Talking with the Bible

Most of us make New Year’s resolutions with hopes of starting fresh or doing what we meant to do last year. For many Christians, each year’s clean slate begins with a resolve to read the Bible all the way through, but distractions occur or we get discouraged when we reach chapters that seem too heavy or hard or, well, boring, and so we never get pass those passages.

Instead of getting caught up in that guilt trip, try these suggestions:

. Prayerfully read previous posts on the Bible Reviewer and find a translation that speaks to you.

. Read Talking with the Bible by Donn Morgan and get to know the many inspired voices that speak to us as One Voice from the pages of Holy Scripture.

As the author explains: “To have real conversations with the Bible, we must be able to recognize the voices of scripture, to know what they sound like and what they want to tell us.”

Besides being communal expressions of faith collected in the Bible canon, “Biblical voices come from prophets, seers, apostles, cultic leaders, storytellers, poets, and many more. These voices are expressed in individual prayers, as stories about patriarchs, as epiphanies, as letters, as records of one variety or another, as oracles, and much more [laws, letters, visions.]”

As we read what God says to us through these voices, scripture begins to shape how we see the world. For example, “The Bible as storyteller exposes us to values, character traits, salvation events, sacred spaces, foreigners, threats to unity, God’s purposes for the people, and more.”

Since I enjoy reading and writing poems, the chapter on “Talking with the Bible as Singer and Pray-er” especially spoke to me. Often expressed through poetry, “The voice of singer and pray-er is also a voice of consciousness-raising, prompting us to recall the things we need to complain about or praise God for.” In addition, “This voice can function as a spiritual director, encouraging us to adopt a rule of life filled with regular prayer and reflection, integrating faith and practice in the midst of difficult times and challenges.”

Bible prophets often spoke through poetry, too, but rather than focusing on the personal or lyrical, “cries for social justice abound” with such attention-getting words as “Woe” or “Behold!”

Those inspired to write books of history usually chose less dramatic language as they wrote genealogies or episodes intended to give a larger view of the ongoing relationship between God and God’s people. However, to hear the voice of the historian clearly, we must “listen to it and hear it on its own terms.”

As we listen carefully to these many voices expressing the voice of God, we separate the sounds of poetry and history and biblical truths in story, noticing, perhaps, how “the visionary voice of scripture thinks and speaks in polarities.” Similarly, the voice of the sage might come across as judgmental at times, but “wisdom is often a topic of discussion, with the sage reflecting on experience to enlighten us.”

When troubles arise, however, and no clear answers exist, the voice of the lamenter or skeptic may be heard, riddling God with questions and trying to make sense of things that challenge our faith in order to return to a position of praise.

And, isn’t that how it is for us? Don’t we also moan and groan and sing and pray and praise? Don’t we tell our family histories and give our children sage advice? Don’t we also hold dear our clearest visions – of Christ’s return or the Spirit of Love reconnecting the Body of Christ?

Through the Bible, God speaks for us! The Bible also speaks to us and with us through a diversity of inspired voices who encourage us to keep on reading, believing, and Talking with the Bible every day.

As we apply these insights to our own lives, we might also ask what stories we have to tell as we write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – or as we spread the Good News of God’s good gifts and the mercy we have received.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler



Talking with the Bible, paperback



Talking with the Bible, Kindle e-book edition

A Bible for the New Year

Many editions of the Bible now include a one-year reading plan to encourage you to read the Bible in a year, but My Daily Catholic Bible does more! This edition published by Our Sunday Visitor gives you the revised New American Bible (NAB,RE) divided into daily readings that take about 20 minutes each day.

Each reading also includes a saintly word in keeping with the day. For example, a quote from St. Paul of the Cross prefaces the scriptures for December 25 with this word:

“Celebrate the Feast of Christmas every day, even every moment in the interior temple of your spirit, remaining like a baby in the bosom of the Heavenly Father, where you will be reborn each moment in the Divine Word, Jesus Christ.”

