Moses of the Bulrushes (People of the Bible)

Moses of the Bulrushes
People of the Bible
Retold by Catherine Storr
Pictures by Jim Russell 
Copyright 1992
Format: Hardcover
Status: Not currently in print but some preowned books are available on ebay
Conclusion: Keep It!  If you don't already have it, find a copy. This one is worth having!


    More Moses!  I have so many books about Moses in my collection.  This series of books is fairly large. I'm aware of at least 23 different books and there may be others.  What I particularly like about this series that it doesn't try to cram Moses's entire life into one book. Instead it spreads his life out over four books, so that the author can include many rich details, yet still keep the length short enough for a bedtime story.  This series does with same with other Bible characters too. Joseph's life into 3 books, and Jesus's life into 5, plus 2 more dedicated to some of his parables.  I really like this approach for sets of children's books. However, the most important point is always, how well do they follow the Bible?

   The Good Points:

  • This book is very close to the Bible. In fact, I think it's the more accurate rendition of the Bible out of any of the stories I've reviewed so far.
  • The illustrations are very pretty.  They look like watercolor paintings.
  • This book includes wonderful details about the story that many other children's Bible stories lack.
    The Discrepancies:
  • The book mentions that Moses has a wife named Zipporah, but never mentions that he had sons.
  • In this book, when God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, he never tells Moses that he is the one to speak to Pharaoh. I fixed this by adding a sentence at the end of a paragraph using a label maker. See the image at the bottom for details.
  • This book describes one miracle that God teaches Moses to perform when convincing the Israelites that God has sent him, but it does not mention the other two. 
  • This book skips the parts where Moses goes back home to get his wife and children to bring with him.  However, this is the end of the book so it is possible that this part of the story is included in the next book which I do not own.
    My reaction to this book is "Wow!"  It's rare to find a Bible story that sticks so closely to the Bible. The discrepancies I was able to find are pretty minor, and one can even be fixed with a quickly written sentence or a label maker.  I wasn't very familiar with this specific book before I wrote this review because I acquired it after my daughter had decided she would rather read the real Bible instead of these stories, but this book is still a longer and more complicated than my 3-year old son is willing to sit through. Now that I've read it, though, I'm really excited to review the other six books I own from this same series.  If they are also as good as this one, I will go out of my way to acquire more of them. I recommend this book for ages 4-9.



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