The Giant Story

About a week ago I mentioned that Smiley is now memorizing stories and reciting them (as best he can) even when the book is not in front of him, and thus it is time to introduce him to Bible stories.

We bought six "children's Bibles", which are not really Bibles but collections of various short Biblical stories with pictures. I'll review them in a later blog post.

His favorite story, by far, is David and Goliath, which he calls "The Giant Story".  He cannot hear this often enough to satiate his love for it.

Sadly, it seems impossible to find an acceptable version of the story on YouTube.  This is not surprising.  I am trying to avoid changes of camera position, especially back and forth during a single scene.  But the obvious way to show tension during the confrontation between David and Goliath is to switch between views of David's face and Goliath's face, and an easy way to make Goliath look huge is to intersperse a camera angle that looks down over his shoulder at David.

I liked this version for showing the stone's flight.  But we always watch videos with the sound off, and Smiley said "too much talking" when the characters did little but move their mouths for a few minutes, earlier in the video than my bookmark.

I'm not sure why I like how these two versions showed the fight taking more than a moment.  The Biblical account makes it sound like David ran, shot one stone, and the fight was over in a few seconds.  Perhaps it was that quick.  For some reason it seems to me even more miraculous and glorifying to God if the encounter lasted a little longer.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention an inaccuracy in many versions of David and Goliath that irks me.  The Israelite army should be pitifully armed, and almost unarmored!  We read in First Samuel 13 that the whole army has only two swords, spears, and sets of armor.  In the next chapter we read of Jonathan killing some Philistines, and in the following chapter the Israelite army defeats the Amelkites.  So by chapter 17, with Goliath, the Israelites have probably claimed some weapons from defeated foes, and maybe some people found armor that fit.  But overall the army must still look very shoddily equipped!