ESV Reader's Bible Review, with Notes on the Translation

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine alerted me to a Kickstarter she thought I would want to see, for a project called Bibliotheca. (See the video below—for real, see it, it's a great video).

The idea behind the project is that, because of the format in which it's usually published, the Bible is actually really hard to just sit down and read at length the way you would, say, a novel or a book of poetry (just two of the many genres which it contains).

I watched this video and was overcome by profound booklust, but at the end of the day I wasn't quite willing to part with $70 for this particular item—I wasn't sure I'd like the translation, and backing on Kickstarter is not quite the same as buying something outright. But the same friend who pointed me to Bibliotheca told me about the Bible Design Blog, a lovely site where I learned about the ESV Reader's Bible, a volume with a similar aim at a more affordable price. I tried to avoid buying the thing, but I eventually lost all resistance and shelled out $20 for a copy.

This was a problem, because my wife had already been pointing out, ever since we got married and moved in together, that we genuinely own too, too many Bibles as it is:

Above: the reasons I should probably not be buying more Bibles

Fortunately for me, when my ESV Reader's Bible arrived and I told Anna about it, rather than scold me, she merely lamented that she couldn't really be mad, since it was, after all, a Bible. I was relieved.

The Book:

The ESV Reader's Bible comes in two formats, a hardcover version (cloth over board), which also comes with a lovely slipcase, and a softcover, leather-bound edition. I opted for the former, mostly because I associate the soft, leather-bound book feeling with Bible-y-ness, and I was trying to get as far as possible from that feeling in my reading experience with this volume.

Bible in its slipcase, a lovely feature in and of itself

This Bible doesn't really feel like a Bible. Held in the hand or the lap, it feels much more like a thick hardcover novel, the kind you take to the beach for a long afternoon: it fits comfortably in one hand, its cover pleasantly rough against the skin, like any really good hardcover without its dustjacket. The cover and binding are of high quality and lovely both to look at and touch.

The ESV Reader's Bible, fitting pleasantly into my hand(s) as I sit in my library/office at home

Like Bibliotheca, the Reader's Bible aims to improve the ease of reading through the Bible by stripping away the apparatus that normally clutters up the text when we we pick up a Bible from a pew or hotel drawer. Verse numbers, section headings, footnotes, cross-references, and double columns are nowhere to be found. Instead, each Biblical book looks like a long chapter in a novel, with the title at the beginning, words broken into paragraphs, and small section breaks between chapters:

The poetry sections are similarly uncluttered, though they don't reserve a single page for each poem the way most volumes of poetry do:

Just for comparison's sake, take a look at the Reader's Bible next to my mom's old Thompson Chain Reference Bible, which is designed for doing pretty much exactly the opposite of extended, pure reading. Here, both volumes are open to the first chapter of Mark. See how the Reader's Bible lets the text breathe without distraction for the eye, where the Chain Reference squeezes the text into tiny columns and loads up the margins with cross-references that pull the eye away from the story:

Top: ESV Reader's Bible; bottom: my mom's old NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible

The Bible it most resembles in my collection is probably Robert Alter's translation with commentary, which also uses a single-column format and no verse numbers, but which does include a great many footnotes that draw the eye:

Both open to 2 Samuel; note the majority of text in the Alter volume below the footnote line

So the Reader's Bible feels more like a novel than any Bible I've ever encountered. The feeling would be complete if not for the Bible-thin paper that's used in the book. If you look at Genesis and the Psalms above, you can see that there's a fair amount of text on other pages "ghosting" through to the page it's open to; this seems like a product of the thinness of the paper. The paper also warps and wrinkles easily under pressure from your fingers, like most Bible paper does.

Of course, the Reader's Bible is packing a ton of text into a regular hardcover novel-sized codex; to get a sense of how thin the paper needed to be to do this reasonably, I compared the thickest books in my library to the Reader's Bible:

Some of my thickest books, ordered by width

All of these were thicker than the Reader's Bible, and yet none of them had even half as many pages! Don Quixote comes close, but it's nearly half again as thick as the Reader's Bible.

So the book design is just a bit of a compromise. Bibliotheca deals with this problem by splitting the Bible into four volumes, but if you want to pack the whole Bible into a single volume, even stripped of everything but the bare text itself, thin paper is apparently the only way to make it happen without creating a monster brick.

We're looking at you, Neal Stephenson, with yer Cryptonomicons and yer Anathems. (Source)

+   +   +  

The Experience: 

The Bible study I'm a part of, a group of residents from Anna's hospital and their spouses, is currently studying Mark. In the absence of any reason to read anything else, I settled on that as my text to read as a test run with this volume. I also ended up reading Galatians, Colossians, and Ruth later on because of the pervasive joy I feel when I pick this thing up.

But let's start with Mark. Mark is the shortest gospel, and the gospels are easier to get through than a non-narrative text like a letter or a poem, but it's still usually a bit of a challenge for me to sit and read Mark all the way through without my mind wandering. This volume's presentation of the text without numbers, columns, headers, or section breaks, though, really drew me into the reading—it made the book actually hard to put down! I got wrapped up in the story and, maybe for the first time, really felt like I understood the flow of it, how each element of the story leads to the next: Jesus' incredible healings gather crowds; he teaches them about the kingdom of God that's just about to break through in an unexpected way; his explosive message angers varying groups in turn—the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the priests—who, though they are each other's enemies, conspire to trap him; he angrily drives out the money changers at the Temple, which is enough for his opponents to arrest him; finally, he's executed and rises again.

