The Five-Minute Bible Read-Aloud That Changes the Tone of Your Home
You do not need a theology degree. You need five minutes, a child's ear, and to let the words do their own work.
Many parents hesitate to read the Bible aloud to their children, and the reasons are almost always the same. They worry about their own ignorance. They worry about the hard passages: The violence, the long genealogies, the doctrines they cannot explain to a seven-year-old. Most of all, they worry that they will do it wrong. So they hand the task to Sunday school, or they save it for later, when the children are older and the parents are presumably wiser. Both of those postponements miss what the practice is actually for.
Reading the Bible aloud is not necessarily religious instruction. It is just as much literary formation. No book has shaped the English language more than the King James Version, and you do not have to take our word for it. In Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, the linguist David Crystal set out to count the everyday expressions the King James Bible has given to English, and he arrived at two hundred and fifty-seven, more than have come down to us from any other single source, Shakespeare included.1 We use them constantly without noticing:
The salt of the earth
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
The writing on the wall
A fly in the ointment
The skin of our teeth
A man who does not know the Bible cannot say where a single one of them came from.
Even the book’s most famous adversary concedes the point. Richard Dawkins, in a section of The God Delusion, lists a hundred and twenty-nine biblical phrases that any educated English speaker recognizes on sight, and he later wrote in The Guardian that a native speaker who has never read a word of the King James Bible is “verging on the barbarian.”2 We are happy to agree, and we would add the obvious corollary: A child who does not know these stories will not fully understand his own civilization. He will not know what is meant when a traitor is called a Judas, or when a man is said to have sold his birthright for pottage. He will read Milton, Melville, and Lincoln with half the lights off.
This is also why we recommend the King James Version in particular. We have no wish to reopen the long quarrels over which translation is most accurate. We only observe that its hold on the language cannot be overstated, even by the vehemently nonreligious, and that a child who grows up hearing “the valley of the shadow of death,” “still waters,” and “a still small voice” is not being indoctrinated, but rather being handed the vocabulary of his own civilization.
The practice itself can be very plain. It does not require a discussion afterward, or a worksheet, or a memory verse. It requires only that the words be heard: Five minutes a day, preferably at the same hour each day, in the same voice. The child does not need to understand everything he hears. He needs to hear it. Understanding follows hearing, not the reverse, which is the same order in which most of us learned our mother tongue in the first place.
We suggest four books to begin with: Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, and the Gospel of Mark. Read a little each day, and let the rest wait.
Begin with Genesis. It is the seedbed of the most well-known Bible stories: The garden and the fall, the flood, the tower at Babel, the call of Abraham, the binding of Isaac, and Joseph sold into Egypt. A child who carries these stories will meet them again everywhere, from Dante to Steinbeck, and greet them as old friends. Genesis is also where that birthright gets traded away for a bowl of stew, which is worth knowing for its own sake (Genesis 25:29-34).
Then read the Psalms. They are the prayer book of the church, the place where Scripture teaches the heart how to speak: In joy, in dread, in repentance, in plain gratitude. Start where nearly everyone starts, with the twenty-third. Six verses, no more. “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Repeated over months and years, that single line lays down a structure of confidence no lecture could reach, and the psalm’s movement, from green pastures to the dark valley to a table set in the presence of enemies, teaches without ever explaining that hardship sits inside a larger trust rather than outside it.
Proverbs comes next, chosen with some care. Leave the warnings about the strange woman in the later chapters for another year. The early chapters are what you want: Wisdom and its opposite, the sluggard who will not get out of bed, the friend who sticks closer than a brother. This is practical ethics in a form a child can carry. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6). A child who hears that line inside the daily rhythm of reading will remember it the next time he is tempted to put something off, and the memory will be his own, not something his parents nagged into him.
Last, read the Gospel of Mark. It is the shortest of the four Gospels and the fastest: Short sentences, active verbs, one scene crowding in on the next. It possesses a sense of urgency as well, which helps hold a child’s attention. He learns first that Jesus healed a blind man, fed five thousand from a few loaves, and walked across the water. The facts arrive ahead of the interpretation, and read in the King James cadence they lodge far deeper than any paraphrase in a children’s Bible ever will.
There is one more reason to keep the King James for reading aloud, beyond the idioms and the allusions: It is the most musical of the translations, because it was built for the ear. The 1611 title page describes the new translation as “Appointed to be read in Churches,” and the translators tuned their work to be spoken aloud and held in memory.3 Many modern translations are built instead for the eye, for study and quick reference, and they have their place. But a child raised on the sound of the King James internalizes a kind of English that shapes his own speech and writing for the rest of his life. Later, when he is older, he can set translations side by side and weigh them against one another. That comparison is good work. It is simply not the foundation, and the foundation is the music.
So: Five minutes, the same time every day. After breakfast, at bedtime, in the car on the way to wherever you are going. Do not explain, and do not quiz. Read the passage through once, slowly, and stop. If he asks a question, answer it honestly and briefly. If he does not ask, trust the words to do their work without your help. Scripture has rarely suffered from a shortage of commentary. What it asks for is someone willing to read it aloud without embarrassment.
And sometimes, hilarity ensues. The first time Stone heard the Story of Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, he later excitedly told us that Noah had a son named Bacon. Hannah laughed so much that Josh came out of his office to see what was the ruckus. Noah and his son Bacon immediately became part of our family lore. We are looking forward to telling that story at his wedding one day.
Back to more practical matters. What happens over months and years is not dramatic. There is no single morning when your child announces that he has been changed. But the tone of the house shifts. The language of Scripture becomes, quietly, the language of your family, so that when real difficulty comes, the words are already there, waiting: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4).
A child who has heard those words in his own parents’ voice, at the same hour, day after day, does not have to be told that he is not alone. He already knows it.
That is what five minutes can do, and it is why you do not have to wait until you feel ready. You are ready now.
David Crystal, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford University Press, 2010). Crystal counted two hundred and fifty-seven idiomatic expressions, more than from any other single literary source, Shakespeare included. He notes that many entered English through earlier translations such as William Tyndale’s, and that only a handful take a form found uniquely in the King James.
Richard Dawkins, “Why I Want All Our Children to Read the King James Bible,” The Guardian, May 19, 2012. The list of 129 phrases appears in a section of The God Delusion titled “Religious Education as a Part of Literary Culture.” It is a section of that book, not, as is sometimes stated, an entire chapter.
The 1611 title page reads “Appointed to be read in Churches,” reflecting that the translation was made for public, spoken reading rather than silent private study.