Illustrated children's Bible wins award

'In the very beginning, God created a world – the heavens and the earth – out of nothing.'

By FELICITY KAY
bible (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
bible (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
So begins the JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible, the recent winner of the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish Book Award for an illustrated children’s book.
Written by Ellen Frankel and illustrated by Israeli Avi Katz, the book, which is also the US Association of Jewish Libraries’ Sidney Taylor Notable Book in the category “For All Ages,” aims to make the Bible more accessible.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Katz explained that, “‘The idea [behind the book] is to have a standard, universally acceptable version for kids to read and learn the basic stories that every Western child should know.”
Frankel said, “One thing I’m really pleased about the book was that most children’s bibles don’t honor the original text, even in modern English, but edit and abridge. They add interpretation, turning the story into fairy tales. These are not meant to be fairy tales.”
Katz also explained the potential difficulty in dealing with the more adult content of some biblical stories: “While the illustrations had to be straightforward, and to tell a story while being visually enchanting, I occasionally had some dilemmas about how to represent certain aspects.
“For example, with the snake in the story of Adam and Eve, the writer was very excited because I gave the snake legs, since it says in the story that it was cursed to crawl on its belly for all eternity, and its legs were removed.”
Katz, who is also a Bible teacher, added his own interpretation, depicting Sara giving birth to Isaac as a middleaged woman, rather than as the classically told 90-year old.
“The Hebrew word for year is ‘shana’, but since Rosh Hashana, the New Year, is said to be in the sixth month in the Torah, I understood a ‘shana’ not to be a simple solar year, but a six-month period.
“Therefore, if Sarah was 90 ‘shanim’ she had her first child at 45, and so that’s how I depicted it. It’s still extraordinary in a biblical society to live to the ripe old age of 60.”
Receiving the award was exciting, he said.
“I’ve been illustrating for many years and you don’t have an audience in front of you, so you don’t get to see the reaction your work produces, yet here I was, standing on a stage getting applauded. It was really fun!”