Book Comment: Choosing a Bible ...

"Father of-us who in the heavens, be holy the name of-you; come the kingdom of-you; become the will of-you in heaven and upon earth; the bread of-us the necessary give to-us today; and remit to-us the debts of-us, as also we remit the indebted-ones of-us; and notbring-in us into trial, but deliver us from the evil." Matthew 6:9-13.

This literal word-for-word translation of the text made perfect sense and sounded normal in ancient Greek. The task of translation is to make sense of it to modern readers. It's not as simple as it sounds. Does the translator stress the meaning or the actual words? The way it should sound to modern readers or the way it sounded to its original audience? The original word order or something that reads easier to modern ears? Difficult or obscure ancient idioms or a modern paraphrase? Should a translation ever be made from a specific denominational point of view?

Choosing a Bible For Worship, Teaching, Study, Preaching, and Prayer, by Donald Kraus, examines all these issues and many others. One person saw me reading this book and, screwing up their nose, asked, "Why?????????" Kraus answers that chefs use different knives for different purposes; the Bible translation you use is a tool which depends on the specific aim of your study: understanding, devotion, as a teaching tool, for historical research, preaching, etc.

The Bible translations discussed are The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter, the Five Books of Moses by Everett Fox, the American Standard Version, the Contemporary English Version, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the English Standard Version, Good News for Modern Man, the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible, the King James Version, the Holy Bible by Ronald Knox, The Message, the Bible by James Moffatt, the New American Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New Century Version, the New English Bible, the Revised English Bible, the New English Translation, the New International Version, the New Jewish Publication Society Translation "Tanakh," the New King James Version, the New Lliving Translation, the New Revised Standard Version, the New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips, the Revised Standard Version, the Revised Version, Today's English Version, and Today's New International Version.

scripture4all.org

     Scripture4all.org is a wonderful free website based in the Netherlands and loaded with features useful to serious students of the Bible.  The backbone(s) of the site is(are) the interlinear Greek and Hebrew Bibles.  Their format is three stacked lines per verse; line one is the Greek or Hebrew text, line two is the extremely literal translation, and line three is the plain English paraphrase.

http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Hebrew_Index.htm

http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Greek_Index.htm

http://www.scripture4all.org/

     Other useful features include an Interlinear Scripture Analyzer used for word studies in Greek or Hebrew.  The word processor quirk with which I have struggled, their insistence on placing Hebrew letters in English letter order, can be overcome here: Hebrew can be displayed in either left to right or right to left letter order.  The site is free but donations are accepted and a statement is made that that new features may require a small fee.      

Update on 23 June 2026: There are now many word-for-word literal interlinear translations of the Bible available online. These use the earliest and most accepted biblical documents.  Using them, along with the Strong's Concordance online enables anyone to perform a word-for-word study of the scriptures from the original languages and the closest thing that we have to the original texts.

If I quote from a specific Bible translation I will give proper credit.

The Original Post, 18 July 2009:  Anytime I quote from the Bible in this blog it will be from the King James Version because it is in the public domain and has no copyright issues.  I personally use several of the newer Bible  translations and also The Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Societies.

My Greek is slightly above the beginners level but I can fight my way through it with a dictionary.  Not so with Hebrew, which I find to be totally alien and incomprehensible, even though Ron Zorn told me it was easy. I'm glad Hebrew is easy for somebody; they'll just have to tell me what it says.