Bibles Bible Studies Books

The title of my Review says it all, and since there are already over 130 Reviews, I will make this short. This is simply the best comprehensive modern systematic theology in one volume on the market I have seen in 40 years of ministry. Why? It covers charismatic, evangelical, historical, liturgical and every other angle theologically, is reader friendly, loaded with footnotes and references from every Christian persuasion, and yet not avoiding thorny and difficult topics usually only tackled by very independent writers. No wonder it has sold over a quarter of a million copies in such a short time.

The study of doctrine should be important to any professing Christian. Understanding what you believe is essential. I have yet to read all through this book but plan on going through it in the next year. I am greatly looking forward to it.

This a fantastic book!,Imagine a book on Theology for everyman to enjoy,From the scholar to the layperson,everyone can enjoy understanding who God is.And this gentleman seems to write from a perspective of really loving God and people too,without any desire to impress anyone with his knowledge as Mr Grudem could easily do,This is a masterpiece and I cannot overemphasize how enjoyable and solid this hefty volume is,We need more men like this to break down these wonderful truths for us and yet they are still as meaty and can be as deep as you need to go with them,I thank my God for using Mr Grudem to bring this to us,all Glory to Him!!

Having spent a few months working through Grudem's Systematic Theology, I'm convinced it is a very important book. I think this will go down in church history as one of the best systematic theologies ever written, and can easily hold its own place on a shelf with works by Calvin, Gill, Henry and Poole. It's a great book to read straight through (if you have a lot of time on your hands) or to use as a reference for specific topics or questions you may have. It's laid out very well, user friendly for laymen, and has great supplementary info at the end of the chapters as well as at the back of the book. A great Reformed theology textbook and a great gift for any believer, whether in seminary or not. Youth pastors should be teaching this book instead of hosting gatherings for playing air hockey and eating pizza.

Fantasticly easy to read systematic theology with some challenging questions at the end of each chapter.
Can't say I liked the hymms section because I didn't really know any of them to be honest (pentecostal / charismatic background sorry) but would be helpful to some.

I've tried reading a few systematic theologies before like Berkhofs, Hodge, Torey and even Calvins Institutes. All hopeless complex and I found myself stuggling. Grudems book is great for students who want a good understanding of Christian theology, but don't want to spend hours struggling with Archaic language and overly scholarlised books.

Grudem has a gift for making complex assertions simple facts. The other guys seem to do things the other way around. Not that there isnt any value in the other authors, but for me I found this book most helpful.
He is quite conservative and rigoursly biblical. Its not an historical or philosophical theology either so it should be renamed biblical theology.

Well worth it, its a massive book and its heavy. make sure you get a hardcover version, softcovers just wont cut it!!

This is one of the most profound books on spirituality I have ever come across. For those who are questioning your faith and feel there is nothing in Christiandom that can help you find the answers to why you feel so miserable, why things don't seem to be going your way, this is the book for you. It has no answers, per say, but it does tell of one man's quest to find the living God and some of the revelations he came to while on that quest. A must have for any Christian library.

I found myself laughing aloud one minute and welling with tears the next. This readable collection of thoughts on being Christian is compelling and inviting. It stretches the imagination of what could be and helps to expose some deeply guarded pharisaical practices in church culture. It will be offensive to some who are used to reading "Christian" books.

This is a book well worth reading. It is appropriate for late teens and early twenties since it covers life in a university. It has a great spiritual depth and we have used is as the basis of study in a small group of men. I recommend it highly.

When I read Don Miller's thoughts on human personality and relationship, it is not exaggerating to rate them as powerful as those of C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Francis Schaeffer. But to run an apple-to-apple comparison, I would pick Lewis in this case for a comparison study, because Miller is not a minister. While Lewis is excellent in using illustrations and allegories to get his points across which might be ambiguous and challenging to understand, particularly when one is not familiar with the literatures he used as references, Miller, while equally personal, sharp and hilarious, is surprisingly and impressively much more articulate in conveying and in the presentation of his observation and analysis from his own experience and interaction with his acquaintances. He nails it when he speaks about human depravity, loneliness, and money (somewhat naïve, but still worth pondering),

"I remember a particular midnight, three weeks into our stay, walking into a meadow surrounded by thick aspens and above me all that glorious heaven glowing, and I felt like I was part of it, what with the trees clapping hands and me feeling like I was floating there beneath the endlessness, I looked up so long I felt like I was in space. Light. No money and no anxiety" (p.199).

