by Stephen Rodgers

There’s an old expression about God closing doors and opening windows. I always thought that was both odd and awesome, since it seemed to call upon Christians to execute maneuvers most often associated with catburglers and second-story men. Except in this case, instead of metaphorical doors and windows we’re going to be dealing with actual hyperlinks on the internet.

CLOSED DOOR

At some point last week, Crossway decided to remove the links to most of the content from the ESV Study Bible that was previously available online.  Following the example of other publishers (Thomas Nelson, Zondervon, etc.) they had previously exposed their book introductions (which was fairly standard) as well as their articles and essays (which was exceedingly generous of them).

They have since decided to remove that content.  It hasn’t been deleted, it’s simply been moved behind their paywall.  So if you’ve registered your ESV Study Bible on their website, you can still view the material by logging in to esvbible.org. (Note: I believe that you still get a free code for this with the purchase of any new ESV Study Bible. They also allow you to purchase a digital version of all the content from the MacArthur Study Bible and integrate that as well, which results in you owning a seriously powerful tool for Bible study that can be accessed from any internet connection).

By the way, since I’m about to say some less-than-complimentary things about the results of that decision, let me take a moment to make one thing clear: it was absolutely their right to make that choice.  They paid to develop the material, and if they wish to be more aggressive in monetizing it, they are well within their prerogative as a publisher. Nonetheless, exercising that right several years after it’s been freely available is a bit odd.

Unfortunately, since I can’t hyperlink to your physical book, and since their bible study web interface is fairly non-standard, it’s a pretty big blow to referencing their material online.  (In other words, while the material is there and at least nominally searchable, the techniques and technology that apply to searching, storing, referencing, and indexing a web document are now useless). And as a result of this, quite a few links from previous BOB articles are now broken. So, since I’m going to have to take the time to touch every article to remove those links, I might as well take the opportunity to add quite a few resources that have come to my attention since then.

OPEN WINDOW

As of the publishing of this article, all previous articles in the BOB series have been updated with new and improved reference material.

Briefly, here is a list of the study Bible resources I commonly use that have some corresponding availability online:

• Apologetics Study Bible – Surprisingly, this Bible is indexed and available on Google Books; you can jump to various books of the Bible by using the pull-down menu
• Archaeological Study Bible – Very little of this material is available online, but you can poke around their website and see what you can find (for example, they have a .pdf version of Genesis that is worth the download)
• ESV Study Bible – As mentioned above, most of this content is no longer freely available, however a few features can still be downloaded. The free version is still available at esvbible.org.
• MacArthur Study Bible – GTY actually makes all their Bible Introductions available online
• NET Bible – I’ve previously mentioned the NET Bible, so I won’t go into much detail.  Suffice to say this is my go-to reference for translation notes.
• NIV Study Bible – Biblica.com makes all the book introductions and selected articles available online
• Reformation Study Bible – Very little of this material is available for free online, but Ligonier recently made the introduction to all four of the Gospels available, and have announced they will be doing the same with the books of the Pentateuch (which will be linked as they become available). (UPDATE: a few sample pages are also available)

I also own and use the Chronological Study Bible, but I haven’t found it particular useful for this series.  I highly recommend having a chronological understanding of the events of the Bible however: which were sequential, which were concurrent, which are disputed, etc. For understanding that, a chronological Bible is a fantastic resource, or you can simply avail yourself to a chronological reading plan (esv.org has a list; the .pdf version of the chronological plan is particularly good).

If anyone wants to talk about Bibles in general or study Bibles in particular, I’d be happy to chat with you; either find me at church or email me directly. Perhaps later in the series we can discuss some other resources as well.

For those of you studying along at home, I hope you find this helpful.