What Was I Thinking? Queen Esther's 1970's Pants Suit

My mother just sent me the Bible story book that our family read when we kids were very young. I think she gave it to me, rather than any of my 4 sisters, because of the famous family story about my misunderstanding of which drawing went with which story. Here's the illustration of the story of Jesus' birth. You see Baby Jesus sleeping in an elaborate purple-and-red manger.

For unknown reasons (the long eyelashes??), I thought this was supposed to be the beautiful Queen Esther. As a child of the '70s, the manger looked like a typical pants suit. But I never quite understood why everyone thought Queen Esther was so beautiful. Her head and arms certainly aren't proportional. Oddly, it didn't phase me that she has hay sticking out of her sides (unruly belly hair??).

I won't mention how old I was before finally realizing this is Baby Jesus...


Now here's the drawing that really illustrates the Queen Esther story, showing Esther between the king and Haman. Much better, eh? I'm sure a banquet with her would be much more appetizing to the king and his favorite advisor than a banquet with the "other" Esther.

(Little Ones Listen to God. Written by Martha Hook; illustrated by Tinka Boren. 1971. Zondervan Publishing House. Grand Rapids, MI.)

The Bible in a Year: 3 months down

I've challenged myself to read the entire Bible in the course of a year, starting January 1, 2006. My expectations were that I wouldn't make it more than a few well-intentioned weeks. But, other than a vacation week in a Hilton with no Bible (who would have thought?), I've been keeping up well and enjoying my reading.

The best part has been re-reading some Bible stories I hadn't heard in many years. I'm also getting a more "global" perspective of the text, rediscovering some interesting thoughts I wrote in my Bible years ago, and found parts I don't remember hearing before. [Example: Judges 12:5-7, Israelite tribesmen use a regional accent Shibboleth/Sibboleth to distinguish between friend and enemy]. My daily readings also have not been as time-consuming as I expected.

Since a blog is a good format for tracking my thoughts, I'll write some down as I read. Here are some thoughts from the past few months that have stuck with me. I'm using a method published on www.christiananswers.net that divides the text in such a way that each week has one reading from each of seven categories: law, history, psalms, poetry, prophecy, gospels, epistles.

On January 1, I obviously read the beginning of Genesis. I was struck by a note in my Bible margin by Genesis 3:21, right after The Fall and God's curse on man, woman, and the serpent. "The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them."

My first thought had always been God's loving care for their needs even after such loss and disappointment. But my margin note isn't about the love and care but about the horror of the situation. Imagine what it must have been like for Adam and Eve, vegetarians up until this point (Gen. 1:29; 2:16), to see an animal killed because of their sins. It's disturbing on several levels. First, up until now, they had been responsible for naming and caring for animals, so it's striking that one of their "subjects" is killed. It may have even been an animal they knew individually. Also, they had probably never witnessed death before, much less been responsible for it. It's hard to imagine trying to fathom death for the first time and coming face-to-face with their own mortality. Not only that but now they knew that they would need to regularly kill animals for food, clothing, and sin offerings to God. I can't imagine watching it die (to learn how) and then having to wear its dead parts to survive themselves. And all of these horrors are dwarfed by knowing they had brought this upon themselves by disobeying God and that they would be separated from God on account of their sin. Then remember that it's only a matter of a few verses before the first murder, one of their sons kills their other son. Now death is even more horrible and the killing turns to murder. (Another note in my Bible at Gen. 4:23-24 comments on how murder is taken a step further by Lamech, Cain's great-great-etc-grandson, who boasts of murdering someone.)

Whew! Happily, there are new testament and psalms readings each week too...