"When I was in love, I hardly thought of myself. When I was in love, there was somebody in the world who was more important than me. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. [The words alone, lonely and loneliness] say that we are human; they are like the words `hunger' and `thirst.' But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface...the soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.

And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions (I might add Internet, blogs, computers, and video games), not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all" (p.151-152, 154, 172).

With this said, however, Miller's theology, which I consider as a close representation of the theology of the emergent church, is shallow, if not faulty. It is a humanistic, anthropocentric theology, where the gospel has been turned into a social gospel, and Christianity as a means to turn the world into an utopia at the expense of neglecting the fundamental issues of sin, the attributes of God; particularly the justice and holiness and glory of God, the authority of Scriptures and the cross of Jesus Christ, the latter being the linchpin of the gospel. He did so by eliminating these and substituting them with a false notion of the love of God, which is common in the emergent camp (the name Brian McLaren usually pops up when the word "emergent" is mentioned).

One might challenge my statement about Miller's theology and accuse it as if I were beating a dead horse considering the sub-title of the book is "Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality." However, this sub-title both sounds like an oxymoron and is inconsistent with what Miller actually does. How can one write about Christian Spirituality without being religious? These two are inseparable. Moreover, despite "non-religious" claim, he does talk about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, prayer and love. How can one write about these altogether and not be religious? Impossible. Perhaps Miller is trying not to scare anyone away by not giving a religious impression on his book, but it doesn't work. If it is Christian, then it must be religious. He tries not to sound religious but he can't help sounding religious as he discusses Christianity, yet ironically, by violating this non-religious claim by writing religiously anyway about Christianity, he doesn't present Christianity rightly as the Bible teaches, but a heavily diluted version of it, so thoroughly diluted that it barely resembles orthodox Christianity that the Bible teaches. From this perspective, this book is a mess. Though Miller does an excellent job in describing the problems with humanity as well as with the so-called fundamentalist Christianity, but sadly he does not go to the bottom of them, that the true gospel points out and the remedy thereof. Consider for examples,

"Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the Fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live.

... I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families,... and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus... you are human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy" (p. 173).

Just like Lewis, Miller is a great writer-psychiatrist-philosopher, but a horrible theologian. My suggestion is to read Miller with caution, disregard his views on theology, learn from his analysis on humanity and combine it with John Piper's Desiring God.

I must say that I am most troubled in my spirit that so many people gave this book a five star rating. I wonder if this guy has ever even picked up a Bible. The only reason I gave it one star is because I could not give it zero.

All I can really say about the book is that the god portrayed in it is not the God of the Bible. When I first began to read, I was impressed with the fact that Donald Miller has actually felt conviction for his sin and I was truly encouraged. Though after continuing on, I realized that it was not a conviction that produced a true repentance which leads to life, but just an emotional and romantic "poor me" story which unfortunately leads to death.

What shocks and concerns me is that someone who hates God as much as Donald Miller does can actually call himself a Christian. This is our fault brothers. This is our fault for being so complacent. If we don't take a stand against this type of humanistic nonsense, this is the "Christianity" that we can expect to keep seeing.

Filled with non-historical half-truths, this is just another postmodern, psychological self-help book which prostitutes Christian terminology to its own demise.

It's time to wake up.

Again big props for this book the Basics of Biblical Greek is a need for all Greek students the book, workbook, cd and CDrom are all perfect and come with a high recommendation!

A "must-have" with the Grammar book of the same name. Plenty of translation exercises to compliment the grammar lessons.

