This essay discusses gender systems in children’s bibles with narrative criticism and discourse analysis. The focus in the essay is on gender studies and how the stories in the children’s bibles change between 1940 to 2020. The children’s bibles used were published 1940, 1961, 1989, 1999 and 2020. The story of Adam and Eva is analyzed. The purpose for this essay is to find out how the gender system shows in these bible stories for children. What is feminine and what is masculine. What makes a woman and a man, what are their differences. How are Adam and Eve portrayed. With Hirdman’s (1988) gender system clear differences can be found. The stories tell of what female and male roles are and what they entail. The guilt of the fall of humanity always stays Eves, but how Eve is represented changes. Who Eve is changes. Eve goes from an extension of the man to a being of her own. The conclusion for this essay is that in the period between 1940-2020 there is a change to how Eve is portrayed. When the reader first meets Eve in the 1940 edition of the Children’s Bible, Eve is an extension of the man. Eve is naïve and her decision to go against God and eat the forbidden fruit is framed as her not knowing better. The next Children’s bible, published 1961, follows the same pattern. Both editions are heavy on details and closely follow the Bible. The third and fourth Children’s bible in the study, published 1989 and 1999, breaks this pattern. The story gets less detailed, and the authors are beginning to step away from Eve being naïve to Eve being curious. Noteworthy that the authors for the Children’s bibles published 1940 and 1960 are men, and the authors of Children’s bibles published 1989 and 1999 are women. From the first Children’s bible in the study to the last a vast difference can be seen. Adam and Eve are now created equally for the first time and the biggest change is in the illustration not the text. When Eve is talking with the snake about eating the forbidden fruit, in the right corner we can see another hand reaching out to the fruit. This may be Adam. In conclusion in this study Eve has gone dooming humanity by her naivety and Adam being smarter to Adam on his way to make the same decision maybe even before Eve.

This paper analyzes two selected passages from six children’s Bibles with respect to their use of the narrator’s voice and focalization. This means that the texts are analyzed with a focus on who is telling the story and from whose perspective it unfolds. The analyzes are also built upon what has been added or taken away from the Bible texts and what functions the illustrated pictures have. In this way, the result can also be analyzed through a theory about use of history; that is the idea that morality and identity formatting shape history telling. In this study the different children’s Bibles tend to lift different aspects of the Bible stories. Even though the aims of the book writers cannot be known for sure, their intentions of moralizing or shaping a certain Christian or Jewish identity, such as the institution of pesach or the communion, can be anticipated. Furthermore, the study shows that the children’s Bible genre is often very didactic, while moralization is generally avoided in newer versions. A general distinction between how the Old Testament and the New Testament stories are told can also be spotted. In the latter one, the reader receives more insight about the characters inner and outer speech, which could make it easier to identify and sympathize with them.