Amen! Although you might not have been aware of this timeless Bible in time to add a copy to this year’s Christmas list, the book gives you a timely way to read the Bible with ease throughout the coming year.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


My Daily Catholic Bible, New American Bible, Revised Edition, paperback



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NIV Essentials Study Bible

For many years Christians from almost every denomination have lauded the ecumenically-minded NIV Study Bible for its well-balanced notes, comments, and study aids, and some, like me, have dug into the Archaeological Study Bible with its “finds” and “tells” uncovered by archaeologists, who gave us deeper insights into Bible places, times, cultures, and events. Also, new Christians seem to appreciate especially the NIV Quest Study Bible with questions from over 1,000 readers and responses from biblical scholars who provide no easy answers but fair-minded feedback and multiple perspectives whenever additional views exists.

Zondervan has produced other fine study Bibles, too, so when I requested a review copy of the new NIV Essentials Study Bible from BookSneeze, I mainly wanted to know what this edition might have that all the others didn’t. Well, I won’t keep you waiting! The answer is – nothing and everything!

As the name implies, the NIV Essentials Study Bible contains the essentials, the highlights, and, dare I say, the best of the sidebars, footnotes, and study aids from each of the other NIV offerings from Zondervan.

Besides my preference for the most recent 2011 revision of the NIV (New International Version), I like the lighter weight of this hardback edition and the easier-to-read font with a bit more ink than the text and footnotes often have in other Zondervan Bibles. I also like the blue headings inserted into the text as a visual reminder of the primary topics for each chapter or passage.

Maybe that medium shade of blue ink helped. I don’t know. I just know I’m somewhat dyslexic, so if a page's format has too much going on, my eyes are apt to blip out in an effort to quieten the chaos. But this Bible evoked none of that! Despite the wealth of notes and information packed onto almost every page, I found the format reader-friendly, visually pleasing, and easy to use.

My only lament, therefore, is a wish – that the NIV Essentials Study Bible will be released in a leather cover as genuine and long-lasting as this essential book.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


NIV Essentials Study Bible, hardback






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The Catholic Teen Bible

When Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) kindly sent me review copies of their recently published editions of the newly revised New American Bible (NAB), I picked up The Catholic Teen Bible, intending to leaf through quickly until I had more time to study each of the books. However, the pages opened to one of the many colorful inserts, generously supplied throughout the edition, and I was hooked.

Here’s what I read:

Who is Jesus?
Son of God. Savior. Messiah. Lord. Master

These are all ways to describe Jesus. But what do they mean? And why does Jesus matter?

Obviously, important questions, right? When you have important questions, it’s vital that you go to the right place to get your answers. When we’re talking about Jesus, the place to start isn’t in movies, television specials, or novels.

The place to start is in the gospels. That’s right. If you’re really serious about wanting to know more about Jesus, don’t waste your time anywhere else. Read a gospel – or two! – from beginning to end. Reflect, think, and pray.

That example gives you a glimpse of the honest, down-to-earth tone and practical, teen-friendly wisdom from the author and high school teacher of religion, Amy Welborn. For another example, I'll again use the OSV format with teen appeal:

What is prayer?

Prayer is talking to God, but it’s more than that. It’s even more than listening to God.

Prayer is being tuned in to God and responding to his presence in your life.

That can mean talking, listening, or just being. It can mean singing, drawing, or writing. It can happen alone or with others. It can be joyful, grateful, hopeful, and even angry.

The spiritual insights in these inserts will help Christians from any denomination, but you’ll find “Catholic specific” information too. A good example comes with a turn of the page as the above insert goes on to explain something people in general often wonder:

Why pray to saints?

Catholics believe that death is just the beginning – it’s the beginning of new life with God. So that means that the people who have died and gone to heaven are still around – they are part of the Church, or the Communion of Saints.

So Catholic prayer to saints is absolutely no different than asking your next-door neighbor to pray for you. When we pray to saints, we don’t worship them. The word “prayer,” in its origins, just means “ask.” If you actually read the prayers to saints that Catholics pray, you will see that’s what they’re all about – asking these holy men and women to pray for us, just as we ask our friends on earth to pray for us as well.

In the next few weeks, Lord willing, we’ll discuss the other review copies OSV sent, but giving them a quick peek now, I see that a clearer font and nice quality white paper has been used for the other editions, whereas The Catholic Teen Bible has pages similar to newsprint. However, the price for this book is much less than for the others, so I suspect OSV wanted to provide a very affordable Bible for teens who will be grown up before we know it. With this Bible, they’ll be growing spiritually too.