The entire study package of Basics of Biblical Greek which includes the textbook, the study guide, the vocabulary cards, the summary sheet, and the lecture CD's is a blessed fruit of a long, thoughtful, meticulous, and high-tech labor of one of the world's best New Testament Greek scholars. I have to admit I have not studied Greek from other professors, but after studying Mounce, I simply can not imagine a better way to teach students an introduction to Biblical Greek than the one Prof. Mounce implements in this study packet. The structure and methodology are so impressively organized that I believe, without trying to diminish the role of an instructor, one can study by himself or herself without taking the class at a seminary. From start to finish, Prof. Mounce designs the lessons with solid exegesis skills as the goal in mind. He wastes no time but immediately exposes students with translation exercises using real Scripture passages in the study guide, even early in the first few chapters when he barely starts with nouns.

The lessons are divided into three major parts; nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each chapter begins with exegetical insights related to the topic being taught in that particular chapter. He then moves on by explaining the English and Greek forms. The nouns and adjectives are not too bad. They are usually divided into three types of declensions. While the nouns usually take on one of the three declensions, the most common configuration of adjectives is either 3-1-3 or 2-1-2 where the first, second and third numbers indicate the declension type for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. There are some discussions on special-case nouns having slightly abnormal endings; pant and ent, for examples. Now verbs are considerably more challenging because they not only have more numerous categories and rules, but the biggest obstacles are the tense stems and when they form the real verbs through a combination of augments, tense-formatives, connecting vowels, and personal endings. The trouble can be illustrated by comparing it to having to memorize the English present, past and perfect tenses of irregular and regular verbs which the Greek version has six; present, future active, aorist active and passive, perfect active and passive, instead of three in English. And each of these six stems has different forms not only depending on the person and number, but also on the voices; active, middle, and passive. On top of these, there is another parameter, called aspect, where these verbs take on other forms, the indicative covered in the early chapters of the verbs, subjunctive, infinitive and imperative. Some are similar if not the same as the indicatives, which make them even harder to distinguish which one is which. Here Prof. Mounce reminds students to always watch for the contexts. Context is your best friend when it comes to translation. There is no easy way of getting around this issue completely except in my view, to get the Greek Morphology text, also by Mounce. At the end of some chapters, there is coverage on extended materials that deal with special cases, additional rules in translation, contraction and morphology.

The summary sheet consists of all important rules involving word formation, verb-ending charts, and all the forms of frequently used verbs. It serves as a handy guide for students when doing the translation so they don't have to flip through the pages of the textbook. Some flipping of pages is inevitable, though, because the last few pages of the textbook has the list of major lexicons.

There are two types of drills in the study guide. The first is chapter-by-chapter review where students are asked to parse ten words in a table having the forms that have been covered up to that chapter. Next, there is a warm-up translation section consisting of seven short phrases or sentences to be translated before the real translation exercise begins with twenty sentences; some are long ones. From my experience, I sometimes had a headache after completing the translation work due to the intensity it involves in figuring out not only what the words mean, but also their forms, and how to restructure the sentence in English format that both are understandable and make sense. The second type of drill is the exam-type where the test materials are combined every five chapters. The tasks include parsing, grammar rules, and translations usually from a New Testament passage.

As in any other languages, learning Greek requires extra memory power, but not brute-force memorization of every single word indiscriminately. Prof. Mounce always warns students only to memory special-case words and rules such as endings and contractions, instead of every single word with all its garden variety of forms. Excellent advise.

Needless to say, I delightfully endorse Prof. Mounce as your virtual Greek instructor. If you decide to homeschool yourself, you can purchase the complete combo set at teknia dot com. I don't think Amazon sell the lecture CD set. But even if you are taking the class at the seminary, I don't see any harm for you to buy the combo set anyway, though you probably won't need the lecture CD's provided you have an excellent instructor.

This is a great product. The corresponding book is also great. Even if you are looking into Greek for reasons other than religion, I would recommend this series. It moves quick, but is easy to understand. At the end of each chapter of the book you do a few pages, and after chapter 2 you are already translating easy greek! The book and workbook are just great products and William Mounce is a great teacher

As I now this is one of the best grammar books for biblical greek.
For me it was very helpfull but you need practice for learning biblical greek. More than half of this book is with verbs.

