Students Make Lentil Stew

Categories: Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau, Jacob

Nurturing our pupils in and out of Sunday School provides a wonderful opportunity to make the stories of the Bible come alive and show the children how much we love them. Olene Carroll, author of Bible stories for children and tour guide to the Holy lands, shared this experience she had with her Sunday School class.

I tried an experiment. I invited 3 Sunday School girls (8 yr olds) over to our house and we experienced the Bible first hand. I provided all the ingredients for lentil stew. We told the story of Jacob and Esau from Genesis 25:29-34 and the selling of the birthright.

Then we:

• popped the peas and beans out of the pods,
• ground the coriander and cumin in the mortar,
• cooked the stew in an iron pot,
• made a yogurt topping;
• set up a low table with cushions surrounding it;
• set out pita bread,
• broke it and ate the stew by pinching it inside the bread;
• mashed some grapes and drank the juice;
• ate fresh figs for dessert.

We also related the meal to the Mary and Martha story. [Luke 10:38-42]

We learned even more about life in Bible times as we watched part 1 of Matthew on video.

The girls worked the maze from biblewise.com of the steam coming from the lentil stew.

We'll continue next week with making clothes for ourselves out of cotton cloth and we'll paint it with a stripe or two as if we had woven it. We also have directions on how to make sandals out of leather and lamps out of clay. We have many more things to learn this summer.

It's not SS, it's more vacation Bible school, but it's a way to enhance what the girls are learning and make the Bible come alive.

I must add that the preparations for the stew took longer than expected---almost two hours. A surprising element was the dried lentils. I thought we might have to soak them overnight, but the recipe called for "green lentils," which were very small and cooked up just fine without soaking. The adults loved the taste and smell of the stew, as Esau did. But the children preferred peanut butter.