By Naomi Katz
Here is a quick test. Open a map of Israel and find Shiloh. Now find Bethel, where Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven. Then find Hebron, where Abraham bought a cave to bury Sarah.
Most Bible readers know these names. Far fewer can put a finger on them. And a growing number of children are not learning the stories at all.
Sara Lamm, a former preschool teacher and the author of the children’s book God’s Land from A–Z (Israel365), says the fix starts at bedtime, with a book in one hand and a Bible in the other.
The numbers behind the gap
Biblical illiteracy in America is measurable, and the 2026 numbers are sobering. The American Bible Society’s State of the Bible 2026 report found that 62 percent of Americans do not read Scripture at all, and only a quarter qualify as active Bible users. A promising rise in Bible reading in 2025 has already slipped back to 2024 levels.
Knowledge follows reading. When the Pew Research Center tested Americans on religion, only 63 percent could name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. Four in ten could not identify Abraham as the man willing to offer his son to God.
Pew’s Bible questions touched geography exactly once, asking where Jesus was born. Shiloh, Bethel and Hebron never made the quiz. Try them at your own kitchen table.
The Bible’s first survey team
Scripture treats the Land as part of the text. In the book of Joshua, seven tribes still had not received their inheritance. Joshua’s solution was a survey. He sent three men from each tribe across the country with a clear charge: “Go and walk through the land, and describe it, and come again to me, that I may here cast lots for you before the LORD in Shiloh” (Joshua 18:8).
The Hebrew is sharper still: lechu v’hit’halchu va’aretz v’chitvu otah, “go, walk through the land, and write it.” The men came back with the Land written into a book, city by city, in seven portions (Joshua 18:9). Israel’s inheritance began with a map.
That map still matches the ground. Shiloh, where the Tabernacle stood for generations, is a living town in Samaria today. Bethel and Hebron sit in the same biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria. A reader who cannot find them misses how close the Bible’s stories sit to today’s headlines.
A map in a child’s hands
God’s Land from A–Z brings Joshua’s assignment down to bedtime size. Lamm, who taught preschool for nearly a decade before moving to Israel, wrote an original rhyming poem for every letter of the alphabet, each one tied to the people and places of the Hebrew Bible. Every page carries an authentic verse from Scripture, and illustrator Yehudit Weingarten fills each spread with full-color scenes of the Land.
The journey runs from A for Abraham to Z for Zion. Along the way, a four-year-old learns that the Bible happened somewhere real, in hills and rivers and cities that still carry their biblical names.
That lesson is where literacy begins. A child who meets Abraham as a man who walked real ground grows into an adult who opens the Bible expecting to recognize the places. Grandparents have caught on quickly: store reviewers describe buying copies for grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Read it, then find it
Lamm’s challenge to parents and grandparents is simple. Read a page aloud. Then open a map and your Bible, and find it together.
Find Hebron, then read Genesis 23. Find Bethel, then read Genesis 28. Find Shiloh, then read Joshua 18 and watch the tribes receive their inheritance. A child who traces a finger from the page to the map to the verse is doing exactly what Joshua’s surveyors did: walking the Land and writing it down.
Biblical literacy grows the way the Land was settled, one portion at a time. God’s Land from A–Z, written by Sara Lamm and illustrated by Yehudit Weingarten, is recommended for ages 4 to 8 and is available now at the Israel365 Store.
