JOURNEY INTO THE BIBLE

This British import offers an eclectic approach to biblical stories and history with panoramic, detailed illustrations, colorful maps and sidebars with “travel tips” geared to travelers of the time period. The organizational strategy consists of 20 journeys stretching from the time of creation as portrayed in the Bible to the era of the early Christians. Key characters are introduced in terms of their journeys to new lands or their returns to homelands. Each spread includes some text, spot illustrations and a larger illustration filled with people of the era, including details of their work, homes and clothing. Helpful labels and explanatory sentences are worked into the text, giving the reader lots to look at on every spread. The maps are a useful feature, often showing the same area on multiple pages, but with different names as the occupying groups changed. Most of the key characters, main stories and major locations described in the Bible are presented, giving a fairly comprehensive introduction to a complex subject. There are no correlations to relevant Bible verses, and although there is an index, it references journey numbers rather than page numbers with no indication of this, rendering it frustrating, baffling and useless for people unable to intuit this distinction. Though the pages seem crowded at first glance, a considerable amount of information is packed into a short volume, and the explanations of complicated history will be useful to adults teaching Bible history and interesting to young readers. (Picture book/religion. 6-10)