50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not really a Study Bible, in my opinion, May 28, 2009
This review is from: Lutheran Study Bible (Hardcover)
I confess I was a bit disappointed when I received this new Bible because I had been expecting more substance. The helps and commentary are quite limited and elementary, and more subjectively opinionated than academic. And there is no cross-referencing between OT texts quoted in the NT, or any cross-referencing system at all for that matter. One positive result is that there is a lot of blank space on most pages for my own notes. With the (sometimes condescending) reflection questions next to the text, this Bible to me is more of a devotional Bible. And sorry, but the pastel blue cover color is a bit too feminine for my comfort. And the pastel blue lettering inside for titles and sub-titles is too light to be read comfortably. For someone looking for a solid NRSV Study Bible, I believe they would be better served by the New Oxford Annotated Bible, or the Harper-Collins Study Bible. Sorry, but only three stars.
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38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for devotional reading. Otherwise a disappointment, May 2, 2009
This review is from: Lutheran Study Bible (Hardcover)
The best parts of Lutheran Study Bible are the essays which deal with how Luther read the Bible and how we, in turn, read and interpret it. In Mary Jane Haemig's essay on Luther and the Bible, she quotes Luther's statement "Christ's teaching should be orally continued giving no command that it should be written". Luther saw the introduction of the mechanically printed Bibles, and considered the need for the printed word to be `a serious decline and a lack of the Spirit which necessity forced upon us...' I am profoundly with Luther on this point, which is why Bible Study, the weekly lectionary readings and the weekly sermon are my most effective paths to spirituality. This is also why this `Book of Life' initiative is important to Lutherans.
The edition is oriented to those who take the lectio divina road to Bible reading. Nothing shows this more clearly than A Short Guide to Personal Bible Reading on page 1553. I am not, however, fond of its suggestion for marking passages in the Bible with a pen or pencil. (If you are inclined to do this, I strongly suggest you get The New Inductive Study Bible, which is designed explicitly for marking up with colors). The Lutheran provides a good Bible reading plan, in the form of a lectionary. For the browser, it has lists of `stories' which would be useful for reading to children and a number of sidebars within the text.
And yet, this edition fell short of my expectations. It does not include the deuterocanonical books. This is surprising, because the Lutheran has almost as many pages and weighs almost as much as NRSV study Bibles which do include these `apocryphal' books. This is relevant because I handed it to one of my students who could use a new Bible, and it was literally too heavy for her to hold. (She had no problem with the Harper Study Bible, which has all 66 Protestant books plus notes.) The added weight is due the paper which is heavier than the tissue paper style of pages in many Bibles and the fact that the book has only a single column of text per page rather than two. This is doubly surprising since the type is smaller than in both the HarperCollins Study Bible and The New Oxford Annotated Bible, the two most commonly cited when you ask about peoples' favorite study Bibles. The Lutheran has 19 characters to the inch, while the Oxford has less than 11 characters to the inch, so the Lutheran is about 35% more difficult to read than Oxford and HarperCollins.
The Lutheran has fewer notes than the Oxford and HarperCollins. On the first page of Genesis, the Lutheran has twelve (12) notes, the same as both other study Bibles, but three of those twelve are questions to the reader. The notes in the other Bibles tend to be longer and more informative about the original Hebrew. In these first 24 verses, there are even differences in interpretation of the language between the Lutheran and the Oxford notes. Genesis 1:2 is translated in the NRSV as `2 ...the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.' The Lutheran notes that the Hebrew word translated as `wind' is better understood as `spirit'; however the Hebrew word is identical to the one in Genesis 8:1, where God made the wind blow over the face of the earth. That is, the same word is used in a context where the literal sense of `moving air' is reasonable, and consistent with the sense of `wind' in 1:2. Luther was the great exponent of interpreting the passages in the Bible by comparing how the words made sense in similar passages. He was a great exponent of understanding what the authors meant when they wrote this text. I suggest our modern Lutheran Bible scholars may have been a bit too free with their interpretation, putting later Greek meanings into the quills of the early Hebrew scribes.
The Lutheran has a `Subject Guide', which is very similar to concordances in other study Bibles. When I compared it to the best Study Bible concordance I've seen so far, in The New Inductive Study Bible (New American Standard translation), the Lutheran had 22 double column pages versus 112 4-column pages in the Inductive. The Lutheran had 13 entries for `wisdom', not including some important ones from Job, while the Inductive had 15 entries, divided between `wisdom' and `wise'. The Lutheran had no entries for `wind', while the Inductive had 11.
An important object of this edition is to present the Lutheran interpretation on the Bible, and on this I was most disappointed. What I hoped to see was Luther's own words he used to introduce the books of the Bible in his German translation. But these are nowhere to be found. In the introduction to Matthew, we get an upbeat introduction we might expect of something written for middle school children. For example, it cites the theoretical `Q' document as if we could touch it like one of the Dead Sea scrolls. The existence of `Q' is an hypothesis, and the evidence for its existence is less substantial than the evidence for the existence of sub-atomic particles. Lutheran Perspectives material is primarily added in the form of marginal notes identified by Luther's symbolic white rose with red inner heart and cross. In Ecclesiastes, there are only three such short notes, in spite of the fact that Luther delivered lectures on Ecclesiastes which fill over 80 pages in English translation.
If, like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, you are intent on learning the secrets at the roots of the mountain which are our scriptures, this book is not the best. If, however, you are like the pious St. Teresa of Avila for whom the scripture heals the wounds of Christ's absence, this is for you.
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