The Orthodox Study Bible Revisited

A review of the 21st printing (2018) of the Orthodox Study Bible published by Thomas Nelson (ISBN 9780718003593). This volume is a red hardback with a glued text block, 9 1/2 x 6 9/16 x 1.63 inches in dimensions.

The New Testament is in the standard New King James Version, and it comes with a truncated set of text and translation notes, as well as a limited set of references.

The Old Testament is based on the Septuagint (LXX), so it contains more books than you'll find in most Protestant or Roman Catholic Bibles. Unhappily, the translation often strays from the LXX, as I show in this video beginning at the 25:33 point.

The text is laid out in two columns, each 65 mm wide, with about 45 characters per line. There are as many as 57 lines per column. The margins are narrow. The font in the text is 10.5 to 11 pts in height. It appears dark gray to my eyes, and it is not particularly bold. The text is not line matched.

I estimate the paper weight at 31 grams per square meter (gsm). The lack of line matching combined with the relatively low opacity of the paper creates a "newsprint" effect, which makes it challenging to read the text on the cluttered, gray background.

Page-bottom annotations are in an 8.5 to 9 point font. They are conservative and Orthodox, and they are not overly long-winded.

The volume contains 47 study articles on a variety of subjects, and 12 color icons are interleaved with the text.

Ten color maps spanning eight pages are located in the back of the volume. The paper the maps are printed on is neither glossy nor matte, but something in between.

In the back one also finds a 24-page index to annotations and a one-page index to study articles.

This Bible has red and yellow head and tail bands, but no ribbon markers. A concordance is not included.

My earlier review of the Orthodox Study Bible may be viewed here:    • The Orthodox Study Bible -- An Overvi...   .

Errors in this video:
1. I made reference to an upcoming review of the second edition of the Lexham English Septuagint. However, the edition I reviewed here (    • The Lexham English Septuagint, Second...   ) is the second edition. Perhaps in time I will review a third edition.

Detailed contents

00:00 Introduction
02:23 Page layout
07:11 The typeface and print quality
07:47 Paper qualities
08:50 Book introductions
09:14 Articles
09:36 The material in the back
14:04 It lies open in Genesis
14:24 The contents and introductory material
18:25 A glance at a few book introductions
19:18 A glance at a few study notes
23:14 Font comparisons
25:33 Translation errors
33:21 Harmonizing the two testaments
38:43 Tapping into the early Christian writers
45:14 Errors in the New Testament references
47:10 Summary