The entire study package of Basics of Biblical Greek which includes the textbook, the study guide, the vocabulary cards, the summary sheet, and the lecture CD's is a blessed fruit of a long, thoughtful, meticulous, and high-tech labor of one of the world's best New Testament Greek scholars. I have to admit I have not studied Greek from other professors, but after studying Mounce, I simply can not imagine a better way to teach students an introduction to Biblical Greek than the one Prof. Mounce implements in this study packet. The structure and methodology are so impressively organized that I believe, without trying to diminish the role of an instructor, one can study by himself or herself without taking the class at a seminary. From start to finish, Prof. Mounce designs the lessons with solid exegesis skills as the goal in mind. He wastes no time but immediately exposes students with translation exercises using real Scripture passages in the study guide, even early in the first few chapters when he barely starts with nouns.

The lessons are divided into three major parts; nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each chapter begins with exegetical insights related to the topic being taught in that particular chapter. He then moves on by explaining the English and Greek forms. The nouns and adjectives are not too bad. They are usually divided into three types of declensions. While the nouns usually take on one of the three declensions, the most common configuration of adjectives is either 3-1-3 or 2-1-2 where the first, second and third numbers indicate the declension type for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. There are some discussions on special-case nouns having slightly abnormal endings; pant and ent, for examples. Now verbs are considerably more challenging because they not only have more numerous categories and rules, but the biggest obstacles are the tense stems and when they form the real verbs through a combination of augments, tense-formatives, connecting vowels, and personal endings. The trouble can be illustrated by comparing it to having to memorize the English present, past and perfect tenses of irregular and regular verbs which the Greek version has six; present, future active, aorist active and passive, perfect active and passive, instead of three in English. And each of these six stems has different forms not only depending on the person and number, but also on the voices; active, middle, and passive. On top of these, there is another parameter, called aspect, where these verbs take on other forms, the indicative covered in the early chapters of the verbs, subjunctive, infinitive and imperative. Some are similar if not the same as the indicatives, which make them even harder to distinguish which one is which. Here Prof. Mounce reminds students to always watch for the contexts. Context is your best friend when it comes to translation. There is no easy way of getting around this issue completely except in my view, to get the Greek Morphology text, also by Mounce. At the end of some chapters, there is coverage on extended materials that deal with special cases, additional rules in translation, contraction and morphology.

The summary sheet consists of all important rules involving word formation, verb-ending charts, and all the forms of frequently used verbs. It serves as a handy guide for students when doing the translation so they don't have to flip through the pages of the textbook. Some flipping of pages is inevitable, though, because the last few pages of the textbook has the list of major lexicons.

There are two types of drills in the study guide. The first is chapter-by-chapter review where students are asked to parse ten words in a table having the forms that have been covered up to that chapter. Next, there is a warm-up translation section consisting of seven short phrases or sentences to be translated before the real translation exercise begins with twenty sentences; some are long ones. From my experience, I sometimes had a headache after completing the translation work due to the intensity it involves in figuring out not only what the words mean, but also their forms, and how to restructure the sentence in English format that both are understandable and make sense. The second type of drill is the exam-type where the test materials are combined every five chapters. The tasks include parsing, grammar rules, and translations usually from a New Testament passage.

As in any other languages, learning Greek requires extra memory power, but not brute-force memorization of every single word indiscriminately. Prof. Mounce always warns students only to memory special-case words and rules such as endings and contractions, instead of every single word with all its garden variety of forms. Excellent advise.

Needless to say, I delightfully endorse Prof. Mounce as your virtual Greek instructor. If you decide to homeschool yourself, you can purchase the complete combo set at teknia dot com. I don't think Amazon sell the lecture CD set. But even if you are taking the class at the seminary, I don't see any harm for you to buy the combo set anyway, though you probably won't need the lecture CD's provided you have an excellent instructor.

Recently I decided to teach myself Greek. I've attempted it before using other grammars without much success. The main stumbling block for me was that other authors assumed I knew what sujective case or nominative predicate meant. I didn't, but Mounce gives the reader a crash course in English grammar along with the Greek lessons. Learning has actually turned out to be fun and easy! I simply cannot recommend this text highly enough.