That narrative sequence has never fully come through for me before. Normally it's easy to read Mark in little fragments and analyze what Jesus is teaching or doing here or there, because the textual apparatus is set up for that kind of thing, especially in Bibles with section headings announcing what's about to happen and breaking up the text. But absorbing the story as a whole is another task entirely, and this is the first Bible I've encountered that facilitates that task at all.

It also made some more local narrative elements come through in a different way. Mark is an efficient, plain, effective storyteller, very much an inheritor of the Hebrew Bible's starkly economical and bare narrative style. His dramatic, fast-paced style really came through to me, and I was drawn into the text in a way I haven't been before. I've read a lot about the Bible, so I know some important literary devices in Mark from an intellectual level—things like the suspense involved in putting the hemorrhaging woman story in the middle of the story about Jairus's dying/dead/resurrected daughter, and the big turning point at the center of the book when the disciples finally get who Jesus is and then he's transfigured before their eyes—but reading the book this way helped me experience them viscerally, as not just as ideas but as feelings, connections, for the first time.

Galatians and Colossians, both letters of Paul (a biblical genre I have particular difficulty getting into) were both a breeze, and like Mark, I found myself grasping what they were each actually about, as a whole, much more than I usually do.

+   +   + 

The Translation:

The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is entirely new to me. I'd literally seen the name of the translation before, but until I purchased this volume, that was pretty much the extent of my exposure. By curious coincidence, at our most recent Bible study, which is a group that leans pretty heavily toward the evangelical wing of the Church, someone brought out an ESV and several others commented that it was their favorite, the best translation, the most accurate, etc.

So I did some digging, talked to my dad, searched Wikipedia, and so forth, to figure out what is the what of the ESV. Turns out it's a revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV). We already have one of those, of course; it's called the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is a great though by no means perfect translation. (The NRSV is what I typically cite and link to on this blog, and it's the translation I'm most used to.) The ESV, though, is a conservative revision of the RSV. In more ways than one, actually: all the sources I've seen say that a mere 6% of the text has been changed in any way. But what I really mean by "conservative" here is that the ESV was translated for and by conservative Christians.

I don't have a real problem with Christians of a certain ideological bent creating a translation that reflects their views; after all, I bought the Inclusive Bible for my wife, a translation that explicitly eschews gendered language for God, even though the original text frequently refers to God in male terms. She loves it. My issue with the ESV is more specific: there's a tension between the translators' biblicism and the actual features of the original texts themselves, and this causes them to do some slightly wacky things.

Biblicism is a subject that I've discussed before in detail, but it's basically a set of beliefs structured around on the idea that the Bible is the inerrant/infallible word of God. I think it's a silly and ultimately unworkable way of reading scripture, but the point here is that it seems to be the ESV translators' view of scripture. The problem with scripture is that it's messy—confusingly messy, if you think it's the "very words of God speaking to us," as the translators put it in their introduction. Why is the order of creation different in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? Why does Judges tell us Moses' father-in-law was Hobab, but Exodus calls him Jethro or Reuel? Why does 2 Samuel say Elhanan killed Goliath, when 1 Samuel tells us it was David? And so on.

This is a problem the translators of the NIV (the favorite translation for evangelicals while I was growing up) also ran into. Their solution, notoriously, was to alter the text to make it both internally consistent and consistent with their theology. Their insistence that the Bible was infallible, "God's Word in written form," was directly at odds with their translation practice, which is that the Bible needs to be altered so it does not contradict either itself or evangelical Christianity.

I checked to see if the ESV would do the same thing, and it does, though to a lesser extent. (The list I found of mistranslations in the NIV had 125 instances; 41 of those showed up in the ESV, too.) The ESV harmonizes some different versions of names in the texts and does some Christianizing (most egregiously in Isaiah 7:14, where it deliberately mistranslates "young woman" as "virgin" to match the citation in Matthew, where it's used to predict the virgin birth of Jesus). It's also been criticized for being clunkily literal, unidiomatic, and tone deaf,* and to my personal distaste it has an overtly conservative translation in some of the "clobber passages" for homosexuality.

I will say, however, that in reading the ESV Reader's Bible, my experience was never impinged upon by the translation. It's an "essentially literal" translation, but not so much so that it's unreadable as English or anything. (Young's Literal Translation this ain't, and I'm told it's easier to read than the also very literal New American Standard Bible.) There were many times where I quite liked what I was reading, so please take these criticisms with a large grain of salt.

+   +   +

Wrapping Up:

If you watched the video at the top of the post and can't bear the thought of not owning a Bibliotheca, the bad news is that the Kickstarter is done and you can't back it anymore, but you can actually still preorder it at bibliotheca.co any time up until the creator, Adam Lewis Greene, actually places an order with the printer. So get on that!

I'm really hoping (1) that the popularity of the Bibliotheca project will not cause so much hassle for Greene—who originally envisioned making 500 volumes but is now going to need to figure out how to make thousands—that he gives up and doesn't deliver, (2) that its success will spur him or someone to make Bibliotheca more broadly commercially available, and (3) that it'll eventually appear in a translation I already trust. At all events, I'd love to see one in person sometime...

The good news is that, however great Bibliotheca is, I'm satisfied that the ESV Reader's Bible is a great substitute, or at least a very strong second place. It's also currently available at an astoundingly good price for a book of such high quality over at the Westminster Bookstore (you can also get the leather bound edition in brown and black there for good prices, though not the fabulous $14.99 the hardcover is going for).

---

*Favorite example: Jesus' perhaps inadvertently sexual assertion in Luke 17:35 that "There will be two women grinding together."