©2013, Mary Sayler


The Catholic Teen Bible, paperback



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Unusual e-book edition of the KJV

The Choice Study Bible published on Kindle as an e-book by Robert P. Holland opens with the editor’s personal witness of faith then tells how he began to color-code scripture. Seeing four basic categories or biblical themes in his studies, the now-retired minister used color-coding to highlight contrasts between the categories of Wisdom and Foolishness, Promise and Curse.

Besides this unique feature found in the review copy I received, Rev. Holland provides a helpful clarification of covenant-making. As he explains in the opening section: “The Bible is a composition of several covenants which the Lord initiated with Adam, Noah, Abraham , Moses (Old Covenant), David, and Christians (New Covenant). Each of the covenants contains the choices of life and death, righteousness and sin, wisdom and foolishness, and blessing and cursing. A covenant contains both wisdom and the Lord’s promises.” Obedience becomes the responsibility of God’s people, of course, but the "promises are never earned by fulfilling the responsibilities. The promises are grace— gifts to the people in covenant with the Lord.”

In this unusual presentation of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), the e-book also includes a Table of Contents with hotlinks to each book and chapter to help you find the passages you want.

©2013, Mary Sayler


The Choice Study Bible, Kindle e-book



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Common English Bible (CEB) with Apocrypha

The more I get to know the CEB Study Bible, which I recently reviewed, the more I appreciate the fresh footnotes and study helps, but I’m also grateful for a new review copy of a reader edition of the Common English Bible (CEB) that includes the Apocrypha.

With or without study aids, the contemporary text and ecumenical input of scholars from most of the major denominations make this Bible ideal for easy reading alone or aloud in church worship.

The review copy of CEB I recently received from Church Publishing would make an excellent Christmas gift for teens and young adults but also an inexpensive pew Bible for church members who might want to present a memorable gift to their congregation or parish. I’ll include an Amazon ad below, as I do with each review for readers who might want to order. Thanks to the online help of Bible Gateway, the following excerpts from the CEB may be helpful, too, in giving you a feel for the reader-friendly text:

From the NT book, James 5:13-16

If any of you are suffering, they should pray. If any of you are happy, they should sing. If any of you are sick, they should call for the elders of the church, and the elders should pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve.

From the apocryphal book, Judith 15:13-14

I will sing to my God a new song.
Lord, you are great and glorious, marvelous in strength
never to be outdone.
May all of your creation serve you;
you spoke,
and they came into being.
You sent forth your spirit
and it shaped them;
there is no one
who can resist your voice.

From the apocryphal book, Sirach 2:1-6

My child, if you come to serve the Lord,
prepare yourself for testing.
Set your heart straight, be steadfast,
and don’t act hastily in a time of distress.
Hold fast to God
and don’t keep your distance from him,
so that you may find strength
at your end.
Accept whatever happens to you,
and be patient
when you suffer humiliation,
because gold is tested with fire,
and acceptable people are tested
in the furnace of humiliation.
Trust him, and he will help you;
make your ways straight,
and hope in him.

Amen.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


Common English Bible with Apocrypha, paperback




Common English Bible – Pew Bible with Apocrypha, hardback



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The Baker Illustrated Guide to Everyday Life in Bible Times

While waiting for review copies of new editions and study Bibles to arrive, I received an A to Z (or, rather A to Y) resource book from Baker entitled Everyday Life in Bible Times. Since I don’t make a habit of reading reference guides cover to cover, I picked up the book, intending to look through enough pages to get an idea of the quality and thoroughness of content, but that’s not what happened.

Before I’d gotten beyond the “Preface,” the warm, informal style and interesting questions intrigued me. For example, “What did an armor-bearer do?” or “How did people hunt?” Then the first entry “Anoint” hooked my interest immediately in a discussion of olive oil, which rates highest on my list as a healthful cooking oil and skin softener too. Mixed with other oils in a specific biblical recipe “At God’s direction, the special oil was poured on the head of a person to mark him or her for special service, whether as a member of Israel’s clergy, as a political leader, or as a prophet.”

We probably knew that, but the book goes on to say, “Those anointed in this way had their lives change in three important ways. First, the one ‘anointed by the Lord’ stood out from the general population as a leader…. Second, the anointed one was not autonomous but was always subject to the will and desires of a superior. The ‘Lord’s anointed’ was a middle manager answering to a divine CEO. Third, anointing meant special protection was extended to these special leaders – protection that was unmitigated by circumstances. For example, David considered it unthinkable to harm Saul, the Lord’s anointed….”

