Saturday, February 21, 2009

ESV / NETS Rebound Bible(s) Project

Last week I took two of my favorite Bible versions to the book binder to have them combined into a superb Bible study tool. I had the English Standard Version Bible with Apocrypha bound together with the New English Translation of the Septuagint. They are both published by Oxford and are the same dimensions.

I took them to an excellent book binder locally. He did a superb job! This is my favorite Bible of all time!

Here's the negatives
- The new ESV is printed on paper that has quite a bit of bleed-through
- The NETS, after binding together with the ESV and having the page ends smoothed, looses about a 1/32th of its margins.
- The ESV Apocrypha (forgive this and later uses of that innacurate word) being based upon prior editions of the RSV Apocrypha, means the version of Tobit is the shorter recension and Sirach lacks the recovered Hebrew fragments, (both of which can be had in the NRSV).
- The ESV Apocrypha is a VERY light revision of the RSV Apocrypha, mainly they've updated English vocabulary here and there
- The ESV Apocrypha drops the translation of the Hebrew text of Psalm 151 recovered from the DSS, and which is presnt in the RSV and NRSV
- Neither the ESV nor the NETS have a thorough cross-reference system

Here's the positives
- The RSV Apocrypha is an excellent translation of those books
- The NETS contains a translation of the longer version of Tobit
- The new ESV with Apocrypha contains both the Hebrew and full Greek versions of Esther
- Having the ESV and the NETS in one volume simply makes comparing the English translations of the MT and LXX a joy, which more than outweighs the above-mentioned negatives

For this experiment, I was more concerned with whether this would be a practical undertaking more than I was concerned with aesthetics. I therefore took a fairly cheep route-- hard bound. It turned out very well I feel. I have already had a nice time using the two books in conjunction with one another. I'm already tempted to redo it in pig skin! :)







The book binder I used was Herring and Robinson who are local to me:
http://www.herringandrobinsonbookbinders.com/

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