library and not just one book, right? There isn’t another book in the world that has all of that and more in it. The word Bible comes from Biblos, a Greek word meaning scroll. Byblos was a Phoenician city along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea north of Israel. They were very famous for importing something called papyrus from Egypt. Papyrus is a very strong piece of paper for writing and painting on, and actually we get the word paper from the word papyrus. I went and found a really cool video for you guys to show you how they make papyrus sheets today—it is really amazing, how they took plants and cut them up and laid them out in patterns to make writing materials. And people have been making papyrus since long before Abraham was born! They didn’t really make books for a very long time because only a very few people could read and write, but they did write receipts for sales and contracts between people, and sometimes priests and doctors would write out directions for what they were doing. When the Bible “books” or scrolls or “biblos” began to be written down during the time of the kings in Israel, and after, they used things like parchment (made from animal skins) and papyrus to make huge scrolls of the books. No one could carry around a whole Bible because it was made up of many scrolls, and they didn’t last forever either. Mostly, scrolls were made to be stored away. The Bible was spoken by Moses and the people who came after him for many hundreds of years before they wrote it all down.
Is that hard to believe? I know it shocked me. I thought that writing things down was always the best but in the days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses and even in the days of Jesus, people trusted what they heard more than what was written down. And the stories they heard from Moses and memorized generation after generation were the most important stories of all to the people of Israel. If a story came from Moses then they trusted it. And storytelling was a very important job. If you have a movie or a show you like, maybe you can understand. Maybe you have watched something so many times that if someone took out a scene or some words that you would totally notice and yell, “Hey, what the heck is going on here! This is supposed to be when Wesley tells Buttercup that ROUS’s aren’t real!” Or when Ralphie gets told he will shoot his eye out if he gets that Red Ryder BB gun. We remember what is important to us and to the children of Israel in the wilderness listening to Moses, nothing was more important to them than what Moses told them year after year. So, when the time came to tell their children, they knew it by heart. They didn’t need it written down. Goodness, hardly any of them knew how to read and why would they even need to read? What they needed in those days was to have a whole lot of knowledge about growing plants and animals and about what God wants from them. God told them to remember His words and to talk about them all the time and to teach their children day and night.
Those people didn’t have Bibles to carry around—they were walking, talking Bibles! Not every single person would have every little thing memorized, but as a community—a large group of people living and working together—together they knew the Bible and the best storytellers would be the ones performing it around campfires and while they watched their flocks and taught their children. Even if they could have read it, they would much rather hear it. If you have ever read the Bible, then it is not hard to see why it would be better if it was told out loud from memory than written down. The Bible is full of songs that the people knew the tunes to, but we don’t know because we only have it written down. When the storytellers would speak the words of God or Moses or Abraham, they knew just how to say them. Have you ever read something in the Bible and said to yourself, “I wish I knew if this person was angry or sad or whatever—the Bible doesn’t give me any directions for how this person is feeling!” That happens a lot, but when these stories got told over and over again, they came from Moses, who knew exactly how they should sound because he was there. Some of them were things he said, or heard, and others were things that God said. Nowadays, we have to do way too much guessing! The Bible, our library of books about God, isn’t written like our books are now. We are always told how the people should sound when they say things, and not just sometimes! It might be a good thing to ask someone to read a book to you without any of the information that talks about the tone of voice or the mood of the person talking.
You might ask how they knew people weren’t just making things up but when you have thousands of people who know a story and who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, then the people telling the story have to be very careful because people will get all angry and complain to the manager if too much gets changed. They knew what Moses said and they knew how He said it but they still loved to hear a good storyteller speak about it. It would be very much like watching a movie or a tv show because they didn’t have any of that. Entertainment for them was stories and the Bible has the most exciting stories of all. And because those stories were their own history, and their relatives got mentioned, that made it even better. People love hearing interesting stories about their families and they always have. But there came a time when things started to go wrong, during the times when there were kings, and when they had a big city with a palace and a Temple, they could start writing some of the stories down and storing them away in libraries—which were places where writings were stored and not places where you could go and check out books! They did this so that the stories wouldn’t get lost and it was a very good idea because some of the kings were very terrible people who didn’t worship God and when the kings didn’t worship God then the people didn’t either. It was probably up to the priests and to the good kings to start recording what Moses had said and Joshua and the stories from the time of the Judges and the prophet Samuel. These stories would have taken up a lot of room but having a library allowed them to be stored away and saved so that they couldn’t be destroyed. And they would have been glad to have them hidden away when the Assyrians and Babylonians began to attack them. Of course, we don’t know exactly when they were first all written down. We do know that Moses wrote down some things, like what God said at Mt Sinai. But what the Bible tells everyone, over and over again was to talk about it and tell people about it and to speak.
