To get the most out of your Bible, you should begin by appreciating how lucky you are to have one at all.
In the first century, books had to be copied by hand, and they were fantastically expensive. Only a very rich person could afford the collection of books that are found in a modern Bible. An ordinary person, if he was lucky enough to know how to read, could never have afforded the whole thing.
A copy of the Gospel of Matthew alone cost the equivalent of more than $5,000. When was the last time you paid that much to own a single volume that you could read in a couple of hours? It’s easy to see how most early Christians would say, “Ehh . . . I’ll wait and hear it read in church.”
But how things have changed!
The development of the printing press and the modern economy has brought the price of Bibles way down. Today the Bible is the best-selling book in the world. It sells so many copies that they don’t even bother putting it on best-seller lists, because it would just sit there at the top—forever.
Bibles are easily affordable, there is almost one Bible for every person on the planet, and some organizations give them away free. All of us should thank God that we were born in an age when we could have a Bible, and we should show our gratitude by studying the Bible.
Here are twelve tools to help you do that.
1. Study Bibles
These works aim to make studying the Bible easy by bringing helpful resources into the Bible itself, so you have what you need all in one place.
Typically, a study Bible will have a brief, introductory essay at the beginning of each book; notes explaining different verses at the bottom of the pages; cross-references to similar passages; and occasional maps, essays, and timelines. Some even include built-in concordances.
Of course, the study helps you find in these Bibles are not divinely inspired. They can—and, on occasion, will—be wrong.
That leads to a criticism of study Bibles: Ii people see something printed inside a Bible, they tend to assume it’s true, even if it’s not the biblical text. There have even been cases of people seeing something in a biblical footnote and misremembering it as something they read in a Bible verse!
Therefore, if you use study Bibles, be aware: Only the biblical text is inspired. Nothing else is guaranteed to be true.
2. Bible studies
These are usually short works that focus on particular books of the Bible, parts of them, or topics. They typically include commentary on the biblical text and are structured as short lessons with study questions for personal or group use.
Bible studies can be a good way to learn the basics about particular books or topics. They are usually written in a popular, accessible style that makes it easy to understand the material.
The flip side of this is that they tend not to be written by scholars, and sometimes the material in them is amateurish. There are many good Bible studies out there, but there are also many that contain problematic material.
3. Commentaries
Bible commentaries are a step up from Bible studies. They are books whose authors work through the text of the Bible in a systematic way, trying to determine and explain what it means.
Some commentaries cover the entire Bible in a single (thick) volume, but most commentaries are made up of many volumes, allowing an in-depth discussion of the biblical text.
Commentaries come in different styles. Some have a popular, practical, devotional angle, while others are scholarly and may focus heavily on the original languages in which the biblical text was written. Other commentaries offer a blend of the two styles.
The advantage of commentaries is the depth of treatment they allow. The brief notes you find in study Bibles and the short lessons you find in Bible studies don’t allow a detailed study of the text.
Also, many commentaries are written by scholars, and the quality of the argument and information tends to be higher than in Bible studies. While both have their roles, if you want a rigorous, thorough treatment of biblical texts, you want a commentary.
4. Concordances
A concordance is a book that lists words in the Bible and where they can be found. For example, if you wanted to find references to St. Paul in Scripture, you would look up the word “Paul” in a concordance to find a list of verses.
In addition to the verse citation, a concordance will also give you a brief snippet of text to show you how the word is being used in context (e.g., “Acts 14:19—“they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city”).
There are several types of concordances. Some are exhaustive. This means that they include every occurrence of every word found in the Bible (except for a few, extremely common words like the, an, I, and you).
Some concordances are analytical. This means that they don’t focus just on the English text, they incorporate information about the original languages.
For example, if you look up the word angel in an analytical concordance, it may list three different words that get translated as “angel”: the Hebrew words ’abbir and malak and the Greek word angelos. The concordance will first show you where ’abbir is used, then give you a list of verses where malak is used, and finally a list of verses where angelos is used. In this way you know not only where the word angel is to be found but what the original-language word is.
Until recently, concordances were an extremely valuable tool for Bible study, but Bible software has rendered them obsolete (see below).
5-6. Synopses and harmonies
Some books of the Bible contain passages that parallel each other. The most famous are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which often tell the same stories about Jesus in different words, but the same is true of other books. For example, 1 Samuel-2 Kings contain material that parallels 1-2 Chronicles; 1 Maccabees parallels 2 Maccabees; etc.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could compare what these parallel passages say, without having to flip back and forth between them?
You’re in luck. That’s the function of a synopsis. This is a book that presents the parallel passages in columns, right next to each other, so you can see them at a single glance (hence: synopsis, from the Greek sun- “together,” opsis “seeing”).
A related Bible study tool is a harmony. Technically, the function of a harmony is to show how parallel passages can be fit together (a process known as harmonization). As a result, some harmonies take text from each of the Gospels and knit it together into a single narrative, so you can have the experience of reading a single, longer text containing the information from all four Gospels.
However, this type of harmony isn’t common. Most of the works called harmonies are actually synopses, so before you buy a harmony, look inside to see what is being done.
The most common synopses and harmonies are for the Gospels, but they also exist for other books.
7-8. Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias
Bible dictionaries and Bible encyclopedias are basically the same thing. The difference is that the encyclopedias are sometimes bigger and contain more and longer entries.
In both you will find an alphabetical set of entries on things you find in the Bible. These will be on people (David), countries (Egypt), cities (Antioch), plants (figs), animals (sheep), practices (fasting), jobs (priest), supernatural beings (demon), supernatural events (miracle), etc.
