My First Bible Teacher

One of my most beautiful memories I have from Dad, blessed be his memory, is the stories he read for me every night before I fell asleep, as far back as I can remember.  At first he read me simple children books.  Later (when I was 5 or 6) he read to me about Winnie the Pooh (he read these to me several times, explaining where it is funny and where to laugh - that is how I developed my sense of humor), but the best of all was when he read the Bible.

 

It started when I was in second grade.  In school we started the Book of Genesis. The classes were too slow for me, and I needed to know what followed before the next class. I asked my dad to read the Book of Genesis to me one chapter per night. He read to me and explained from the Gordon's translation. After Genesis we continued with Exodus, and continued up to Jeremiah. I was in 4th grade at the time.

 

People asked me "how did you understand Jeremiah in 4th grade?" I didn't think it was hard.  When dad explained, everything seemed simple... His co-workers in Carmel Forge also said, that when they came to him with tough problems - "The procedure didn't work", "The part is not per specs!", etc., he would tell them what and how to do it, and in minutes it all looked simple and easy.

 

When we read the Book of Isaiah, we came to a scripture (Isaiah 9.6) "That the government may be increased, and of peace there be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it through justice and through righteousness from henceforth even for ever..." ...I realized in one of the words there was a typographical error and said "this is probably a typo."  Dad told me "no, this is not a typo, every letter in the Bible has a meaning, even if we don't understand it."

 

In 4th grade, we concluded that I was too old for a "bed time story," so we stopped it.

 

I continued with Bible studies and in 10th grade I picked it up from about the place Dad and I left off.  In 12th grade I participated in a world bible knowledge competition and got third place. When I studied for that competition, most of the stories were familiar to me, probably due to the bed time stories.  When I wrote articles to the "Megadim" Bible magazine, Dad read them and asked a question - not on the content but on the style and the disrespect I showed to the writers I criticized. This is an area I still need to "work" on.

 

These days I mange and maintain the "Bible navigation" web site.  Its main purpose is to give the true meaning of every single word in the Bible. This site is part of what I inherited from my Dad, Dov Segal, blessed be his memory.