The next entry, “Armor-Bearer,” didn’t sound as interesting to me, but it was! For example, the future King David could not trust King Saul to stop trying to kill him, and yet Saul totally trusted his life to David. Later, when severely wounded in battle, King Saul asked his current armor-bearer to finish him off – the very opposite of what the job entailed.

Throughout the book, color photographs give visual appeal to each slick page, silken to the touch, drawing me from page to page with the pleasure of leafing through a high-quality picture book for adults. I thought I’d just read the photo captions as I went along, but the content of the text proved too enticing to ignore. Not only does the author, John A. Beck, present interesting information, he shows its relevance to scripture, explaining the significance of metaphors, biblical images, and connotations of words we might otherwise miss.

For example, the childhood story most of us heard of David’s bringing down the giant Goliath often gave the impression of a little boy with a slingshot, rather than a young man with a sling that “added distance and power to the throw because centrifugal force was added to arm strength.” Because a slung stone could go a far greater distance than a spear, David actually had a physical advantage, but, more importantly, he had behind him the spiritual power of God.

As this beautifully done book continued to draw me, I read every entry, including the one for “Stiff-Necked,” which most likely began, not as an indictment against God’s people, but as a reference to draft animals who just would not do what was needed to get their master’s job done. “Strong neck muscles allow animals such as the camel, donkey, and ox to resist the guidance of their handlers,” who described those stubborn creatures as stiff-necked.

The last entry, however, reminds readers of how a yoke can link “two entities together in a close relationship – the kind Jesus calls us to have when He asks us to “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


Everyday Life in Bible Times, hardback

Chronological Life Application Study Bible, NLT

What a Bible for Bible lovers! If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for your pastor, Bible teacher, biblical writer, or a Bible student who already has a study Bible or readers’ edition, the Chronological Life Application Study Bible in the New Living Translation (NLT) from Tyndale House Publishers makes an excellent choice. Having another Bible first matters only because the books in this edition have been arranged chronologically, rather than by traditional groupings, so if you want to look up a passage quickly, say, during a discussion in your study group, you’d need to know the book of Job most likely occurred before the time of Moses in order to find its placement. The easier way, though, is to look up the scripture you want in the “Canonical Table of Contents” in the opening pages, where you might find Haggai and Zechariah interacting with the book of Ezra and the Gospel stories intermingled.

Despite the confusion some have when flipping pages can't be done efficiently, the chronological arrangement clearly shows how books in the same time period relate to one another. For example, after fleeing from King Saul (I Samuel 22), David wrote Psalm 57, which places those passages together in this edition.

As portions of scripture weave together in time, the introductions and overviews of each book needed to be gathered in one section entitled “The Bible, Book-by-Book.” Also, in the back pages, you’ll find a “Master Index,” concordance, and maps, along with other features you might expect in any good study edition.

Throughout this edition, you’ll find the type of footnotes and “Personality Profiles” that made the Life Application Study Bible a popular choice, but the unique features of the Chronological Life Application Study Bible come as a clock or calendar.

For example, the article “A Chronological Study of the Bible” in the opening pages provides a brief but helpful overview of biblical history from creation to the first century church. However, the feature I especially love is the “Complete Biblical Timeline” that lets me know the Egyptians built the pyramids not very long after the flood, which makes me wonder if the design occurred as an attempt to get above water level!

Also, in Egypt, papyrus and ink were invented for writing and horses domesticated long before the birth of Abraham. About the time his grandsons, Jacob and Esau, were born, Stonehenge appeared in England, and within a couple years of the birth of Jacob’s son, Joseph, someone invented the wheel.

In Babylon, Hammurabi wrote his code of law around 300 years before the laws came through Moses. About 50 years after Moses’ death, King Tut entered his famous tomb, and, about ten years before a whale swallowed Jonah, Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such interesting information continues for several pages, and then a brief timeline tops each page of scripture, keeping us connected to the world context in which the Bible lives on and on as the living Word of God.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved.


Chronological Life Application Study Bible, hardback



Chronological Life Application Study Bible, Kindle, e-book



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