The Letter to the Ephesians consists of six short chapters and maybe five or six printed pages. Why would someone want or need a 900-page book on it? Well, the fact of the matter is that no matter how feature-laden your study bible is, there will be times when you need more information. Fortunately, there are plenty of supplemental sources you can turn to.
Commentaries
The most essential bible reference is the commentary. You can use a commentary to help interpret the meaning of a particular passage or as a guide in working your way through an entire book of Scripture. Finding a good/reliable commentary isn’t easy. Commentaries range from the very introductory to the very scholarly. If you want to focus on the practical application of the Bible for Christian life, there are devotional commentaries (e.g., Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible) that would suit this purpose. But if you want the history, culture, and background to the biblical text, you will need something more in-depth.
Commentaries come in mainly two formats, the single-volume and the multi-volume varieties. One-volume commentaries (e.g., HarperCollins Bible Commentary, New Jerome Biblical Commentary) provide you with basic, introductory material on every book in the Bible. If you are starting out with scripture study and building up your library, a one-volume commentary is a useful first step. But by its nature as a concise commentary, do not expect the analysis to be in-depth.
Multi-volume series (e.g., Anchor Bible, Hermeneia) have an entire volume (or two) dedicated to one of the biblical books. A commentary dedicated to a specific biblical book will usually include the author’s translation of that book with textual notes explaining the rationale behind the translation choices. Because different volumes in the series have different authors, the quality and writing style will vary.
Commentaries are geared towards different audiences. A commentary on Genesis intended for pastors and well-educated laymen will be less dense and run a couple of hundred pages, but one intended for scripture students and readers familiar with Greek and Hebrew could be 1500 pages spread over three volumes. Individual textbook-level books such as this could easily run more than $50. Before making a big investment, check out reviews and, if available, the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon to see if the reading level and style of the commentary is suitable for your purposes.
Other Reference Works
While bible commentaries are an essential study aid, other reference materials such as a bible dictionary, bible atlas, and concordance could come in handy.
A bible dictionary is really a bible encyclopedia. You use it as you would an encyclopedia to learn more about a biblical person, place or thing. They also come in the single-volume (e.g., HarperCollins Bible Dictionary) and multi-volume (e.g., Anchor Bible Dictionary, New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible) varieties. Multi-volume dictionaries are very expensive and would be considered an investment. A good one-volume bible dictionary is probably all you need and Wikipedia might do in a pinch.
A bible atlas is more than just a set of maps. Some bible atlases include articles on history and archaeology, details of battles and conquests, artistic renderings of biblical cities, etc. I would put this in the “nice to have” category, especially if your bible already has some decent maps.
A concordance is used to look up all the verses in the bible that contain a particular word (e.g., all the verses in the bible with the word “camel”). Since the Hebrew and Greek words can be translated using different English words, you need to use a concordance that is keyed to a particular translation. There are free bible concordances available online for popular translations like KJV and NIV.
A Gospel Synopsis places similar passages from the four gospels side-by-side so that you can easily compare them. It’s in the “nice to have” category but very useful if you want to study gospel parallels.
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| Old and new wineskins. |
How They Work Together
Let’s say you want to research Jesus’ proverb about “old wine in new wineskins” but don’t know where it is in the Bible. Looking up “wineskins” in a concordance you find references to Mt 9:17; Mk 2:22; and Lk 5:37f. You could then look up these three passages individually in your bible, but a Synopsis of the Four Gospels presents them side-by-side on the same page.
From the synopsis, it is easy to see that Luke adds a non-related statement (v. 39) that no one drinking the old wine desires the new wine. This saying apparently has no bearing on what was just said about old wine in new wineskins and seems a bit odd, so now you want to know what biblical scholars have to say about it.
A single-volume commentary only has two sentences on v. 39. From this you learn that v. 39 is a unique Lucan proverb that conditions how the previous saying about “new wine” should be interpreted. The “old wine” represented by the Sabbath and practices like fasting are not to be cast aside as they also contain God’s will.
That provides some insight and many people would be happy enough to stop right there. But those wanting to go deeper could consult a commentary volume dedicated to Luke and there they would find several paragraphs devoted to v. 39. Reading the detailed commentary, you learn the proverb is referring to religious conservatives comfortable with the old practices like fasting having difficulty in accepting the “new wine” that Jesus offers, saying, “The old is what is good.” Therefore, this proverb does not contradict what was said before about the incompatibility of the old practices with Jesus’ new teachings, but confirms it.
Hopefully, this very brief example illustrates how to incorporate multiple reference works to bring out a deeper meaning in a passage that, on initial reading, seemed odd and confusing.
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