The workbook, flash cards and vocabulary CD are great adjuncts to the text.

I purchased the book to help with Bible translation work. It is a reasonable resource for this type of work. As with all things there is no easy substitute for hard work. Greek Grammar is probably more difficult than most - so it is not a book that you can pick up and within a short time be able to speak and read Greek. Still requires lots of work. There is a lot of reading, memorizing and studying. You also have to have an extensive understanding of the grammar of your mother tongue.

This is the best grammar I have used in my 18 years in the ministry. I have tutored Greek students on occasion and have found this grammar to be the best grammar available. The "inductive" approach is very easy to follow. I highly recommend this grammar as a primary to anyone reviewing their Greek (or secondary grammar to any student) who wants a clear overview of Koine Greek. I use it as part of my daily reading and study.
After learning Dr. Mounce's noun and verb rules for recognizing the "roots," I no longer need to memorize so many paradigms. Once I learned the morphology of the language, the large amount of memorization other grammars require is greatly reduced. This grammar is a must study (or review) for any preacher or teacher working in the New Testament Greek text.

This book has proven to be an excellent way for me to learn enough Biblical Greek to at least have an understanding of why different interpretations of scripture are debated among scholars. I am a lay reader of Biblical Greek and Hebrew and this more or less beginner course was very helpful. Prof. Mounce keeps the reader encouraged with his count of NT Greek word occurrences and a tally of the number of words in the NT one can read based on vocabulary progress from chapter to chapter. Why, after only learning the vocabulary of 8 chapters and only 72 Greek words, I can read over 50% of the words in a Greek NT. (Of course, that means I must skip around to read half of the NT and I am reading words like "and" and "the" etc. a lot, but it is a fun way to keep up with progress. The exegetical insights at the beginning of each chapter are very interesting ways of gaining a sense of the reasons for varying interpetations of scripture.

This book has a lot of information not only on how to read the Bible, but also on its historical context (exegesis) and how it can apply to us today (harmenuetics.) This book has so much though that to read this book for all its worth requires a dictionary and time. If you want to learn about the Bible as well as how to read and understand it and have the time to go through it, then this book will be a great buy for you.

Great book that provides a great tool for how to get deeper into the Bible. It is easy to follow and fairly simple to see the points. They provide great examples from different passages with different translations. And using different examples on how to go through an exegesical study helps the reader to follow the process. Highly recommended.

Another book that was required for a course. Another book that would not otherwise have been purchased. Content was OK. It contained some helpful and insightful information.

The book is an excellent journey into the word of God and will get you pointed in the right direction. Many Christians do not study the word of God in the correct context and this book rectifies a long standing problem in the Evangelical community concerning the interpretation of Scripture. I was concerned about the author's pushing the TNIV as the translation of choice for serious study of the Bible. I would have preferred that they used the NRSV with the TNIV being a strong secondary translation for study. I did appreciate the fact that they encouraged the use of Bible dictonaries and commentaries to study scripture, but I felt that thay should have done a chapter on good study bibles that can aid in understanding the text. I did feel that they interjected their opinions too much in the book and gave us their pet peeves, couched in the language of exegesis and hermeneutics. In the same vein, they did debunk a few misinterpretations on some biblical passages and they allow for healthy dissent. The most important thing is to read the Bible and this book gives a good start.

The title says it all. If you want to read the Bible for all its worth, you, not only read the book, but have to have your own copy. I borrowed the book from the library and started digging into it. There were many valuable Bible verses provided to illustrate and support the important points of the author's view. In order to gain the most from the book, I would need to go through all of these references. Since I did not have the time to do this at one time, I would like to keep a copy on my book shelf. In this case, I would be able to refer to it whenever I need to. So, I decided to purchase my own copy. If you are serious about understanding the Bible, I highly recommend this book to you.

In addition to what other reviewers have written, allow me to add a note about this book's style and format. Fr. Pacwa respects the intelligence of his readers, and doesn't hesitate to introduce deep theological points and insights, using etymology and history to explain them. Decades of preaching these concepts to a wide variety of audiences no doubt helps him do so. Likewise, the format is not of the "What-the-readings-mean-to-me" variety. Fr. Pacwa takes a cognitive approach to instruction, and readers are expected to probe and discuss meaty subject matter from the text. I intend to use this book for my weekly catechism group this fall; the fact that it is reasonably priced is an added bonus for the group's members. Highly recommended.

