Judges 9 - Parable of the Trees Quiet Book Page

 In Judges chapter 9, Jotham prophesies against Abimelech who is found to be a prickly king.

 

Memory Verse: “Then all the trees said to the bramble,
‘You come and reign over us!’
And the bramble said to the trees,
‘If in truth you anoint me as king over you,
Then come and take shelter in my shade;
But if not, let fire come out of the bramble
And devour the cedars of Lebanon!’ Judges 9:14-15 (NKJV).

 

Materials needed to create the Parable of the Trees quiet book page:

• A4 felt background sheet - I used red
• my free template
• felt scraps in gray, olive green, spotted bright green, bright green, mid green, and light and dark brown
• beads and buttons etc to decorate the trees with fruit and bramble with thistles
• a felt crown (or make one)
• ribbon scrap
• sewing thread in brown and to best match the page
• a plastic thistle leaf (from an artificial flower)
• hot glue gun and glue

Cut out your mountain pieces from the mid green felt. Sew them onto the same colour felt and cut out again. 

Cut out the rest of your pieces from the appropriate colour felts and arrange them on your page.

Cut a length of ribbon for the crown and melt the edges (How to Stop Ribbons Fraying). Use the hot glue to attach the crown to one end of the ribbon, and sew the other end behind where the mountains will be on the page.

Sew the mountains down onto your page along the bottom edge. Then arrange the towers at either end of the mountains and sew them down over the side edges of the mountains so the mountains form a pocket.

Sew down the two tree trucks, and then use a close zig zag stitch to form a vine stem and branches. Sew the foliage in place.

Use hot glue to attach the plastic thistle leaf to the page along the centre stem. 

Hand sew the buttons and beads in place on the trees and bramble. When I sewed the beads on the bramble, I caught some of the leaves in my stitches to keep it in place better.

Finished! Now you can play with your page.

Difficulty Level = Easy

If you are unsure on how to hand sew buttons, just look at a tutorial on YouTube.

Key Learning Areas and Skills

• Judges 9 - bad decisions have consequences - don't make a prickly man king!
• Imaginative Play - try the crown on all the trees (and see if you can remember their responses to being asked to be king)
• Pocket Play - young children love pulling things out and placing items and putting them back (not always lol) into pockets - the crown piece can be hidden behind the mountain pocket
• Fine Motor Skills - all quiet books encourage fine motor skill development
• Hand-eye Co-ordination - all quiet books encourage hand-eye co-ordination

Read the Chapter

Judges 9

Devotional

This was one of the earliest pages I made when Tahlia was a baby and I had just started the project. I had read this chapter and because of the project, I was thinking about how to portray it visually for a quiet book page when I noticed that all the trees and bramble in this parable had purple fruit or flowers (olives, figs, grapes and thistles)... and of course purple is the colour of royalty in the Bible. 

When Tahlia was a baby I wasn't earning a lot of money, and didn't have much to go buy supplies with. I had found an incomplete felt story set of the Frog Prince in an op shop and acquired it quite cheaply. That is where the crown came from. However, I was particularly perplexed about how to do a bramble - but, I really wanted to do the project. So I was praying about it regularly, and one day as I was pushing the pram along the side of the road, I saw a few plastic thistle leaves detached from some kind of artificial flower littering the roadside. I knew it was the answer to my prayer.

If you want to know about the plant that has been proposed to be the actual plant mentioned in the Hebrew (Atad), then watch this YouTube video: The Parable of the Trees - Judges 9 by Fig Tree Ministries. It has very scare orange/red/brown fruit, that doesn't taste very good and is not used to sustain people. It is only good for shade - if that, because it has shallow roots which use up all the water and does not leave enough for other fruit trees to thrive. It must be removed by fruit farmers, and is then only good for fire wood. 

Parable of Trees - Heidi Hawkinson-Penny - Topic

I think the lesson to be learned for this story is - don't be a prick, and don't make a prick the king. Eventually you'll be devoured.

One extra thought - I love how concepts transcend language. Abimelech was a prickly man in Hebrew and English.

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Have you noticed many things that are cross-linguistic? I'd love to hear about what you found.