Another comic book style Bible has realistic art.

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Product Description

For years, The Picture Bible has delighted young and old. Now updated with interesting new features, including "Did you know?" fact pages, time line, story listing, maps, and more, kids will love the great stories and action pictures of the newly revised Picture BIble. God's Word will come alive for hours of family reading enjoyment.

Newly designed with a fresh cover, text, and maps, this Scripture makes an ideal first Bible for young readers. Though the full text for 233 stories is provided, children can follow the colorful pictures and storyline without having to read every word. A perennial best-seller, The Picture Bible is loved by young and old, and has proved to be an excellent way to improve children's reading skills.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12538 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 800 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780781430555
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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Customer Reviews

Reads like a comic book. Superb Gift, Good teaching tool.
I disagree with the review written by Andrew B. Morseman on September 20, 2000, and I strongly recommend this book for teachers of higher elementary grades and summer or Vacation Bible schools. I respect his opinion, which is why I am rebutting it here, legally, in view of the public.

This book is an excellent way to expose older children and young teens to the bible as religious literature, or as educational literature, because it synopsizes events, clarifies characters, and artfully omits some of the vissictudes and harsher realities of ancient times.

While not fully accurate to the facts, the general events and key characters are magnified as the centers of the stories, with geneaologies of the Hebrew and Israelic ancestors telescoped or omitted. Most children do not have the attention span or interest to digest the historical record-keeping which the bible contains, and many are not ready to deal with the full goriness of bloodshed, sex, and intricate conspiracy which dominates all of human history. The Picture Bible dances around many such events which are distracting with regard to the main storyline, (i.e. the rape of Tamar does not directly affect the life or rule of David) omitting irrelevancies and euphemizing "mature" material.

The illustrations cleverly indicate the characters, their moods, and the passage of time, to project a limited idea of the timeframe of the individual stories, the scope of indivdual storylines, and people interweave seamlessly as individuals from one story to another. The chapter divisions are marvelously episodic, and clearly identify the biblical texts from which they are derived.

Books paraphrazed or synopsized, but not omitted from mention, are the major and minor prophets, the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon. swaths of the Pentateuch are left out, and the Letters and travels of Paul, the other events in Acts and the other letters, and the Revelation of St. John are all synopsized or given prominent mention. Every book of the canonical Bible is conspicuously mentioned at some point. The meaning of the prophetic books is under much debate and is largely a conceptual or spiritual problem, not suited for younger ages. The books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon (a.k.a. Canticles) are mentioned but left out because they contain no story material of themselves. Leviticus and Deuteronomy contain almost nothing but the Mosaic Law, which is of little or no interest to young minds (the Ten Commandments are stated Verbatim from the King James Bible on a separate illustrated page), and other books contain material that simply can't be worked into a storybook grounded in corporeal facts and events.

As to inerrancy and infallibility; only the Truth Himself is inerrant and infallible; there are many nuances of bare facts that have been lost to history and translation, and bibles as late as the King James and Douday Original Version have been shown to contain errors of translation, content, and meaning, while scripts like the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome were rejected as un-canonical although they contained neither gross nor suttle errors of meaning or doctrine. Even today books touted as Bibles contain many errors that do disservice to both Christian Doctrine and scholarly and literary accuracy. The admitted errancy of this book is not that of a knave, but of a knight. It is fallible so that it might be more authentic, and less artifical. I think it is very useful as a stepping stone, even if it isn't the Rock of Truth.

I first studied Christian Literature using this bible, and when I dug into the King James version, I didn't get lost becuase I already knew the main storyline, and could identify key characters. I also did not find the omissions to be misleading or ingenuine to the stories themselves, or discredit the characters or ideas presented in the stories.

All in all, this is a wonderful book for older preteen readers; it conveys the key events and ideas found in the bible, has skilled and meaningful illustration (which helps the story along as much as the dialogue) and presents religious truth without any authoritative invocation or declaration. I like the content, but I would change the title to "The Comic Book Bible."

And for any comments, my real e-mail is pettarg@hotmail.com, and my real name is Gabe. Thank you for reading!!!

Shortcomings of The Picture Bible
We bought The Picture Bible as it was required for a daughter's class in a Christian school. After reading only a few pages, my wife and I became convinced that the book falls far short of what we expected from such a work.

The main deficiency is in the area of accuracy to the actual Biblical text. In addition to creating extra-Biblical dialog for characters to speak, the author has also made glaring errors in an apparent attempt to make stories flow more to his liking.

A prime example of this is found in the story of the two angels who visit Lot in Sodom (Gen. 19). In the Bible, the residents of Sodom demand that the angels be sent out of the house so they can have carnal relations with them, a clear example of the depths of depravity existing in Sodom. According to The Picture Bible, however, the citizens of Sodom, believing the two strangers to "look like trouble," determine to run them out of town. By changing the story in this way, the Sodomites appear to have civic virtue in mind, rather than personal lust. Therefore, when God destroys Sodom, He comes across as irrational and cruel, rather than righteously expressing His anger at the sin of Sodom. In this manner, the entire meaning of the passage is not only lost, but turned on its head.

Another, relatively minor problem, but one which characterizes the poor thought given to development of The Picture Bible is seen in the story of Sarah learning at the age of 90 that she will become pregnant and have a child (Gen. 17, 18). When Sarah first hears of this and says she is too old to have a child, she appears to be somewhere between 30 and 40 years old, and certainly less than 50. Abraham, who is 99 at the time, has a brown beard and appears hale and hearty. A few pages later, she is far older and barely recognizable as the same person, while Abraham is now grayed and bowed.

In other passages, events are taken out of order or details found in Scripture are left out from The Picture Bible, for no apparent reason. There are many more examples of these types of problems, but space and time prevent me from describing them.

It would have been just as easy to write this book accurately as inaccurately. Parents who believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture will probably not be pleased with this book, due to the many liberties it takes with the clear text and message of the Bible.

Other resources which are much better include the Dorling Kindersley Family Bible, and the Read-and-grow Picture Bible, not to be confused with The Picture Bible. Both of these works are much more accurate and, as my 5 children can attest, hold the interest of young people very well. Parents and children can do much better than The Picture Bible.

Awsome comic Bible
My 9 year old son received this Bible for christmas last year and in one year he read it from cover to cover 7 times. He loves it.