Study Bibles, Reformation Bibles, Audio Bibles, Bibles for kids, Bibles for adults, Bibles for Twilight fans, Bibles for LOST fans, Bibles translated into Klingon….
I love, love, love my The ESV Study Bible
But I noticed the competition: NLT Study Bible, Indexed Edition
I’m one of “those” guys.
I like Bibles. I own a dozen or so, and I want more. Sure, I have the Logos app, and a VERY generous reader of mine sent me Bible Works 7 (you know who you are, thank you, thank you, thank you!), but I always like new Bibles. I have so many Bibles I don’t use though, I may start giving some away. All that said, I want to know one thing:
What Bible do you read and why?
Leave it in the comments 
-Don-
I love those ESV fake leather bibles. Small enough to be comfortable, and clean and clear writing inside. Makes me actually enjoy reading it,
I have an older one (got it around 2006 ish) but the newer ones have even a better typeface!
I do most of my reading/study from a large ESV, single-column wide margin. And I also fell in love with the ESV study Bible.
I have a feeling a lot of people love the ESV who visit here. Do you have a hard cover or soft cover?
The study Bible is hard cover, and my mark-up, drag-around copy is that soft cover reference edition (with both Old and New Testaments, according to the info page).
I like to read the netbible.org version. The semi-open source commentary system produces lots of helpful notes on translation and historical background.
That sounds like a very interesting idea. I might have to check that out.
While I'll tend to read whatever version is in front of me at the time, my preference is to hop onto BibleGateway.com and hop back and forth between a literal and a paraphrase version. Usually this means NIV and The Message. NIV because it's the obligatory literal translation (though I'm not otherwise attached to it; if you have better recommendations, lemme hear 'em), and The Message, because I love the plain English way it puts things (I often find myself finally understanding passages I didn't quite 'get' in other versions, as well as looking at old familiars in a whole new light).
The reason for this is because I find that sometimes literal versions will lose important ideas in the translation over to English, and paraphrase versions are prone to the translators' opinion (at least more so than literal versions). Next to actually being able to read Greek and Hebrew, studying several different translations is the best way to understand what the original text is trying to communicate.
My everyday reading (2 books at a time) is in my trutone chestnut red ESV. That bible is beat to heck and it keeps coming back for more.
I do all my studying from ESV.org with two browsers – one browsers with verse numbers and one without. Then I can copy sans verse numbers into Evernote and chop it up from there. This allows me to deal with passages but without the verse numbers. This helps me see what the author was trying to really say.
I use my ESVSB on iPhone with Evernote when I go to church service. With the Olivetree Bible Reader, I can take notes on individual passages and it will save those notes to my Evernote account. I use ESVSB and some commentary to help me on certain difficult passages.
Sometimes I will go to a thought translation like NIV or NLT. I won't use NIV for reading through because it is very hard for me to understand (compared to ESV which is crystal clear). If I read NLT, I keep feeling like I am missing something and constantly have to go to my ESV for richer, fuller detail. After 7 books in NLT with that mess, I decided not to bother with it anymore.
My main reading one is a thinline ESV like mentioned above. It's a great size and very durable (my old one got rained on heavily. It's just wrinkled, nothing was really hurt, no running ink.)
For study I also use Ligonier's Reformation ESV study bible and The ESV study bible.
Both have great commentary.
You and Eric are definitely cut from the same cloth! Our house library is crammed with an impressive library of Bibles, ranging from a Kingdom Interlinear Translation the Jehovah's Witnesses used to use, to a hefty ESV that has already developed a dark thumb-line along the page edges from the sheer amount of heavy use it's received. And that's not counting what's on the computer and the laptop…
I tend to use three Bibles in my reading: an NIV Life Application SB that is my church Bible, an ESVSB for home use, and recently I've been getting into the good old KJV for bedside reading. I'd use the ESV at church but it's a beast to carry around, and my daughter Tabitha apparently decided she didn't like 1 Timothy 2 and ripped the page out last year. (I can't blame her though, being only a year old it's no surprise her hermeneutics is shaky!) I also have one of the small ESV's that was my first non-Witness Bible, that I stuff in my purse for taking on trips or long waits. It was a gift from Eric after we both came to know Christ together.
