Review: Who Counts?: 100 Sheep, 10 Coins, and 2 Sons
An unusual take on a familiar series of parables (Luke 15)
As a father and a theologian, it will not surprise you that I have a lot of opinions about children’s Bibles. I’m still trying to articulate the general principles that will guide the book reviews I post on this site—watch this space. For now, suffice it to say that good children’s Bibles and Bible stories should help children learn, enjoy, and explore biblical stories—not only teaching the main ideas but also drawing children into the details and language of the Bible. And the best do the same for adults! That’s certainly the case for the delightful book I’ve chosen here as my first review.
If after reading this review you’re interested in buying this book, please consider supporting my work by using the Amazon affiliate links on this page.
Overview
Text: Luke 15 (Parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son)
Age: 3+
My Rating: 👍
Who Counts?: 100 Sheep, 10 Coins, 2 Sons (2017) is an unusual take on a familiar series of Jesus’ parables. It retells and expands the three parables in Luke 15 as a delightful children’s counting and hide-and-seek book. My 3-year-old loves this book, and so do I!
1. Story
The three parables retold here are well-known: a man looks for his lost sheep, a woman looks for her lost coin, the prodigal son returns to a gracious father and an angry brother. The first two, only a few sentences in Luke, are significantly expanded here. The final parable requires less expansion, being one of the longest and most artfully crafted of all Jesus’ parables. Each is retold in a way that emphasizes the search for what is lost and even invites children to join in.
The authors collect all three parables in one book because they want us to hear them as interconnected treatments of the same theme. In particular, the first two parables should reshape our understanding of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which has been so central to how Christians understand sin and grace. “The main message,” the authors tell us in a useful note for parents and teachers, “is about counting, searching for what is missing, and celebrating becoming whole again.”
So each retold parable invites us to ask “who counts?” At one level, the answer is that the person who has lost something must count what remains in order to recognize what is lost. But “who counts” also means, “who is important, who matters?” These stories teach that, because they are counted, every sheep, every coin, every child is important. Every one counts. Note that on this view, the Parable of the Prodigal Son implies no rejection of the older son and whomever he has often been taken to represent (the Pharisees? the self-righteous? the Jews?). Rather, both sons are lost in their own ways, even as both are sought by their father. (It might better be called “the Parable of the Lost Sons.”)
The book can be a bit too didactic for my tastes. The authors go out of their way to put the moral of the story as they understand it onto the lips of the main characters. In the first parable, for example, the shepherd is asked why he makes such a big deal about one sheep, and he answers: “One sheep makes a difference. Without her something is missing. Now my flock is complete.” No doubt the authors do this because they are trying to offer an alternative to some very entrenched traditional readings of these parables. Because their take is fresh and rooted in insightful exegetical work (see below), I find that these didactic moments are not too grating.
It also helps that, despite some noteworthy omissions, these tellings retain much of the detail of the Biblical narratives. The man carries the lost sheep on his shoulders (v. 5); the silver coins are called drachmas (v. 8); the woman lights a lamp and sweeps her house seeking the coin (v. 9); the father does not just give the younger son his inheritance, but divides his property between both sons (v. 12); etc. Children who learn this version of these stories will get lots of exposure to the texture of scriptural language and will have plenty to reflect on beyond the moral that the authors focus on.
The book is a collaboration between Amy-Jill Levine and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso. Levine is an eminent New Testament scholar who has taken to writing children’s books that distill some of the insights of her scholarship. (Her book on Jesus’ parables, Short Stories by Jesus (2014), is an excellent introduction to the parables for adults.) Sandy Eisenberg Sasso is a rabbi and an award-winning children’s book author, including many other Bible stories. (She also has a useful book for adults on Jewish midrash called God’s Echo: Exploring Scripture with Midrash (2012).) Both come at these parables from a Jewish perspective and with a more rabbinic sensibility, steering away from traditional interpretations that reduce the parables to moralistic allegories. They have collaborated on a number of other books based on Jesus’ parables, including Who Is My Neighbor? (2019) and The Good for Nothing Tree (2022).
2. Artwork
The beautiful illustrations by Margaux Meganck are lots of fun and help draw children into the stories. In the first two parables, Meganck has hidden the lost sheep or coin somewhere on the page, so reading the book naturally becomes a game of hide-and-seek. The evocative facial expressions on the main characters also help children to understand the story. We see the shame of the younger son as he returns home penniless, the complex mix of anger and hurt in the older son who feels neglected by his father.
The illustrations also help children bridge the gap between the modern world and the world of these parables. The main characters are depicted with a welcome diversity of skin color. But they all inhabit a single shared rural context, which is also recognizably but unobtrusively contemporary. For example, the “lamp” with which the woman seeks her lost coin becomes a flashlight, the older son working in the fields is driving a tractor.
Meganck’s illustrations also use recurring items or characters to subtly underscore the interconnectedness of these tales. Instead of a piggy bank, the woman in the second parable has what I guess we should call a “sheepy bank” that looks like the sheep in the first parable, and like the sheep grazing in the field in the third. The man and the woman from the first two parables are also portrayed as invited to the final party for the lost son.
3. Exegesis
The best children’s books reflect serious engagement with the Biblical text; and adults can teach these books more effectively the more they do they same. One of the most compelling features of this book is its midrashic spirit: it offers apparently daring expansions of these parables that nevertheless emerge from definite exegetical questions or problems.