I don’t know about you but if I could understand ancient Hebrew, I would love to hear how the stories that we read today sounded coming from the mouths of the people who knew exactly how to say every little word and knew the answers to the children’s questions about the stories. Have you ever been to a story time hour at the library? I mean with someone who really knows how to tell a story. Not everyone is good at it. But you can bet that the people in the wilderness who were teaching Moses’s words (because Moses couldn’t be at every camp every night, right?) had their favorites—people with the best memories and the best voices. “Tell us the story of when God saved us from Pharaoh by parting the Red Sea!” or maybe a child would ask, “Did the prophet Moses really get to live in a palace? Did he really spend forty years in the wilderness working as a shepherd? Did his mom really hide him in an ark on the Nile?” You might go to church and hear these things, but when they were resting at night or on the Sabbath, they were hearing stories about their own families. So, those stories were probably much more important to them than they are to us.
But when the people stopped listening or caring and decided to worship other gods and to hurt people who were poor and weak and wouldn’t free their slaves, God stopped protecting them from the other nations. And first, the people in the north had to go to Assyria and the people in the south got taken away to Babylon. In Babylon, something wonderful happened. The people started to care about God and how He always saved their ancestors and blessed them and cared for them. And people called scribes gathered up all the stories, and the histories, and the songs, and the wise advice, and the records of their kings and all the wars they fought, and they put all those stories together in scrolls. Some scrolls, like Ruth and Esther, were shorter, and some, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were very long. Some of the books of our Bibles that are separated now, were together then. Ezra and Nehemiah were just one scroll, I and II Samuel were one, I and II Kings, I and II Chronicles. Jeremiah and Lamentations were together. In fact, our Bibles have thirty-nine books that were written in Hebrew but they only had twenty-two. It’s the same stuff we have now, but some big books were made into two smaller books.
But the really great thing about those days is that when the Jewish people who put all the books together really started worshiping God again and loving Him and not having anything to do with any of those false gods again. They became very interested in everything Moses ever told them and they were also interested to see what God had told the prophets about when they might get to go home again to Israel. The people who came back to Israel were very different than the people who left seventy years earlier. But the funny thing is that even though they had combined all of the stories together and had them written down, when they got together to talk about God, they didn’t have personal Bibles at home that they would read alone. A very big synagogue might have a lot of scrolls to read from but most people still couldn’t read and they would listen while someone else read from the scrolls or just told them the stories. They didn’t care about what was written down yet, they really just cared about what Moses had said. They were very different from how we are now, for sure. And we might say, “That’s just silly, stuff that is written down is much more accurate than what people say!” But just think if you lived in a world where only maybe one or two out of a hundred people could read and everything you knew was what you had heard. Would you care what was written down somewhere? Something you couldn’t read? Something that for all you know is just silly scribbles that don’t mean anything at all? If you lived in a world like that, you would have to have a very excellent memory. If someone gave you instructions then you couldn’t write notes to help you remember. You would become the kind of person who paid close attention whenever anyone told you anything so that you could remember every single word. You might even have the memory of a genius. The people who could tell all those stories would have to be incredibly smart, right? To have all those Bible stories stored carefully away in their brains?
See? Just because someone can’t read or write doesn’t mean that they aren’t super intelligent—it just means that they haven’t been taught. When I was a kid, we didn’t have cell phones. Heck, when I was first an adult we didn’t have them either. So we didn’t have any phone numbers stored away that we could look up. But what we did have was really good memories. We had so many phone numbers stored in our heads. We had them memorized because that was what people had to do. You will find in your life that if you really need to be able to do something or remember it that you will be able to. We just think it is hard to remember stuff because it is so easy to look it up that we don’t even bother memorizing it but we definitely could if we had to. If someone asked me for my friend’s phone number and I told it to them, they wouldn’t say, “I don’t believe you because it isn’t written down.” They would believe me because they knew that I knew the number. And it is the same way with how the Bible used to be the words of Moses and Joshua and Samuel and others, that people remembered just because of how important they are.
But there are other stories that weren’t as important. They weren’t spoken, they were written down as records while things were happening. Sometimes we will see a verse that says, “Isn’t such and such recorded in the book of Jashar” or the ten other records mentioned in the Bible that we don’t have. People didn’t memorize them and they were probably destroyed when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem—if something is only written down and not memorized by anyone, then it is really easy to get rid of it. See how important it was that the communities memorized everything we have written down in our Bibles today? To get rid of the Bible today, even if they burned every single copy and destroyed every single computer with the Bible on it, unless they killed every single person who knows the Bible—we would still have it safely tucked away in people’s heads. There is actually a movie about that where a blind man has a Braille Bible, which means the letters are written in bumps on the paper, and even though all the books in the world were being destroyed, he had the entire Bible memorized even when they took his away. And as long as he was alive, the Bible was too and at the end of the movie he was telling it to someone else and they were writing it down. No one can get rid of the Bible as long as even one person remembers it! That’s why they put their trust in people and not in paper back in the time of Moses. Isn’t that cool?
