These Old Testament stories simplified for little hearers and readers, are not meant to take the place of the Bible, but to server as a foretaste.  Even in these breathless times of ours, and with all the variety of children's books and children's interests and children's occupations, there can be found leisure for Bible stories—the stories, for instance, grouped in this volume, stories of Joseph and Moses, Saul and Samuel, David and Jonathan, Solomon and Absalom and the rest. These stories, told for thousands of years by dwellers in the desert, by boatmen on the Nile, by fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, by builders of the Temple at Jerusalem, by Hebrew captives in Nineveh and Babylon, weeping as they remembered Zion, may at first bearing sound to us as voices of the far-away, the long-ago, blown like seeds upon the wind from clime to clime. Yet so richly stored are these tales with passionate life, with the deep wisdom of love and suffering. the bright inspiration of daring, patriotism, friendship, so divine with imagination, mystery, and faith that they are as young as the youngest heart that bears them.

"Light cometh from the East." Our Bible is the offering of the Orient to Europe and America—an open treasure for all parents who would give good gifts unto their children.

From the introduction