For the most part, these works do not get heavily into theology. The entries will contain basic information about the concepts they cover, along with examples of where the Bible mentions them and, in many cases, the original language words for them.
This means that the term dictionary can be a little misleading, because this isn’t the kind of information you would find in an ordinary dictionary.
For example, if you looked up David in a typical dictionary, it would tell you that it’s a male name, has a Hebrew origin, and not much else. It would not give you a mini-biography of King David and the role he plays in Scripture.
What you find in “Bible dictionary” entries are thus more like mini-encyclopedia entries.
The Bible study tools that actually are dictionaries go by a different name . . .
9. Lexicons
A lexicon is what we would call a dictionary—a book of words and their meanings. The name comes from the Greek term lexis, which means “word.”
You want a lexicon if you want to look up the meaning of a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word.
Most lexicons are devoted to either biblical Hebrew or biblical Greek. The amount of Aramaic in the Old Testament is so small that some Hebrew lexicons have an appendix to cover it—or they will mix the Aramaic terms among the Hebrew ones.
For studying the Bible, you want a lexicon for one of the ancient languages. Do not make the mistake of getting a dictionary of modern Hebrew or Greek. The vocabulary in the languages has changed significantly.
Entries in a lexicon will give you the different possible meanings for an original language word—usually with references to where you can find that meaning in Scripture. For example, the Greek word angelos is sometimes translated “angel” and sometimes “messenger.” A Greek lexicon will tell you that and give examples of where it is translated both ways.
One common lexicon is known as Strong’s after the man who compiled it. Because it is short and in the public domain, you will often find Strong’s bundled in other works (e.g., concordances). Be careful with it. While it’s better than nothing, it’s also more than a hundred years old and has some Protestant theological bias. Don’t rely on it for establishing technical points in an argument.
In fact, be careful in general about over-relying on lexicons. They give you basic information about what a word means, but they aren’t subtle enough to catch all the nuances. Dictionaries are basic tools, but they aren’t sophisticated enough to settle complex arguments.
If you cringe when people try to settle a subtle theological argument by appealing to the way Webster defines a term (and you should), you should also cringe when someone does the same thing by merely appealing to a Greek lexicon. Lexicons supply helpful data, but they are not by themselves sufficient.
You should also know about a special class of lexicons, which are called analytical lexicons. These don’t just list the basic form of a word. They list every form of a word that appears in the Bible and then analyze it grammatically.
For example, a normal lexicon would have a single entry for the word apostolos and tell you it means “apostle.” An analytical lexicon would have that entry, but it would also entries listing the other forms the word apostolos takes in Scripture, such as apostoloi, apostolous, and apostolōn.
This is valuable because in the biblical languages words change their form much more than they do in English, and sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out what the basic form of a word is by looking at its modified form.
If you use an analytical lexicon, you will be able to look up words you are seeing in the biblical text by the form you have in front of you, without having to guess the basic form.
For example, you could look up apostoloi and the analytical lexicon would tell you—among other things—that it is a plural form of apostolos. You could then turn to apostolos and determine that apostoloi means “apostles.”
10-11. Interlinears and reverse interlinears
An interlinear is a Bible that has the original language printed on one line and English on the line below it. This makes it easy for students of the original languages to read the text in the original and look down for help with unfamiliar words.
Because English doesn’t use the same word order as Greek and Hebrew, the words on the English line have been rearranged to fit what’s in the original language. It also may include words that are left untranslated because they don’t come across smoothly into English.
For example, if you looked up the beginning of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew, the English language line would read something like “Father our the [sic] in the heavens, sanctified be the name of you.”
Standard interlinears are designed for students of the original languages, but they proved so useful that many people doing Bible study purchased them, even if they weren’t trained in Greek or Hebrew.
A few years ago, Christian publishing houses twigged to the existence of this market and started producing reverse interlinears. These have English as the dominant line and the original language is under that, adapted to English word order.
That makes it easy to read along in English and then look down and see the original for a word that interests you. It’s also standard in reverse interlinears to have another line giving grammatical information about the original language words.
If you’re a beginner in the original languages, you want a reverse interlinear.
12. Bible software
The biggest development in Bible study tools in recent years is Bible software.
Depending on the software you get, it can be a kind of omni-tool that incorporates the functions of all of the other tools mentioned in this article.
In particular, Bible software obsolesces concordances. Concordances allow you to look up only a single word at a time, but with Bible software you can do much more powerful searches.
Suppose you wanted to find all of the verses listing both Jesus and Peter. With a concordance, you’d have to look up all the verses with the word Jesus and all the verses with the word Peter, and then you’d have to compare the two, eliminating all the verses mentioning just one or the other.
With Bible software, you could type in “Jesus AND Peter,” hit Enter, and you’d be done. You’d have all and only the verses you want.
What’s more, some Bible software allows you to do semantic searches where you don’t need to know the exact word being used.
You could do a semantic search for Jesus and Peter and it would turn up not only the places where they are referred to by those names but also verses where Jesus is called “the Lord,” “Christ,” “Messiah,” “he,” or “him.” It would similarly look for references to Peter as “Cephas,” “Simon,” “Simeon,” “he,” or “him.”
Bible software is so much more powerful than concordances that any time a person asks me to recommend a concordance, I strongly suggest that he get Bible software instead. It will save him endless hours of work.
And that’s only the beginning of what Bible software can do. It has become an amazing research tool, and personally, I, use it every day.