So, by the time Jesus was born, they had Torah scrolls in the big city synagogues or other parts of scrolls, and so Jesus was able to read from the Isaiah scroll when He went home to Nazareth. He might have walked with his family the four miles to Sepphoris and their big synagogue to read from Isaiah 61. But when He preached to the people, we don’t see scribes recording every word He says and we sure don’t see Him telling anyone to write it down. Jesus would have traveled from town to town with His disciples, preaching the exact same sermon and telling them the same parables over and over again until his disciples had them memorized and then He sent them out in two’s to start teaching what they had heard Him teach over and over again. It really wouldn’t take long for them to memorize the message of the Gospel, that the Kingdom of Heaven was here at last and invading earth to destroy the powers of Satan. The people had been waiting for a Messiah to come and destroy the Roman armies and so they had been waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven but boy were they surprised when Jesus wanted to forgive the Romans instead of kill them. They weren’t keen on that! When they heard the Scriptures in the synagogues, that’s how they interpreted what they were hearing. And interpretation is a funny sort of thing. We have the verse written down, right? And we might decide that it means such and such—that’s our interpretation. But sometimes our interpretation is wrong, wrong, wrong! And someone else looks at that same verse and thinks it says something else and maybe that person is right or maybe they are wrong too. Sometimes, God means this and we make the mistake of thinking something else entirely because we can’t read His mind or anything. Good thing too because if we did our brains would likely explode. Which would be almost as messy as Legos in the carpet.
And so, after Jesus rose from the dead and explained to His disciples how all those Hebrew Bible verses in the first thirty-nine books of the Bible, all were telling everyone about Him (they were just interpreting it wrong—they thought it said this when it really said that), they went all over the place teaching what Jesus taught and sharing all of their memories about Him. And they did that for many, many years until someone decided to gather the stories they knew together and those became the Gospel of Mark, and then some others did the same and we got Matthew and Luke as well and finally, the last story about Jesus was the Gospel of John. And they are all different stories because Jesus is too awesome and amazing to only have one story told about Him. Mark tells us the story of Jesus who is the warrior of God from the prophet of Isaiah, leading the greater exodus and destroying the forces of evil. Matthew tells the story differently—he focused on Jesus as being a greater teacher than Moses! Luke is filled with all of the little parables and stories that Jesus told as He traveled from town to town. And John, John is the hardest of all to understand because John tells the story about Jesus being the creative spoken, out loud and personal word of God, the Logos that we could all see and hear. I mean, not us, I am not quite that old but you guys know what I mean.
And as the church spread out all over Europe and Asia and Africa, Paul had to write letters to the different cities who were having problems because of the local cultures, teaching them how to solve those problems. That’s part of why Paul was hard to understand because he knew the problems, and the questions, and we don’t. It’s like we are snooping at someone’s email but we can’t see the messages before it! But Paul knew them and they knew Paul so they didn’t have to be incredibly detailed. Over the next two centuries, the believers in Jesus were reading these aloud to their congregations and the ones that all the congregations accepted as being inspired from God were gathered together into the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. All together, we have sixty-six books telling us the story of God doing the work of saving His people from sin.
I will tell you a few secrets though, did you know that there were no chapters in the Bible until like eight hundred years after Jesus came. Can you even imagine trying to find anything in the Bible without chapters? And there were no page numbers in the old scrolls either! They really had to know where stuff was at. And there were no verses until about six hundred years ago when a Rabbi finally divided up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, into verses. It wasn’t until about a hundred years later that the New Testament, the Greek Scriptures, were divided up and published that way in Bibles. I am telling you that we are super spoiled. And now we can go on the computer and enter a few words into biblegateway.com or google search or biblehub and it will give us the rest of the verse which is craaay-zeee. I couldn’t even imagine that when I was a kid, or for most of my adult life either. A lot of people have gone to a lot of work for many thousands of years—remembering, writing, organizing, and getting the Bible to us so that we can have it in our own homes and not just at the church or synagogue, and even on our computers and phones!
I love you and I am praying for you. I hope that you enjoy listening to the Bible as much as they did in the wilderness when Moses shared the stories of everything God had done for them.