ESV Study Bible Review

Mine arrived yesterday. I got the natural brown TruTone. I'm not sure what the deal is with the orange triangle, but overall I like the design. The cover reminds me of a football. It also seems like it will be a lot more durable than my TruTone Reader's Greek New Testament or my compact ESV. It doesn't feel quite as soft, which I think is good. It also doesn't feel as plastic as bonded leather.

The binding is incredible. The book is enormous, but it will stay open no matter where you turn. This is key if you plan to use it in preaching, teaching, or in a classroom. I'm not an expert on binding, but I understand that this is remarkable. I know that I appreciate it because I hate having to use two hands to hold a book open.

Much has been written about the features of this study Bible, so I won't go into them too much. The illustrations are everything I was hoping for. I think they alone are worth picking up a copy. I don't know about you, but the descriptions of the tabernacle and the temple don't lead to ready pictures in my mind. However, the illustrations in this Bible do. They are incredible.

The Internet Monk described the ESVSB as a "seminary in a book," and I would tend to agree. If you are on a tight budget and don't have access to seminary libraries, you can learn quite a bit from this book. The articles in the back remind me of my old copy of Total Baseball. It was great to have a giant tome of stats, but the articles about Sabermetrics and baseball history were great additions. This Bible is the same way. The cornerstone of the book is the Word of God. I haven't read too many of the notes, but those I've seen have been excellent. However, just paging through the articles in the back gives me a great recap of my hermeneutics course and world religions course, for example. There are other articles as well.

One of my pastors sometimes jokes about reading the whole Bible "from Genesis to maps." You definitely have plenty of that in this Bible. The maps in the back are pretty standard, but the color maps in the text notes are what make this really stand out too. I like looking at maps because I don't have a good mental image of the geography of Palestine.

I don't work for Crossway. I get nothing out of recommending this resource. However, I do plan on showing it off to my believing friends so that they can see what a powerful tool this study Bible can be. I would love to see it in the hands of every Christian.