14 Old Testament Reference Books and Counting

Picture of the Day for 1/4/2014. I may be a bit of a heathen, but that doesn't mean I don't have a well-stocked library of religious reference materials. My friend Suzanne was recently called to be a Sunday School teacher in her ward and I offered to loan her some reference books for the Old Testament- this year's course of study for the LDS church. She asked to come over today to pick them up so I assembled about 14 books for her. Those were just the ones I could find easily. I know I have more lurking in the hard-to-reach recesses of my bookshelves.

I have a couple of books where contemporary writers have written essays or short stories about the Old Testament. My favorite is a rather subversive short story called "She Unnames Them" by Ursula Le Guin. The story is written from Eve's point-of-view as she unravels Adam's work by "unnaming" the animals. The imagery in the story is so beautiful; below is an example:

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace. 

I have so many reference books because I was a Sunday School teacher myself for over four years. It was one of the rare periods of time when I haven't played the piano for church. Pianists are always at a premium so that's why playing the piano represents 99.9% of my church service to date. My most successful/favorite lesson I gave in all those four years was from the Old Testament. I was teaching the creation story from Genesis and I showed an excerpt from Nova - To the Moon, a space documentary that included the Apollo 8 transmission to earth on December 24, 1968. The astronauts took turns reading the creation story from Genesis. It was an appropriate choice (at least I think so- the words are lovely regardless of religious beliefs) not only because it was Christmas Eve, but because this was the first time men had traveled to the moon and had the unique vantage point of seeing the earth rising over the moon. The earth looks so beautiful from space, It must have seemed like an amazing creation to those astronauts. 

I do have to add a disclaimer that I showed this excerpt BEFORE I became a space fanatic. This particular documentary had been on my radar because several years before I had been having a crisis of faith. I turned on the TV at 2 am one morning due to insomnia and the excerpt I showed to my Sunday School class happened to be playing right at that moment. It made me cry.