Illustrated Family Bible: Understanding the Greatest Story Ever Told

I love this Bible! Very colorful too! I bought one for everyone in my family!

This is a beautiful book! Simply laid out, but marvelously comprehensive. This is targeted at a youthful readership, but is interesting and valuable for adults too! The text is scripture quotes, not fictionalized rewriting. Each spread is a different topic, and although not presented as a Bible study curriculum, lends itself well to planned Bible study. I use it as a supplement for my high school Sunday school class.

This book provides an excellent presentation because it smoothes out the Bible and provides a coherent, easily comprehensible, linear framework of understanding. The most helpful aspect of this arrangement of material is that in the section covering the Gospel books, it presents selected chapters in chronological order (Sunday School materials might have set a precedent here). It's like an ideally arranged compendium of Sunday School booklets, with helpful background sections introducing major parts of the Bible. It uses a classic style of graphics, combined with various types of art as DK Publishing excels in.Everyone who is studying Christianity should read this first, to set up a basic framework of understanding. This book portrays clearly and efficiently a point of reference to answer "What is the orthodox conventional reading of the Bible?"This book reveals the anti-Semitism that builds up in the book of Acts; the Jews who supposedly persecuted the Christians are always shown in a two-dimensional, cardboard way, with mean expressions on their faces. This book clearly portrays the conventional Christian reading of this material. It's a good, clear portrayal of the standard orthodox way of reading the Bible.There is an appendix of people's names in the back. The book lacks, most of all, a set of genealogy diagrams. It has a fairly good map in front, but could use more maps or at least a guide to the little maps that are dispersed throughout.It has a great index. After reading the book cover-to-cover, I highlighted the 50% of the index entries that are least clear to me, to do a 2nd, review pass. I played a Bible trivia game and was inspired to read this book because I lacked too many of the standard Bible stories. I can tell that I'll do much better in that Bible trivia game, and will do even better after reviewing more of the unfamiliar entries I found in this book's index.I felt that getting through this book required the most perseverance when wading through the section about the kings who did or didn't worship God, and the section about Jesus' parables -- these are covered well, but these weren't the sections of the Bible I was most interested in. My favorite sections of the book -- the subjects I was already most curious about -- were the stories between Eden and the later kings, and the stories between the Crucifixion and Revelation. The book has a nice treatment of Revelation and explains its political context. In the middle of the book, the parables and wisdom literature is covered.I treasure this book and am glad to have read the Bible in this clear and understandable form. Next, I may read the Bible Handbook by DK Publishing (John Bowker). I'm reading Bowker's 2002 book from DK Publishing, God: A Brief History. I've also read the pocket-size Bible handbook from DK Publishing, which isn't very enlightening -- it's a tiny, somewhat random subset of the Illustrated Family Bible. I also recommend the books by DK Publish

My wife and I are both Sunday School teachers and have found the illustrations and side-bars very helpful. There is an amazing amount of additional information in this book about archeology and history. The bible truly comes alive. We originally bought it as a book that our family could go through. It is such a helpful teaching tool that my wife and I use it exclusivley as a reference resource and have yet to get into it with our family. It is well worth the price.

I found the illustrated bible easy to understand, interesting and precise. In today's busy world the ability to quickly get an overview of both testaments was wonderful. I would recommend to anyone wanting to "get started" with the bible. If you can only read one "bible" this should be it.