This book written by Father Mitch Pacwa, of EWTN fame was specifically written for the Year of Saint Paul. Written and presented in a way that makes it very intereactive, Fr. Mitch presents Saint Paul's teaching on six of the seven Sacraments. Each of these chapters/sessions delves into what Saint Paul taught and its relevance for us today.
The book also includes a checklist/reading guide to aid those who would like to read through the Pauline corpus during the Year of Saint Paul. The list is designed to help the reader make it through the writings of St. Paul in about three months, while taking no longer than 10 minutes a day to do so!
This is a very original book, presenting fresh material that is engaging and exciting. The boxes within the book provide interesting information, including some recent research that gives a new take on the Letters to Timothy and Titus.
Highly recommended!
I am the author of The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You

Father Pacwa is a biblical scholar of remarkable depth, but he's also a preacher who can communicate to ordinary people. He has produced something remarkable here: a profound synthesis of St. Paul's thinking on a variety of subjects, but in a form that's digestible for parish groups and home Bible studies. His special focus is the Church's sacraments, but he also touches upon other doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary issues. With this overview, we can recognize our present-day parishes in the congregations of so long ago. The Church is one, not only throughout the world, but through all time. This is the best introductory Bible study to Paul I've seen.

I ordered this Bible for my 11 yr. old grandaugher and she thinks it is wonderful. It was in excellent shape and shipped very fast.

This is a real good bible with a translation you could use to "quote". I liked the pages and inserts with explainations. You could sit down and just read facts and info on many subjects in the bible. I wish the pages were a little thicker so you could write or highlight on them. I suppose it would make this book thicker and heavier. It would make a great study bible for youth or any age. I, definately, would recommend this bible to anyone.

I have used this bible for a few years now and love it! I find the additional notes to be informative and thought provoking for students of all ages. We now purchase these for our 6th graders at my parish. The parents who saw our 'new' bibles really liked them too. I cannot recommend this book enough for both students and adults!

This bible is explained for understanding the meaning inside of the bible. It's described with more detail how God works to every prophet until His own Son Jesus Christ and full of guidances.

Excellent Easy to use Bible. Great for the Young adults in our lives. Makes great sense out of scripture. Hard to Find and Usually expensive, Extremely reasonable on Amazon.

Study questions of this OT survey are helpful, but the content is on the shallow side. Be aware that the interpretive slant is very conservative.

When I received my book it was in top condition. The delivery was prompt. I was pleasantly surprised with my purchase and the delivery.

If you're a pastor, seminary student, or a layperson who needs a good, informative, and easy to read introduction to the Old Testament then this book will be perfect for you. Many OT introductions/surveys that are out there are either 1) too technical and academic, or 2) liberal/modernist. This introduction is solidly evangelical, easy to understand, and academic enough for even the novice biblical scholar.

The strength of the book is that it does not only survey each of the books in the Old Testament section by section but by topics of significance in each book. For instance, when the authors talk about the book of Genesis they do not only discuss what each of the 50 chapters say but about what the author said about the nature of election, the Abrahamic promise, the covenant, etc. Pretty much everything is covered regarding each book (authorship, date, place of writing, etc.).

Another feature of the book that will attract more novice pastors and students of the Bible is the colourful pictures that are abundantly printed in the book. Though some may find this comical, I think it added to the charm of this book. Pictures, graphs, maps, etc. help readers understand the background of each of the OT books better.

Finally, one other thing I really liked about this book is that the authors discuss side-issues related to the OT. The chapters on the historical background of the OT (chap. 2) and the introduction to the Prophetic books (chap. 24) are well written, informative, and orthodox. Sure, the authors could have written more deeply on these chapters but the intended audience demanded that they do not go too deeply in these matters.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book for those who want a better understanding of the OT books. Though it is not that scholarly and deep, it is still good enough for what it intends and many students of the Bible will find rich information that will greatly help in their personal spiritual growth and ministry.

