The Family that Reads Together

It has long been known that reading aloud confers numerous benefits upon not only the reader but the listeners. Doing so can expand the vocabulary of the reader and the listeners as well as strengthen the bond between them and spark creativity and imagination. In young children, reading aloud can help them lengthen their attention spans, improve their listening skills, and stimulate cognitive development. Reading aloud, especially within the context of a family, allows children and adults who aren't literate the chance to hear stories and gain knowledge that they otherwise would not be able to access.

In our society today, we are fortunate to have access to any number of texts, whether because of the ubiquity of digital content online or local public libraries. But several hundred years ago a book was a precious commodity whose cost was beyond the means of most working-class people, and texts were regularly passed down as heirlooms from one generation to the next. If a family in19th-century America was fortunate enough to own even one book, it was probably a Bible. And so if the members of a family in 19th-century America read aloud to each other, it was probably from the family Bible.

However, this could potentially pose a problem. Christian parents may have wanted their young children to read aloud from the word of God, but they didn't necessarily want them to read every word aloud. Sex and violence abound in the Old Testament, in particular, and it is hard to think of anything worse than having to explain to little Timmy what "loins" are during a family read-a-thon. Thankfully, in 1809 Mark Coffin wrote and distributed his Index to the Bible, an indispensable tool for parents seeking to avoid "considerable embarrassment" from the inadvertent reading aloud of "expressions rather improper to be read in mixed company". Coffin bravely spent months combing through the Bible in order to identify and document every unseemly word. His resulting index flagged every questionable chapter so that parents could relax during their children's nightly reading from the Holy Scripture. As you might have guessed, the entire Song of Solomon is a no-go.

To reverse-engineer an exhaustive list of naughty Bible verses, come to Rauner and ask to see Chapbook 51A.