Musings of a Snickerdoodle

These books are intended to teach kids about various biblical characters.  I read the ones on David and Esther.  The books are made up of various "files" for kids to investigate the particular characters in any of the given books. Starting out with a "Fact file", which gives a few facts about the person you are looking into, including a tiny timeline with about three events selected.  Next comes the "Action File", giving a summary of the person's life, along with various illustrations.  Lastly comes the "Power File" which gives you some ideas of what you can learn from the life of the person you are studying, and also provides you with memory verses from various books of the Bible. I'm sorry to say that I was disappointed with these books. First of all, they seem more like books for kids younger than 8, not 8-12. The biographies skip too much, it doesn't mention that Jonathan's father tried to kill Jonathan when Jonathan d...

I often sense a tendency in myself to take having an English translation of the Old and New Testaments for granted.  But, as Harry Freedman demonstrates in his book, The Murderous History of Bible Translations: Power, Conflict, and the Quest for Meaning, I shouldn't take it for granted and should appreciate all the more the effort and sacrifice that went in to getting the written Word of God into a book that ordinary people could read.  In this book Freedman does an excellent job at writing, he grasps and keeps one's attention, and it flows nicely.  He takes you through history, beginning with the translation of the Old Testament and then including the New in the focus as well.   Translating God's Word into the common vernacular of any people was often very tumultuous and controversial, and we see this down the passage of time that the author examines, and through many different translators who often took many risks to make the translation.  Thou...