My nine year old had been flipping through an art book and was asking about the story of Susanna tonight at dinner in front of her four younger siblings—PG 13 is about right on the whole, though perhaps the last few chapters of Judges and some other bits rate R. Dismembering one’s concubine’s corpse after allowing her to be gang raped to death isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I wouldn’t censure it, and it does provide a valuable theological lesson, but I don’t want my kids hearing about it fron the pulpit.
I went to an Orthodox Jewish Yeshivah from grades 1-12, and we studied the Hebrew Bible (”Old Testament” to you) in the original Hebrew. We started the book of Genesis in third grade, and every once in a while the teacher said that we would skip a chapter because “the Hebrew is too hard.” They were the parts you wouldn’t want to teach third graders— Lot and his daughters, Judah and Tamar, a few others. By the sixth or seventh grade, they stopped leaving parts out (I think we were in sixth grade when we got to David and Bathsheba, and we didn’t skip that.)