Found: Psalm 23

 Found: Psalm 23
Written by Sally Lloyd-Jones
Illustrated by Jago
Copyright: 2007 (text) 2017 (illustrations)
format: hardback
Status: A boardbook version is available on amazon  and new or used versions are available on ebay
Conclusion: Keep it



I asked my son to pick the next book I should review and he chose this one. I'm not sure why, because we almost never read it.  However, this book is very interesting. The words come straight out of the Jesus Storybook Bible which was also written by Sally Lloyd-Jones and illustrated by Jago.  That is a very well-known and highly regarded story Bible for children. I've read it to my children but have not reviewed it yet (mostly because reviewing entire children's Bibles seems a bit intimidating right now, so I'm just reviewing one story at a time for now). However, in the "Found" book, they took the original words from their version of Psalm 23, separated them from the rest of the story, and added many more pictures to create a separate book.  It's lovely, but how well does this selection from the Jesus Storybook Bible match the Bible?

The Good Points:
  • "Found" stays very close to the Bible.
  • This book does a wonderful job of using short easy sentences for children to understand. 
  • It also makes the imagery very easy for especially young children to understand and relate to.
  • The images are colorful and fun. They add to the words to make storyline that fits with the poetry.
The Discrepancies:
  • The book doesn't mention that God leads him "For his name's sake."  Just that God leads him.
  • The Bible says "He preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." This book doesn't mention enemies.
  • This book mentions that God's love will follow him wherever he goes, but doesn't mention a time frame. In the Bible it says "all the days of my life."
I had to go pull my old King James Bible off the shelf for this review. I still have Psalm 23 memorized from when I was a child, and now all of the other version just sound wrong to me.  But regardless of which version I used, this book has very few problems, and the ones that I did find were so small, I wasn't even sure if I should this some of them.  Should this one be kept in your collection? Absolutely! I really like it! I recommend it for ages 1-6, though I suspect my 7-year old daughter might still enjoy it too. Now that I remember how much I liked this one, I need to put it in the rotation of Bible stories more often.


For comparison, the following image is the poem from the original Jesus Storybook Bible.





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