Award winner! Catholic Book Awards (Catholic Press Association)
FIRST PLACE—Children's books

Close your eyes. Think back to last Christmas. Where were you? What were you doing?

Now try to think back further in time. Make an extra effort: think back a long way, long before you were born. Imagine how your grandparents lived when they were your age. Their lives were certainly very different from yours. Think what the world would be like without computers, television, even telephones!

In this book we're going back even further, back and back in time until we get to the age of Jesus. Even then we won't be stopping. Before Jesus there was a world that we learn about from the pages of the Old Testament. If we think back that far we may find ourselves following a caravan of camels carrying their loads across the desert under a burning sun. We may see large families all living together each in their own tents. Why did some of them decide to settle down? What was life like when they did?

This is the sort of question to which you will find some answers in this book. It will show you all kinds of fascinating details of everyday life in town and village, among the rich and the poor, in palaces and temples and in the countryside, as it was lived from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus.

Open the book, and you will find yourself on a journey through time. In it you will find fifty double-page spreads, fifty picture windows, each opening up on a different theme. Through them you will see many different views of a distant world that will slowly become more familiar to you.

Look, for instance, at the spread about education in biblical times. Were there books and blackboards? How did people learn? Or look at a spread about living conditions. There was no running water and people slept alongside animals. A few pages later there is a picture of a city gate: go through it and you will find narrow winding streets with all kinds of activities. Or you may want to go into the city of Jerusalem, into the heart of the temple. Or have a bird's-eye view of the land of Palestine.

The people of the Bible lived in a very different world from ours. But we have one important thing in common with them. Like them, we have come to believe in God. So this book will also tell us something about our own past.