The Bible may be creeping its way back into England’s classrooms if advice from University of Exeter study is taken But it misses a trick by suggesting that kids are asked. to re-tell Bible stories – rather than study its best passages as examples of word craftsmanship.
When the folk singer Pete Seeger died recently, a BBC announcer explained that he had written the song ‘Turn, turn, turn” (the Byrds’ version is posted above). He had a little help: the song is straight from Book of Ecclesiastes with one word, ‘turn’, slotted in by Seeger. As he knew, these words have lost none of their power over the millennia.
The Book of Ecclesiastes is full of such mesmerising, evocative phrases and analogies – which is why writers such as Doris Lessing have saluted the “the thundering magnificence” of some of “most wonderful prose ever written”.
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