Customer Reviews

Animals of the Bible

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This reference book is appropriate for children of any age. Great text, wonderful illustrations, and helpful reminders about where in the Bible these animals are mentioned. I found this book at our local library. The 1978 hardcover was published by Doubleday & Co. A similar book, 95 Animals of the Bible, by Nancy Johnson is also excellent. Children love animals, so both the Asimov and Johnson books are great ways to help children become biblically literate.

Part of the attraction of this edition is the children's book format of including artistic rendering of the story on each and every page. Lewis Carrol's 'Alice' would certainly approve. The pictures are bold, stylistic expressions inspired by the artist's visit to Northern France, where he had viewed exquisite medieval stained glass and tapestry. The animals are as caricatured as a Disney animation, but the ornamental flora is distinctively Old World.

Isaac shares with us the original language names of many of the species mentioned in the
Bible, some of which are either extinct, or mythical, or simply unknowns translated into
familiar species names. The most surprising, I think is the phonetic equivalent of something
we've heard in recent tragedy.

'Akhbar', a Hebrew word translated as 'mouse' in the KJV, is according to Asimov, a general
term "covering all the small rodents of the rat and mouse family."
"Akhbar literally means 'destruction of grain'." And, because I Samuel recounts an incident
where the Philistines offered a 'guilt' offering of five golden mice, to end a disease plague,
"Some scholars think that this indicates that the people of biblical times may have understood that rodents spread disease."

Whether or not that's true, it was thought whilst the plague was active during the dark ages,
that Jewish communities must have been working witchcraft, because their abstinence from
eating things like 'rodents' and from pouring their waste in the thoroughfares, [unlike the
Europeans] as well as their strictures about washing hands and against handling the dead
without cleansing themselves, all of these reduced the incidents of plague in Jewish
communities.

Small wonder that westerners can't begin to fathom how an pseudo literate band of religious fanatics would crash a perfectly good airplane into a building, screaming at the top of their lungs...

"God is a rat?"