Compact? Devotional? Journaling? Reference? Parallel? Study? Reading? Men’s? Women’s? NIV? NASB? NLT? ESV?
When it comes to choosing a Bible there are so many options. It can be overwhelming when purchasing a new Bible. If you are anything like me, then you want to make sure you make the right purchase the first time. Hopefully this will be some help to you.
Translation
I suggest you first begin with translation. Depending on the chosen translation determines what options you have within that translation. Translation can also be very important on readability and literal translation. Each modern day translation has taken the original languages of Hebrew and Greek, and placed them into English. Because of this factor, the publisher had to make a decision regarding how they were to translate certain things. At times they will have to make the choice to translate the words or the ideas. For example, if you were to translate the phrase “He kicked the bucket”. How would you choose to do this? You could translate the literal words, but the reader might not understand the meaning of this. You could translate the phrase to “He died”, but then it loses some of the meaning as well. Some translations will choose to err on the side of literal (NASB) and translate in more of a word for word style, while others choose to err on the side of meaning (NLT)and translate thought for thought. At Stone Oak Bible Church, we use the ESV or English Standard Version when preaching from the stage. We choose to go with this translation because of its ease of reading, as well as its choice of words versus meaning. It seems to balance the word for word versus thought for thought debate really well. Whatever translation you choose, make sure you can understand it. For some people that have grown up with the King James version, it is easily readable. If you haven’t ever read the King James version, then I probably wouldn’t suggest that version to you based upon the language used.
Purpose
What are you going to be using this Bible for? I have quite a few Bibles. They all serve a different purpose for me though. I have my Bible that is my daily Bible. This is a really cheap Bible that I can toss into my bag, and not care if the pages get bent, or the cover gets marked. I didn’t spend much money on this Bible. It is my ‘standard’ Bible. There isn’t anything fancy about it. It doesn’t have a lot of extras to it. I also have a couple of Bibles that don’t leave my house. One of these is my study Bible. I leave it at home because it is so large and heavy. It’s purpose is for my personal study. It remains on my desk at all times. It is the Bible that I am going to use when I need some extra help with the text. I also have a reading Bible. As you can probably guess, the purpose of this Bible is to simply read it. What I love about the reading Bible is that it doesn’t have any extras. There isn’t anything on the page that will distract you from the text. There aren’t any footnotes, references, or even verse numbers. This isn’t going to be a Bible I use when discussing the text with others because I can’t point to individual verses. This particular Bible is designed with the purpose of reading only.
What is going to be the purpose of your future Bible purchase? Is there a specific need that this Bible is going to meet? Is this Bible going to need to meet many different needs, or is it a more specialized Bible?
Now that we have determined which translation you will be using, and you have thought through the purpose, on the next blog we will look at the different options you have at your disposal.