Teaching Early Years Scripture

Teaching Early Years Scripture

SOME KEY BELIEFS:

·  Teaching Scripture well in the Early Years requires using all the best pedagogical practices that research demonstrates most effectively nurtures the education of young children. This includes providing opportunities for children to engage in deep extended play (such as using Scripture puppets to retell a Scripture story and dialogue with their peers about the possible meaning of the story for people today).

·  It is critical not to teach students anything that they will need to ‘unlearn’ later on. Therefore, it is important to teach Scripture using an accurate and approved translation of the text, and not to use a Children’s Bible or storybook as if it is the same thing as an accurate translation of the text, because Children’s Bibles and picture storybooks that retell Scripture stories are laden with author bias and illustrator bias.

·  If children are taught an accurate translation of the text, they can also be taught to identify author bias and illustrator bias. (Therefore, Children’s Bible’s can be a great resource for enabling students to develop the skills to detect author bias and illustrator bias.)

·  Teaching Scripture in the Early Years is about ensuring students know and understand the foundational concepts – which can be built upon in later years. (See overview of teaching the Creation stories P-7.)

TEACHING USING THE THREE WORLDS OF THE TEXT

The Story of Noah – Year 1

Genesis 6:13-9:1Contemporary English Version (CEV)

13So he told Noah:

Cruelty and violence have spread everywhere. Now I’m going to destroy the whole earth and all its people. 14Get some good lumber and build a boat. Put rooms in it and cover it with tar inside and out. 15Make it four hundred fifty feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high. 16Build a roof[a] on the boat and leave a space of about eighteen inches between the roof and the sides.[b] Make the boat three stories high and put a door on one side.

17I’m going to send a flood that will destroy everything that breathes! Nothing will be left alive. 18But I solemnly promise that you, your wife, your sons, and your daughters-in-law will be kept safe in the boat.[c]

19-20Bring into the boat with you a male and a female of every kind of animal and bird, as well as a male and a female of every reptile. I don’t want them to be destroyed. 21Store up enough food both for yourself and for them.

22Noah did everything the Lord told him to do.

The Flood

7The Lord told Noah:

Take your whole family with you into the boat, because you are the only one on this earth who pleases me. 2Take seven pairs of every kind of animal that can be used for sacrifice[d] and one pair of all others. 3Also take seven pairs of every kind of bird with you. Do this so there will always be animals and birds on the earth. 4Seven days from now I will send rain that will last for forty days and nights, and I will destroy all other living creatures I have made.

5-7Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the boat to escape the flood, and he did everything the Lord had told him to do. His wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law all went inside with him. 8-9He obeyed God and took a male and a female of each kind of animal and bird into the boat with him. 10Seven days later a flood began to cover the earth.

11-12Noah was six hundred years old when the water under the earth started gushing out everywhere. The sky opened like windows, and rain poured down for forty days and nights. All this began on the seventeenth day of the second month of the year. 13On that day Noah and his wife went into the boat with their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives. 14They took along every kind of animal, tame and wild, including the birds. 15Noah took a male and a female of every living creature with him, 16just as God had told him to do. And when they were all in the boat, God closed the door.

17-18For forty days the rain poured down without stopping. And the water became deeper and deeper, until the boat started floating high above the ground. 19-20Finally, the mighty flood was so deep that even the highest mountain peaks were almost twenty-five feet below the surface of the water. 21Not a bird, animal, reptile, or human was left alive anywhere on earth. 22-23The Lord destroyed everything that breathed. Nothing was left alive except Noah and the others in the boat. 24A hundred fifty days later, the water started going down.

The Water Goes Down

8God did not forget about Noah and the animals with him in the boat. So God made a wind blow, and the water started going down. 2God stopped up the places where the water had been gushing out from under the earth. He also closed up the sky, and the rain stopped. 3For one hundred fifty days the water slowly went down. 4Then on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the year, the boat came to rest somewhere in the Ararat mountains. 5The water kept going down, and the mountain tops could be seen on the first day of the tenth month.

6-7Forty days later Noah opened a window to send out a raven, but it kept flying around until the water had dried up. 8Noah wanted to find out if the water had gone down, and he sent out a dove. 9Deep water was still everywhere, and the dove could not find a place to land. So it flew back to the boat. Noah held out his hand and helped it back in.

10Seven days later Noah sent the dove out again. 11It returned in the evening, holding in its beak a green leaf from an olive tree. Noah knew that the water was finally going down. 12He waited seven more days before sending the dove out again, and this time it did not return.

13Noah was now six hundred one years old. And by the first day of that year, almost all the water had gone away. Noah made an opening in the roof of the boat[e] and saw that the ground was getting dry. 14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was completely dry.

15God said to Noah, 16“You, your wife, your sons, and your daughters-in-law may now leave the boat. 17Let out the birds, animals, and reptiles, so they can mate and live all over the earth.” 18After Noah and his family had gone out of the boat, 19the living creatures left in groups of their own kind.

The Lord’s Promise for the Earth

20Noah built an altar where he could offer sacrifices to the Lord. Then he offered on the altar one of each kind of animal and bird that could be used for a sacrifice.[f] 21The smell of the burning offering pleased God, and he said:

Never again will I punish the earth for the sinful things its people do. All of them have evil thoughts from the time they are young, but I will never destroy everything that breathes, as I did this time.

22As long as the earth remains,
there will be planting
and harvest,
cold and heat;
winter and summer,
day and night.

God’s Promise to Noah

9God said to Noah and his sons:

I am giving you my blessing. Have a lot of children and grandchildren, so people will live everywhere on this earth.

