Are you a serious Bible student? Serious! Really serious! If you answer in the affirmative, then Hendrickson has just published a Bible precisely for you – the 2011 NIV Loose-Leaf Bible. It’s a Bible with plenty of room in the margins for your personal notes and discoveries.

As the title describes, this is a loose-leaf version and it can be purchased with or without the binder that fits which has “Holy Bible” embossed in gold letters on the front. It’s a wise decision, otherwise you’ll have to purchase a four-inch one to hold this massive volume. Besides, it looks classy.

Yes, it’s big, so probably it’s not one that you can carry with you to church every Sunday or perhaps not even to your favorite Bible study. But for sincere, detailed, note-taking, personal Bible study, it is ideal. Permit me to provide some of the hard-core specifics.

The Bible…

A Handbook on the Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, Edited by Craig A. Evans and David Mishkin. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2019.

Summary: A topical handbook on the Jewish background of the Christian faith, informed by the perspectives of both Jewish and non-Jewish Christian scholars.

A variety of scholars have called attention to how important it is to understand the Jewish background to the ministry of Jesus and the origins and development of the Christian movement. This background is critical to understanding the New Testament, the relationship between the two testaments, and indeed, the relations between Jews and Christians.

What makes this handbook distinctive from others that cover similar ground is that it is a multi-authored work, in which some of the contributors are well-known scholars like Scot McKnight, Larry Hurtado, Craig A. Evans, Andreas Köstenberger, and George H. Guthrie, and most of the rest are Jewish and/or…

If we are honest, those of us who love to “dig into” the Bible, have at least a passing interest in archaeology. An archaeological find that supports a biblical statement or event is one of the those “Aha; I told you so moments.” On the other hand, there are few of us who completely comprehend how archaeology and the Bible work together. We plug through a variety of Bible and/or archaeological websites and magazines hoping to find a few nuggets of knowledge and information. The real dilemma is we do not know how the Bible and archaeology are in sync.

So, when a book entitled The Bible and Archaeology comes along, just the title should pique our interest. And this one does! For those who have a limited knowledge of archaeology and how it intersects with the Bible, this is the perfect book to begin to understand the association.

The…

This beautiful resource is the perfect choice for Sunday School, college classes, or any sort of Bible class. The size of these wall maps (28 X 40 inches) is ideal. The maps themselves are attractive and loaded with the best information. Carta maps are my favorite and the ones chosen for this package are the most important for a teaching setting.

When you open the container that holds these maps you will first see an 18-page Bible atlas that will aid your use of the larger maps and help you prepare to teach. All 12 maps are included in this atlas along with 5 additional maps. The bonus maps in this atlas include: The Land of Canaan with an inset of the walls of Jericho, The World of the Greeks with a small insert of the empire of Alexander the Great, The Roman Empire with a small inset of the…

Today I read Psalm 1 out of the just-released Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition, and it was just as wonderful as I’ve long imagined it would be!

First and foremost, this is due to the power of Scripture itself. The Psalms are just amazing. And there’s something about reading the Bible in its first languages that fosters (at least for me) a deeper sense of connection to the church throughout time and space.

But until this month, Bible readers and original language students could only read the Septuagint with the aid of a lexicon or Bible software. Other than a few tools with selected passages, there was no edition of the Septuagint with footnoted vocabulary and parsings throughout, so that you could pick up one book and read, with all the help you needed at the bottom of the page.

Readers of this blog are likely aware of…

Carta continues its line of interesting, creative, and colorful titles that address something that you will be hard pressed to find somewhere else here in this lovely volume. Though only 40 pages, they are 40 large (9 x 12inches) eye-appealing pages. In every case, Carta’s unparalleled Bible atlas resources fill out the work of a text prepared by an accomplished scholar. In this title, Jeffrey Garcia, takes the Gospels and looks for what they reveal about ancient Judaism. Really, it’s a look at how the Gospels and Judaism shed light on each other.

The introductory section covers the journey of scholarship on these issues. He works his way through a succession of what he calls sources for understanding the Gospels including the Hebrew Bible, other Jewish literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, rabbinic literature, and Philo.

Even better is the section that delves into the geography of Israel in the…

Wright, Paul H. Understanding the Ecology of the Bible: An Introductory Atlas. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2018. 48 pp.; Pb; $18.00.  Link to Hendrickson

Paul Wright is the President of Jerusalem University College (the Institute of Holy Land Studies). He has contributed to several other “introductory” Carta atlases including Understanding Biblical Archaeology and Understanding the New Testament, and Understanding Great People of the Bible.

This atlas has a narrow focus, the ecology of the Bible. As Wright suggests, a study of the ecology of the Bible is important because flora and fauna are the natural context of the Bible (7). The daily life of ancient Israel was embedded in an ecosystem, and many of these natural elements form metaphorical language of the Bible.

For each of the six chapters of the book, Wright cites a theme verse. This does not always make the topic of the chapter clear…

Philosophy of Revelation, Herman Bavinck (edited by Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, foreword by James P. Eglinton). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2018 (Originally given and expanded from Stone Lectures in 1908).

Summary: A new annotated edition of Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck’s 1908 Stone Lectures at Princeton, arguing that revelation is a warranted basic belief.

Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was a Dutch Reformed theologian, writing mostly in Dutch, from the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. With the translation of his Reformed Dogmatics in 2003, studies of Bavinck’s work has flourished. This work represents an expanded version of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures at Princeton, first translated in 1908 by Geerhardus Vos. Two contemporary Bavinck scholars recognized the importance of this work to discussions of Reformed epistemology, and have given us this new annotated edition of the work. The annotations to the work are found in the footnotes and address everything from…