My Golden Book of Bible Stories

$86 million! That is what World Youth Day cost us NSW tax payers, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. And that doesn’t include another $42 million for use of the Randwick Racecourse. Ouch, ouch, ouch! Why don’t they just give the money to ME?

Do they think that the benefits of having these visitors here will outweigh the $128 million spent? I heard they hardly spent anything here at all. I wonder what the thinking was behind that.

Still, there’s been lots of fuzziness and good spirits around. As soon as you got into the city last week you saw clusters and brightly dressed youth, waving flags, and singing and squeaking excitedly. You’d have had to have been a massive jerk not to be happy for them, really. It was kind of heart warming.

So now the Pope has gone, the Press is slowly discontinuing its fawning coverage, and the young geeks of the world – instantly recognizable by the orange backpacks and the obligatory acoustic guitar player issued to each group of pedestrians – are going home. I mean seriously, what is wrong with these kids?

My own religious education was confined to a lone Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publication. (I know, it could have ended really badly). When I was around four years old, my parents hired a builder called Barry to do some work on their lovely London home. As they told me some years later, after he’d finished his last day of work on the house, he told them he was a Jehovah’s witness, and asked he could give their daughter (me) a book of Bible stories. They said “All right then”, and so little Sprite was presented with a gold coloured hard-back book, with the words ‘My Book of Bible Stories’ etched on the front in shiny red letters.

I don’t remember really reading the book until I was several years older and living in Saudi Arabia. Due to its size, it sat on the lowest level of my bookshelf with the other hardback books, mostly fairy tales, Care Bear stories and illustrated ballet books. Now, I didn’t get it out very often, but every now and then I’d scan my big selection of books, looking for something a bit different that I hadn’t already read three times in the last year, and maybe I’d be in the mood for something a bit different, a bit off the wall so to speak, and I’d reach for the golden book of Bible stories.

This book held a bit of fascination for me. It started with the cover, plain and tasteful, with no pictures or hints of what was inside. It seemed so adult and mysterious, not aimed at children at all, or at least, aimed at children of another age. So many things were weird about this book. The forbidding, adult tone. The drawings, the good guys in pastel colours and the bad ladies who all looked like the original Charlie’s Angels, perpetually laughing drunkenly, flashing tiny white teeth. I had so many questions. Why were they all Arabs, and yet so different from the Arabs I knew? There wasn’t a mosque in sight! And why did the Paradise on Earth that God promised look like a Safari Park? I didn’t know anyone who’d like to spend eternity in small nuclear family groups, crouching behind bushes and pointing at lions. (I still don’t).

Even at seven or so, I could tell from the tone of the book that it was somehow meant to convey a moral message. But the God in these tales was angry, spiteful and capricious; the messages went against much that I had been raised to believe was right. I also sensed that whoever had written it meant it to be a historical record. Yet I had never heard a whisper of these stories in history class at school. Surely historians conferred occasionally??!

But I was willing to suspend disbelief. It was, after all, shelved with my fairy tales.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the book was the mysteries it held. I just didn’t understand a lot of it. One story stands out in my memory, though I don’t remember the details. (Folks, I really don’t know my Bible). A 70’s looking couple were lying together on a sofa, asleep in smug abandon. Jehovah, tirelessly interfering bastard that he was, got enraged (again) and smote them, or something like that, or condemned them to perpetual crop failure, or something, I really don’t remember. The point was, God had forbidden people to lie together unless they were married. (The whole thing was so deliciously unsuitable for innocent children!)

Boy, did I ponder that one. I would look at the picture of the sofa, and remember the many times I had spotted my mother catching an afternoon lap in the living room, and quietly curled up beside her. I assumed that the author was getting at stuff like that. But what in the world were they talking about? I thought and thought and thought!

God – ‘Jehovah’ – seemed so vindictive and evil. He only liked incredibly obedient people, who farmed a lot and stood around gazing adoringly at young children and animals; men with salt and pepper beards and women with big eyes. He really hated shorter bearded men and brassy haired women, who sprawled around in large crowds in Roman-style villas, waving goblets in the air and flashing tiny teeth in slack smiles. I couldn’t imagine wanting to be in either group, but I reasoned that if I had ‘Jehovah’ breathing fire down my neck, I’d surely join group #1 out of self-protection. For me, group #2’s only real wrongdoing was their criminal stupidity!

Who wrote it? Where did it come from? Was it old or modern? Did someone somehow actually still believe in it? (My mother taught me basically that Christianity was something people used to believe in Olden Times, but it was now only relevant as a shared cultural background). But it seemed like somebody did, because it was always asking questions like, "Wouldn't it have been better if so-and-so had listened to Jehovah?" (Me: "It would be even better if Jehovah didn't have anger control issues") and "Wouldn't you like to stand around for eternity stroking a sheep?" ("No"), etc. And what did it mean when it said people shouldn't 'lie together'? Baffled, I’d think and think and think.

Then I’d put the book away and forget about it for another year or so, when I’d tackle it again with the benefit of a little more age, with a slightly different take, and the whole process would begin again.

P.S. After writing this, I did a quick search of the Internet, and guess what, the book’s on Wikipedia. You can check it out here. Go ahead. You know you want to.