STUDY TOPICS

1.  Browse through the book of Proverbs, especially chapters 10 and following, looking for teachings on the following subjects; enter the references opposite (a), (b), etc., below.

(a) Diligence in work. (b) Temperance in use of wine. (c) Honesty in business. (d) Compassion toward the poor. (e) Self-control in anger.

2.  Read Ecclesiastes 11, for a taste of another “wisdom” book.

3.  Find if you can a Bible with the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments, and read a chapter or two in Ecclesiasticus, or the wisdom of the Son of Sira.

FOOTNOTES: 

[5] Part of these pages taken from the author’s earlier book, The Story of Our Bible.  Copyright, 1914, 1915, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.  Used by permission.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BOOK LEARNING AMONG THE JEWS

If we could have visited the home of some sincerely religious Jew about the time when the law of Deuteronomy was adopted by King Josiah and the people we might have seen the beginning of a new kind of education—­the regular study of books, and especially of the Bible.  They had for their Bible at that time the law of Deuteronomy, which they had accepted as God’s will for all Jews.  And if this was God’s will for them, it was plain that it must be taught to everybody, beginning with the children.

TEACHING THE LAW AT HOME

Let us imagine ourselves, then, visiting the house of some good Jewish friend in Jerusalem under Josiah.  As we enter the door we notice letters roughly carved or painted on the wooden door.  “You ask what are those words,” replies our host to our question.  “They are from our law.  They are for the children to see, as they go in and out the door.  This is the way the inscription reads: 

    ="’Hear, O Israel:  Jehovah thy God is one and thou shalt love
    Jehovah thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
    and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’=

“The priest wrote them for us and both I myself and the children have been learning to read them,” says our friend.  “And every Sabbath we study them, and I teach the children to repeat after me as much of the rest of Jehovah’s law as I can remember.  Sometimes the children ask me questions.  They say, ’What mean these laws and these statutes which you say Jehovah our God commanded?’ Then I answer, ’We were Pharaoh’s slaves in the land of Egypt.  And Jehovah brought us up out of Egypt ... to give us this land.  And Jehovah commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear Jehovah our God for our good.’”

=Religion through education.=—­It is easy to understand that with this training in childhood it became more and more easy from this time on to persuade the Jewish people not to worship idols and to see why they gradually changed more and more rapidly into the most devout and earnest people in the world.  The children were taught in their homes.