The most obvious example is the centrality of counting, which none of the Biblical parables mention explicitly. Why make so much of it in the book, then, except perhaps as a hook for little children? Yet the authors themselves explain their compelling rationale: “The shepherd counts the sheep; that is the only way he would know one is missing. The woman counts the coins so that she is aware when one has been lost.” This makes sense. How else could one know that one of a hundred sheep is missing but by some pretty careful counting? Before the loving act of seeking the lost there must be a prior loving act of recognizing that someone is lost, which in turn requires paying careful and individual attention to all that is one’s own. This book thus invests the very everyday child’s activity of counting with deep significance. The authors invite us to ask: “What, or whom, have I forgotten to count?”
Another example: in the first two stories, the man and the woman each throw a party. In most English translations (e.g. NIV, NKJV), the guest list looks identical: both gather their “friends and neighbors” (Luke 15:6, 9). Yet in this telling, whereas the man “invited everyone to celebrate” and the illustrations depict a diverse group of men, women, and children, the woman “invited the women in the town to celebrate.” Is this just a heavy-handed nod to contemporary identity politics? No; it is rooted in a subtle difference in the original Greek. In the first parable, the words used for “friends” (τοὺς φίλους) and “neighbors” (τοὺς γείτονας) are both masculine, whereas they are feminine (τὰς φίλας) or ambiguous (γείτονας, without the article) in the second case. Moreover, as in most Western languages, the Greek masculine plural may be used for mixed-sex groups whereas the feminine plural generally implies a single-sex group. So it is entirely plausible that the man invited a mixed-sex group whereas the woman invited a group of her local girlfriends. Note too that the first parable is introduced in gender-neutral language (“what person (ἄνθρωπος) among you…”) whereas the second uses gender-specific language (“what woman”). All of this suggests that unlike the first, the second parable is primarily about women. (A question for older children: what difference, if any, does the guest list make?)
A final example: in the parable of the prodigal son, when the father throws a feast for his younger son and the older son refuses to attend, Luke tells us merely that “his father came out and pleaded with him” (Luke 15:28). But in this book, the father realizes that he has entirely forgotten to invite the older son:
When the father counted everyone who had come to the party, he realized that one person was missing.
That person was his older son! He had forgotten to invite him.
Later the authors insert something approaching an apology into the father’s final speech to his angry older son: “I paid attention to my younger son, but I discounted my older son. I didn’t realize that he felt lost.” This expansion is bold, especially if you assume that the father symbolizes God. (Perhaps it is worth noting here that, according to the authors, these stories are not about God seeking the lost—surely God does not lose things in the first place!—but rather about how people should love our neighbors by making sure no one gets lost.)
In any case, this reading too has a compelling rationale. For while the anger of the older son is easy to understand (and a frequent sermon theme), it is much more puzzling that he does not even know about the party until he asks one of the servants (Luke 15:26). Why does the son have to ask what is going on? Perhaps the son was invited but he himself forgot or neglected the invitation; perhaps he was supposed to be invited, but a servant failed to deliver the message? But the hypothesis that the father himself forgot to invite the son makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that in verses 22-24, the overjoyed father seems to throw a party without planning or preparation. It also makes sense of this parable’s juxtaposition alongside the first two: if a sheep or a coin is lost, it is probably the fault of its owner.
A final noteworthy exegetical choice is that the authors chose to tell these parables as free-standing stories rather than as stories told by Jesus. The parables are told without the context Luke gives them: as Jesus’ response to the Pharisees grumbling that Jesus welcomes sinners (Luke 15:2). They also lack the interpretations that Luke puts on Jesus’ lips: “I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7; also v. 10). Levine and Sasso are trying to help us hear these parables in a way that comes closer to how Jesus’ original audience would have heard them, prior even to the earliest church’s interpretation (as represented by Luke). We do well to remember that the words and stories of Jesus circulated independently in oral form for a generation before they began to be collected in written gospels as we have them today, and that the gospel writers rarely included interpretations of the parables. In her longer book on the parables, Levine emphasizes this point:
It is a very good thing that the interpretations, if indeed Jesus did provide them, have not come down to us. The Gospel writers, in their wisdom, left most of the parables as open narratives in order to invite us into engagement with them (Short Stories by Jesus, 1).
The Lucan framing of this parable directs us towards the issues of sin and repentance and invites us to understand the man and the woman (who seek the lost and then throw a party) as symbols of God. Levine and Sasso are not implying that this interpretation is wrong, only that it is fruitful to think about this parable in other terms as well. I heartily agree, though I would add that with older children, it may also be fruitful to reintroduce the Biblical context as a counterpoint. “How do these parables explain why Jesus eats with sinners?”
The parable of the lost sheep is especially interesting in this connection. As if to underscore the fact that one parable may have multiple interpretations, while Matthew and Luke both include a version of this story, they give it slightly different interpretations.
“Thus it is not the will of your father in heaven that even one of these little ones should be lost.” (Matthew 18:14)
“I tell you, in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.” (Luke 15:7)
While Luke focuses on sin and repentance, Matthew places the parable (18:12-14) in a longer discourse about Jesus’ concern for the “little ones,” the “least of these” (18:1-14). Levine and Sasso’s interpretation of the three parables is more in this Matthean spirit.
4. Conclusion
The overall question I ask when recommending a children’s Bible is whether it will reward rereading. Only a book that I and my children enjoy returning to is worth keeping on my bookshelf. In this case the answer is clear: my three-year-old enjoys hearing it over and over again, and it continues to give me food for thought as well. Who Counts? is an excellent addition to any collection of children’s Bible stories. An enthusiastic thumbs up! 👍
If you’re interested in buying the book, please consider supporting my writing by using the Amazon affiliate links here.
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.