A Manual for Teaching Biblical History. Eugene Kohn
and right conception of aim illustrated. A lack of appreciation of these aims has often led to the treatment of the Biblical narrative as if it were merely a series of moral stories or, at any rate, of stories into which a moral can be read. According to this method the connection of the Jewish people today with the people of the Bible is almost wholly ignored and there is no appreciable difference in the way the events of the Biblical narrative are taught and, let us say, the incidents of some highly moral fairy tale or folk-lore of other peoples. To give an example I quote the following summary of a lesson on "Moses' Return to Egypt":
"So then we can learn these two noble things from our lesson; modesty adorns everybody even the greatest people, yes very often the greatest people are the most modest. And further, when we have begun to do something, let us do it with all our might and stick to it till it is finished, no matter what it is, whether a school lesson or setting a people free; whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well."
One could imagine the same moral attached to the story of George Washington or of Cincinnatus and brought home as effectively by it. The difference between the right and the wrong method of treating the Biblical narrative from the point of view of the aim of such instruction can be seen if we contrast the above with the simple summary of the same lesson in the Passover Haggadah:
"Slaves were we unto Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord our God brought us forth thence with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. And if the Holy One, Blessed be He, had not brought forth our fathers from Egypt behold we and our children and our children's children might still be bondmen to Pharaoh in Egypt." And again: "In every generation one is obliged to regard himself as if he in person had come forth from Egypt, as it is said, 'And thou shalt tell thy son in that day saying, It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.' Not our fathers alone did the Holy One, Blessed be He, redeem but us also did He redeem with them, as it is said, 'And us did He bring forth thence in order to bring us hither to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers.'"
According to the method of the former quotation Biblical history is no more related to the child than the story of the Iliad, according to the latter it is his own history, the study of which helps him to self knowledge, to the knowledge of his Jewish self, the knowledge of the ties that bind him to his fellow Jews and the Jewish people to its God. Much more might be said of the effect upon the method of instruction of a clear conception of the aim of instruction in Biblical history when thus conceived in terms of Jewish life, but a study of the lessons given in this book will suffice to explain this without the need of further amplification, so we may pass to the consideration of the subject-matter to be taught as a determining factor in the method of instruction.
The subject-matter: Biblical history. I have throughout referred to the subject-matter under the name not of Jewish history but of Biblical history and I have done so advisedly. For the term Jewish history does not commit one to that interpretation of the early history of our people which is to be found in the Bible. From the Jewish point of view the Bible, in its narrative portions as well as in its laws, is Torah, that is authoritative teaching. It does not merely recall the early events of Jewish history but it takes a distinct attitude to these events, seeing in them the revelation of a divine purpose; it not only tells the deeds of Biblical heroes but it passes judgment upon them, here approving and there disapproving; and it is precisely this attitude to Jewish history, this interpretation of the significance of historic events, which must be made an influence in the life of the child. If we were merely teaching Jewish history as such and looked upon the Bible merely as the source book of this history we might tell the story of the Exodus somewhat in this fashion:
"The children of Israel who had at the beginning of their sojourn in Egypt been well treated by the Egyptian rulers, owing to a change of dynasty were subjected to oppression and forced to do servile labor for the Pharaohs. They took advantage however of a series of calamities that visited Egypt, which their leaders Moses and Aaron interpreted to the Egyptians as signs of the divine wrath incurred by her because of her oppression of the Israelites, and so left Egypt in a body."
The above account is Jewish history but it is not Biblical history for it has nothing to say about the significance of these events as the Bible regards them. It does not tell us that Moses was sent by God, it does not know anything of the covenant with Abraham of which these events are the fulfillment, it does not therefore see in the Exodus one link in a chain of events having its beginning in the election of Abraham and its consummation in the revelation at Sinai. In the Biblical narrative what is most conspicuous is the Eẓba Elohim, "the finger of God," in the merely historic account this may altogether be omitted.
Must give Biblical moral to Jewish history. Very few teachers in our Jewish schools, if any, would make the mistake of teaching the events narrated in the Bible merely as cold facts without any attempt at giving them religious significance, though frequent efforts at rationalization tend in this direction. For the most part, the aim in teaching the early history of our people is felt to be a religious one and to call for a religious interpretation of the events recorded. We are not loath to attach a moral to the stories we tell our children, but where we fail is that we imagine any moral which we can read into the story is satisfactory. We have already shown how the consideration of the aim of instruction in Biblical history, from the point of view of traditional Judaism, opposes this method and limits the moral which should be taught in connection with any given story, but the consideration of the subject-matter to be taught limits it still further. We must not only give a Jewish moral to each episode in the Biblical narrative but we must give the child the specific moral that the Bible itself attaches to that episode. If we take our Bible seriously, if we regard its interpretation of the events of our history as essentially true, as indeed part of the Torah, a divine revelation, then it becomes our duty to give this interpretation of events and not another to our children. We sometimes excuse to ourselves the perversion of the Biblical moral on the ground that because children are children they frequently cannot grasp what is really the Biblical lesson. If in any given instance this is the case, it is better not to teach that story at all to the child than to falsify it. But usually the ideas of the Bible can be brought home to the child if we but take the trouble to translate them into the language of childhood and illustrate them out of the child's own experience. It is largely due to indolence on the part of the teacher that we so frequently sin against the Biblical sense of a story. I have heard the story of Abraham's divorce of Hagar told as if it were a mere family squabble in which Sarah, by shrewish persistence finally prevails upon the meek and submissive Abraham somewhat reluctantly to send away Hagar, who had aroused her jealousy. Abraham was made a rather doubtful hero who represented the virtue of loving peace—peace at any price as the narrative showed—and Sarah was regarded as acting in a mean and ungodly capacity. Had that teacher read her Bible carefully and intelligently before coming to class she could not have been guilty of such grotesque distortion of the Biblical story, by which it is made not only trivial but ludicrous. She would then have realized that Ishmael had to be separated from Isaac for the same reason that Lot had to be separated from Abraham and Esau from Jacob, because they were not of the seed from which Israel was destined to spring; that even before the birth of Ishmael we have the prophecy told to Hagar, "And he shall be a wild ass of a man; his hand shall be against every man and every man's hand against him" (Genesis 16. 12). She would have observed that in the words of the Rabbis "Abraham was subordinate to Sarah in prophecy", that just as Isaac showed a mistaken preference for Esau so Abraham when the birth of Isaac is predicted to him pleaded, "Oh that Ishmael might live before thee!", and that the Bible recognizes the superior prophetic insight of Sarah by telling us that God commanded Abraham explicitly, "Let it not be grievous in thy eyes because of the lad and because of thy bond-woman; in all that Sarah may say unto thee, hearken to her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called." Surely, though the story undoubtedly presents difficulties of a pedagogic nature, it is not impossible to teach a child that God foresaw that Ishmael would be a "pere adam" (a wild ass of a man), that he did not wish the chosen people, who were to inherit the promised land, to be possessed of such traits, and that therefore Ishmael had to be sent away so that Isaac and his descendants might become the great people he had promised Abraham they would become. In this way the Bible speaks for itself and tells a story that is quite as intelligible to the child as the one that the teacher I have mentioned told,