Good overview of each book of the OT -- BUT there were a LOT of mistakes (verse references and illustration references) in the book, which I believe decreases its integrity as it certainly takes away my respect of its credibility. For example, on pg 214, the citation for 2 Sm 6:6-8 should actually be 2 Sm 5:6-8. Another example, on pg. 242, "Jotham of Israel" should actually be "Jotham of Judah". These are only a few of the mistakes I've seen, and it makes me wonder what other mistakes there are. Seems like it needs a good editor's eye.

Other issues I had with this book: the key terms are never defined in the book. You have to look it up in the accompanying CD to find the definitions. Also, I found that often times, the point/message that the authors are trying to convey in their paragraphs and sections are never clearly stated (they beat around the bush and go in circles). Lastly, the attempts at application/contextualization seem to have been added to the ends of sections almost as an afterthought, and they stood out like a sore thumb as not belonging to the train of thought.

I am disappointed with the quality of this book. The pictures and color are very appealing in comparison to other Old Testament survey books, however, the other issues with the book make it a less than desirable textbook.

This text was introduced into evidence by me in a federal discrimination case against a public community college in South Florida. The book is completely inappropriate for use in public colleges. It is not simply "broadly evangelical". It adopts the views of the religious right on every subject from evolution to homosexuality to premarital sex.

The jury which heard the case was outraged, finding a "gross betrayal of the public trust" in the selection of texts, among other things.

This book is designed for people who do not ask questions, who take the Bible literally and who are predisposed to a particular agenda. If you do not meet all of these particular criteria, find a better book. There are plenty.

Please disregard the review that says the color maps are unreadable. I have no problems seeing the maps. I used to think New Interpreters Study Bible was the best because of the articles scattered throughout in addition to end page annotations. But HarperCollins has increased and updated its annotations, which, in my opinion, puts this latest edition over the top. This is now the best academic study Bible in publication. If you are expecting fundamentalist commentary, you need to look for another study Bible. This is an academic study, exploring word meanings, cultural nuances, archaeology and comparative religion. The editors have not tried to smooth out the disagreements between contributors, which helps to give the reader a glimpse of the range of interpretations and views on Scripture of those in academe. The commentaries are detailed and scholarly, but all of it is very readable for intelligent laity. The Oxford Study Bible now has a lot of catching up to do. And Zondervan's NIV Study Bible does not hold a candle to this! The annotations are by the cream of scholars who have written some excellent articles here on reading strategies, Israeli history, archaeology, Hebrew and Greco-Roman religions. This edition also includes a historical timeline and concordance. The translation, of course, is NRSV.

Christians today need a healthy view of the Bible. HarperCollins provides an excellent way to develop just such a view. Though Christians view the Bible as the Word of God, the scripture is described as God breathed (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Therefore, how we view the human words which we read with our eyes influences our understanding of the Word of God. We must remember that John 1:1-2 is not talking about the Bible but Jesus. Let HarperCollins give you better insight for your mind concerning the human words while God's Spirit gives you the right insight for your spirit concerning His Word.

Tendances 'liberale' apostate...everywhere
You will know why i threw in the rubbish
beautiful burgundy Jerusalem Bible with
HarperCollins Study Bible, Commentary etc.
Among other reasons
both copies were talking about
'young woman (Isa 7:14)'
not Virgin that brought our Lord Jesus
into this world and it was not
'The Spirit of God moved upon the face of
the waters (Ge 1:2)' but the wind of their
godless 'scholars'?
Seems these 'specialists' never read (Rev 22:18,19)
By the way Authorised KJV was supposedly HARD to read,
my view is Bible is a serious Book not for reading only
but for living BY and THAT is hard.
Life is OK but politics of those 'scholars' nope!

NOT ONLY DID I NOT RECEIVE THE BOOK, BUT I HAVE NOT RECEIVED A REFUND. IT HAS BEEN TRULY A FRUSTATING AND DISSAPOINTING EXPERIENCE.

I was extremely disappointed in the study notes and returned the bible for a refund.