(As an interesting side note: the infamous KIT Eric has was quietly shuffled under the Organization's rug because the Greek passages showed the true, unaltered Scripture that the JWs have spent almost two centuries trying to convince their followers is not "the Truth." The new KIT has conveniently, ahem, corrected those errors.)
"Our house library is crammed with an impressive library of Bibles"…oh no, I have no problem with redundancy is no problem for me…
ESV and NASB are my main two English translations I use. The ESVSB is most certainly a BEAST, have a copy for my phone (gave away my Dead Tree version and currently waiting for Logos to finish porting it over to their software).
For a paraphrase version, I use the NET. After seeing the law of sin being portrayed in Romans 8:1-2 as "a continuous, low-lying black cloud" I could not take "The Message" seriously.
I used to have some software that had a TON of bibles in it, but I seem to have misplaced it…
So I now rely mostly on Logos 4 for electronic versions.
The KIT is probably the most interesting one that I use (unfortunately there is not an electronic version… I wonder why…). It is amazing how words just seem to be left out in their translation… [sarcasm] It's not like those words are important or anything [/sarcasm].
As for playing around with the Greek texts, I bounce between several, but mostly stay with the UBS 4. As to Hebrew… I cheat greatly on this one and rely solely on an interlinear. My brain is not ready to try to wrap itself around Hebrew.
Overall, I prefer a literal translation, it forces me to take time over passages and actually think through them. I am a speed reader, so I need to place "speed bumps" when reading important books, so having to try to work through unusual wordings helps a lot (probably why I also like Wuest's "Expanded Translation").
Okay, I've looked and can't find what "KIT" version is. What is it?
"Kingdom Interlinear Translation". This is the Watchtower's "in-house" interlinear New Testament.
If you take some time, you can easily see where they decided to drop a few "minor" words to suit their beliefs. It is amazing what the omission of a few definitive articles or omitting the occasional "Christ", can do to your views. If you can find one, look for the 1969 (Purple covered) version. You can see the pattern of their translation better on this one. They "forgot" to change the literal glosses in many places, so you can clearly see the twisting of translation for their NWT version.
I really really want an ESV Study Bible but I like my KJV SB pretty well. Yeah, I'm one of those preferentialists. Not an onlyist, don't worry.
ESV, because it's the Elect Sanctified Version.
HA! Saving that one.
I still struggle with loving the NASB more than the ESV. I like them both.
NASB: Necessarily Advantageous for Serious Bible-students
Actually, the ESV is the “Evangelical Standard Version”.
Then you have the HCSB – “Hard-Core Southern Baptist” version (stole this one from Dr. David Platt).
Aw dangit! You stole my line, Eric! LOL
I don't like the HCSB. It's okay, but I just don't like the wording for some reason. I feel the same way with NCV (New Century Version) and the CEV (Contemporary English Version).
I understand your thoughts about the HCSB. There is just something… strange… about their choice of phrasing in places. Our church uses the NIV but like the HCSB, for some reason I am not a big fan of the phrasing style of the NIV. For some reason I always find my mind wandering after reading the NIV for a few minutes.
NCV and CEV are too easy for me to read, so I find myself just skimming and not picking up anything (but then these two are written for "tweens" [anyone besides myself really hate that word?], not reading addicts like myself).
I like my Ryrie Study Bible. It's a NASB. I seem to be the only one today. But I've used it for years and am keeping it together with packing tape. I have several other versions (ESV, NIV, KJV etc) around for comparison. The software I use is e-Sword. It's free, but if you like it you can support it. You can find it at http://www.e-sword.net.
I used to use e-Sword but I tried The Word and I like it better: http://www.theword.gr/