[This is an attempt to write a Bible study lesson for twelve to fourteen year old children. I invite you to read it and tell me what you think. All helpful criticism, comments and suggestions are welcome.]

People who do not have a system of writing pass on their history from generation to generation by story telling. They sit around a campfire in the evening, or in a warm lodge during the winter months, old and young together, and the storyteller recounts a story from their history. The storyteller knows the old ones have heard these stories hundreds of times and they are so firmly fixed in their minds that he dare not change even one little detail. This is called oral history and it is as reliable as written history.

The book of Genesis is oral history that was later written down. During the whole time period covered by Genesis storytelling was the only means of recording history. Some other peoples developed systems of recording events through the use of pictographs. Pictographs use symbols that represent birds, animals, flowers, trees and people to tell a story. Such a system cannot record all the details found in oral history.

The first chapter of Genesis is not like the oral history of the rest of the book. It is an eyewitness account, but there were no people to see what was happening in those first six days. The only one who could have provided these details is God Himself.

How did this get put into writing? We have no description of how it happened, but we know that the Hebrew alphabet was the first phonetic alphabet. There is no record of any such alphabet, no written history, no written law, before Moses went up the mountain and spent forty days with God. When Moses came down from the mountain he had the ten commandments written in a phonetic alphabet. It is logical to think that this is when he began the task of putting the book of Genesis into writing and that God revealed to him the details of events that had no human witnesses.

A phonetic alphabet uses symbols to represent each sound that makes up a word. This made it possible to record oral history word for word. The Greeks took the Hebrew alphabet and changed the shapes of the letters. The Romans changed the shapes again to give us the alphabet we now use. The word alphabet comes from the names of the first two letters. In Hebrew they were Aleph and Bet. In Greek they were called Alpha and Beta.

Now the people of God had a system for recording their history, their poetry and the words of their prophets. Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Through the centuries that followed God inspired other men to write events and prophecies so that they would be preserved for future generations. This is history that we can trust.

Look up the verses and write in your own words how you would explain them to someone else.

1. Exodus 20:4-6.
How would it have been possible to teach this with pictographs that were themselves a likeness of things on the earth?

2. Joshua 1:8.
Why should we read the Bible?

3. Luke 1:1-4.
Luke was a careful historian. He checked his information, gave the names of important Jewish and Roman officials and other information that help us connect the events in his gospel to events in other written histories of the time. Does that help you to trust what he tells us about Jesus?

4. Acts 26:26
The apostle Paul is telling king Agrippa that the events of Jesus’ life were well known at that time. Why do you suppose some people today would try to say they never happened?

5. Deuteronomy 4:2.
How might we add to, or diminish from, the words of the Bible?