How do we need to understand this text in order to teach it well to children?

·  We need to teach children that when this text was written, people did not know all that we know about the world today, so they told stories and wrote stories to help people understand what was happening in their world. Therefore, floods would have happened long ago, and there probably was a big flood that looked like it covered the whole world at some stage. But we know today that would have been impossible – the world was much bigger than people of the time ever imagined possible. People wrote stories that had special messages to help people understand how God wanted them to live in the world. (Note: We do not teach this as a literal, historical story. We teach it as a mythical story – a story that had important messages for people.)

6:9–9:29 The account of Noah

Many ancient peoples around the world tell the story of a great flood from which only one man and his family escaped by building a boat. But, as might have been expected, the closest parallels to the biblical account come from Mesopotamia, in the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh epics. Both texts date from around 1600 bc. Like the biblical story, they tell of a man (Atrahasis or Utnapishtim) who was advised by his god to build an ark to escape the flood. He did so, loaded it with goods and animals, floated on the floodwaters for a short while, and sent out birds to see if the waters were abating. Eventually the ark grounded on a mountain top, the flood survivor emerged and offered sacrifices which greatly pleased the gods, who rewarded him with eternal life. The similarities between the biblical and Babylonian accounts of the flood show that it was a well-known story in the ancient Near East.

There are, however, various differences between the accounts, which show that they have not simply been borrowed from each other. There are differences of detail, e.g. about the size and shape of the ark, the duration of the flood and the types of birds that were sent out to inspect the floodwaters. But these are relatively trivial differences. Much more important are the theological differences between the accounts. These are so considerable that it seems likely that the author of the biblical account was deliberately trying to correct or refute the common oriental view of the flood. In particular, Genesis is trying to explain what God is really like and how he relates to the world.

In the Babylonian versions, the gods agreed on a flood to stop human population growth, but one dissented and tipped off his worshipper Atrahasis (the equivalent of Noah). When the flood was unleashed, the gods cowered before it like dogs unable to control it. After the flood the gods hurried to the sacrifice as they were hungry, since sacrifices had stopped during the flood. One of the top gods was surprised to find a man had survived the flood (evidently this god was neither omnipotent nor omniscient).

The whole theological and ethical outlook of Genesis is different. First, the flood was sent not to curb human noise or fertility but because of human corruption and sinfulness (6:11–12). Secondly, Noah was saved not because he chanced to worship a god who disagreed with the flood decision but because he was righteous … blameless among the peoples of his time. Throughout the flood story Noah is portrayed as doing exactly what God commanded him (e.g. 6:22; 7:9; 8:18). Thirdly, the God of Genesis is all-powerful and all-knowing. He is always in total control of the flood and knows just what is happening. It was when God remembered Noah that the flood waters started to recede (8:1–2). The sacrifice after the flood did not quench God’s appetite (unlike the Mesopotamian gods, he was not in need of human food) but appeased his wrath. Despite continuing human sinfulness (cf. 8:21 with 6:5), God promised that never again would the earth be destroyed in a flood. The rainbow was God’s pledge that he would maintain and protect the whole earth (8:22–9:16). Finally, while the Atrahasis epic ends with the gods inventing miscarriage and female infertility to curb population growth, Noah is urged three times to ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth’ (9:1; cf. 8:17; 9:7). Despite sin, God is basically on our side and concerned for the welfare of the human race. This goodwill was secured by Noah’s sacrifice and by the greater sacrifice of Christ.

6:9–8:22 The story of the flood

Genesis regards the flood as the great dividing point in world history. The flood was a great act of de-creation. It returned the earth to the situation of primeval watery chaos that existed before God started speaking in 1:3. Life was destroyed. Water covered everything, even the mountain tops, so that the planet looked as it did when God first created it (1:2). Then, when God remembered Noah, he sent a wind over the earth (cf. the hovering spirit/wind of God in 1:2) to begin the process of new creation. The world was born anew. Dry land and waters were separated, and Noah, the new head of the human race, emerged from the ark and, like Adam, was told to ‘Be fruitful and increase in number’ (9:1, cf. 1:28). Noah is thus seen as a second-Adam figure.

This parallelism between the flood as the great act of de-creation and the re-creation after the flood is underlined in Genesis by the literary design of the story. It is written in a large mirror-image pattern (‘extended chiasmus’ or ‘palistrophe’) which emphasizes the symmetry of the story. Here just some of the most obvious features of this structure are noted. (For fuller discussion see Wenham, Genesis 1–15 pp. 155–158).

A Noah’s sons (6:10) / A1 Noah’s sons (9:18–27)
B Enter the ark (7:1) / B1 Leave the ark (8:16)
C Seven days (7:4) / C1 Seven days (8:12)
D Seven days (7:10) / D1 Seven days (8:10)
E Forty days (7:17) / E1 Forty days (8:6)
F Mountains covered (7:20) / F1 Mountains uncovered (8:5)
G Flooding for 150 days (7:24) / G1 Water receding for 150 days (8:3)
H God remembered Noah (8:1)

This structure not only draws attention to the parallels between God’s destructive work in sending the flood and his work of recreation but also shows that the turning point was his remembering Noah. The God of Genesis was not impotent before the flood, like the gods of Babylon, but in total control, sovereign in judgment and mercy.

6:9–22 Command to build the ark. Those who construct pictures or models of the ark have to read into Genesis extra construction details, and how far these are valid may be questioned. Particularly obscure is the roof design in v 16. (See the larger commentaries on this.) What most concerns Genesis is the purpose of the ark, which was to keep … alive all species of living creatures. Hence, pairs had to be taken aboard to ensure their continued breeding.