Tools

These are the main tools I’m using for this endeavor:

• The Harper Collins Study Bible – New Revised Standard Version

• The Harper Collins along with the New Oxford Annotated seem to be the most well-respected widely available study bibles available today.  The Harper Collins is chock-full of extremely useful notes and helpful introductory essays for every book.  Also my wife already owned a copy from her Introduction to the Old Testament course during undergrad.

• The New Jerusalem Bible

• I sought out this particular translation primarily because it preserves the tetragrammaton YHWH as Yahweh in translation.  I like this – while reading the NRSV I intentionally read “Yahweh” in my head whenever I see the Lord.  I think it’s just more honest to the original authors and doesn’t hide the fact that the Israelite god had a name and it was Yahweh.  It’s also a pretty hardcover that looks much better to take to church than the Harper Collins.  I had to get it on Amazon, because even at a Catholic store I couldn’t find one in stock – and the Christian stores in my area didn’t even carry the NRSV or NASB or RSV or … well basically they didn’t carry anything that wasn’t the NIV, KJV, or NKJV.  Kind of sad.

• The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Elliott Friedman

• Once I get to the Pentateuch I’ll be primarily working out of this, as I’m super excited to see how Friedman has assigned passages to one of the Documentary Hypothesis sources.  Now, I’ve read that I should take what he’s done here with a grain of salt as trying to identify every passage with an author might have been a little over-eager on Friedman’s part and the traditional DH is (of course) being challenged, modified, and adapted to newer scholarship, but it’s still neat nonetheless.

• Logos Bible App 

• A handy phone app which I'll primarily use to occasionally compare translations - particularly any passages  that seem theologically... interesting.  (Honesty time: mostly I want to see how the openly biased evangelicals behind the NIV handled difficult passages)

• Wikipedia’s Chronology Overview 

• Yes, it’s Wikipedia.  No, of course not every biblical scholar is going to agree with this list.  But does it seem reasonable?  Yeah, why not.  Do I have the expertise to figure out a chronology on my own?  No.  So we’re working with this.  It’s a starting point.