SOTW - The Jewish People

It's been a little while since I've updated what we've been up to in The Story of the World.  A few weeks back, we covered Ch. 6: The Jewish People.  We learned about the city of Ur, located in the evil Sargon's empire in Mesopotamia.  Abram and his father, Terah, were merchants who had grown rich buying and selling in Ur, thanks to Ur's handy location on the Euphrates River.  After Sargon's death, his empire fell apart, and all of the surrounding cities were fighting.  Terah worried that he would lose all of his riches if the city was overrun and burned down by the Gutians (tribes of wild people) who were invading the lands. Terah was extremely upset and went to the largest ziggurat in Ur to ask to moon-god to protect him from evil.  A ziggurat was a special pyramid, not a tomb, built with stairs on the sides so that priests could go to the top and sacrifice to the gods. Terah finally decided to move himself, Abram, and Abram's wife, Sarai, to a better place to live. 

Here is Madeline's make of a ziggurat. Travis knocked it over about 30 seconds after this picture was taken.


The story then continues that once they got settled into Haran and became successful merchants again, Terah passed away.  After his funeral, a god called out to Abram to move away from Haran and go to the land of Canaan.  Abram made a deal with God that he will obey and worship Him, and in return, God will make Abram a father of a whole new nation and give him and his entire family the land of Canaan.  God changed Abram's name to Abraham, meaning 'father of many children', and also changed Sarai's name to Sarah, which means 'princess'.  The following year, at the ripe old age of at least 90, Sarah had a baby, named Isaac. 

Then Isaac had a son named Jacob, and Jacob had 12 sons.  Each of the 12 sons had their own family, and everyone lived in Canaan.

The next section of The Jewish People focused on the story of Joseph, Jacob's favorite son.  It explained how Jacob had a beautiful and colorful coat that he gave to Joseph, and that made all of his brother's extremely jealous.  One day, while out in the field, they decided to sell their brother as a slave, and stained his beloved coat with lion's blood to show their father that Joseph was dead.  After many years of being held prisoner in Egypt, Joseph was able to decipher the Pharoah's dream about 7 fat cow and 7 ugly, thin cows to mean that there will be 7 years of plentiful crops followed by 7 years of famine.  The Pharoah instantly put Joseph in charge of collecting and storing grain during the plentiful years, making him second in command to the Pharoah himself. 

During the time of famine, Joseph's brothers walked for days from Canaan to Egypt in search of grain.  Once they arrived at the Pharoah's palace, they did not recognize Joseph as he fed them.   Finally, Joseph invited them all to a feast and told them who he was.  They thought Joseph would kill them, but instead, he invited their whole family to move to Egypt where there is plenty of food.

As you can tell from this lengthy post, we enjoyed this chapter.  We also read through a few extra books... "The Coat of Many Colors" was the favorite around here.