The Bible

The Bible is a collection of many books, written down by many authors over many centuries, and most of their names are not known. The Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, was written mostly in Hebrew, with some Aramaic, long before the common era. Christian Bibles add the New Testament, written in Greek in the first century. Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions differ on exactly which books belong to it. Its stories have been retold for children for centuries, and the ones here are retold for children in today’s English.

In English, they follow the King James Version, translated by a committee of scholars for the English church and published in 1611. The text people have read since is the standard edition of 1769, and that is the one these retellings use. They are neither a new translation nor a children’s Bible: each tells what the text says happened, in order, and stops at the last scene, without adding a lesson, a prayer or an explanation.