My, how this grizzled old atheist's heart did leap when he checked - for the umpteenth time - to see if that useless "print replica" version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) had been superseded by one that has actually been formatted for Kindle. There's no way I was going to waste money on a purported Kindle version that serves the need to constantly zap back and forth between text and commentary less well than the massive print version does. And finally - here it is! Warning: if you're buying a Kindle version, DO NOT get the "Print replica" one that, as I speak, costs about £5 more for the privilege of getting next to zero functionality. Amazon should really take that one off and just leave the this Kindle version and the print one. I note K's review on Amazon.com to the effect that this Kindle version's navigability could be improved. I'm sure they're right - in the excellent series of concluding essays, for example, and the in-book annotations, the referenced Bible passages aren't linked. It's also clunky to navigate your way to a particular verse, chapter or passage within a book. You just have to scroll. But hey ho - what's on offer is light years in advance of the previous PDF masquerading as a "Kindle" version. It'll do me for now, and if a new, even better, Kindle version is produced, I expect it'll be automatically updated on my Kindle in Amazon's usual helpful fashion.
I've been discovering far more about the Bible since I became an atheist than I ever did when I was a fundamentalist Christian. I'm sick at heart when my former fundie peers pervert reason and their own minds "reconciling" the Bible's obviously irreconcilable contradictions in ways that would be laughed out of court if they were applied to any other corpus of literature, or produce grotesque readings of passages whose meanings are often plain enough but that contradict what they want to believe, claiming the "inspiration of the Holy Spirit" as if it provided access to some kind of interpretive Holy of Holies rather than failing to constitute even the most patently miserable of excuses for their blatantly warped interpretations. And atheist Bible-bashing can sometimes be not much more helpful. Yes, I know the Genesis creation and flood accounts are absurdly at odds with Buddha knows how many well-established branches of knowledge, that the Exodus myth is... well, a myth, and that the divinely mandated genocide of the Hebrew Bible and the condemnation of most of earth's population to everlasting hellfire of the Christian one is no less than sick and deranged, although in their defence this bashing is made necessary by literalist nonsense.the soundness of whose empirical and logical basis is in inverse proportion to the frequency of its repetition. The Bible, along with every other "sacred" tome ever written, as well as all notions of the "divine" themselves, is a product of the individual and corporate human mind, and it would be great to have an edition of the most influential of these writings that treated it as such.
It's in that respect that this massive tome is such a powerful tool. It proceeds on the assumption that humans wrote this collection from human motives. This is a "reasonable" approach. It's the same one we use to treat Homer's "Iliad" and the works of Shakespeare. or for that matter any work of fiction or non-fiction. "Goddidit" provides no more explanation for what the Bible says than it does for any secular literature. It's worse than irrelevant: it's profoundly damaging to a quest for any kind of truth or knowledge. It's not the beginning of investigation - it's the end of it. After that comes the mere black hole of "faith", one of the most heinous conceptions our diseased imaginations have ever produced.
As part of its assumption, the NOAB as near as neutrally summarises the present state of scholarship, religious and secular, on all things biblical. The series of essays in which it does so consists of introductions to sections of the Bible and to individual books, as well as a raft of concluding essays on all aspects of the Bible generically (Hebrew and Christian, separately and together). These essays are both substantial enough in themselves and of sufficient quantity to warrant separate publication in their own right as a collection. At last I can find out what the relevant experts are saying - or NOT saying - on a particular topic, and thus to find out what we know and (just as importantly) don't know about such things as the process by which the canon now known as the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh was composed, compiled, edited and redacted - i.e. how the text grew out of the societies that produced it. The essays are written for the general reader, not for specialists, and as such they make available to anyone who's interested not only the most recent scholarship but (again, just as importantly) the methods scholars have used and use to arrive at their conclusions. The supplementary tables, charts, diagrams and maps are extremely helpful, although the latter, being in colour, don't come across well on a Kindle. There's also a really helpful bibliography of some of the editions of, and the most basic literature on, the various topics discussed.
This humanist approach also applies to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the text used by the NOAB. Praise be to Allah that all the blather in so many "Christian" English editions, in which the translators express the hope that the results of their labours might convince the reader to believe what they believe, is absent. (I suspect that such material usually means that some ideologically-driven mistranslation is going on, which is what the New International Version has been criticised for.) No, the introduction ("To the Reader") to the NRSV simply outlines the process by which it was carried out and the principles used, as if it were a translation of The Song of Roland. How refreshing. At last I feel the scales lifting from my eyes and the light of reason and common sense dawning. And a couple of the NOAB's essays aren't afraid to call out errors in the NRSV translation, either.
Then, of course, there are the annotations to the actual texts themselves. All those in the NRSV have been preserved, with the Oxford edition ones being presented separately from them, the former being accessed by clicking on the superscript letters, the latter by clicking on the verse numbers. I haven't started exploring these yet, but from a quick perusal I expect the more fulsome Oxford ones to amount to separate essays in themselves for each book.
A final note: the ecumenical NRSV, and consequently the NOAB, includes ALL the apocrypha used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox (i.e. Greek and Slavonic) churches. You will therefore find such works as 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 as well as the apocrypha accepted only by the Roman Catholics that you sometimes find in Bibles "with Apocrypha".
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Anselm
THE PROPER KINDLE VERSION HAS ARRIVED!!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2018Verified Purchase
PolMac
Ref Kindle version
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2019Verified Purchase
S. J. Williams
A very good study Bible IF YOU CAN READ THE FOOTNOTES AND ESSAYS.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 January 2021Verified Purchase
Truckey
Review of poor and odd Kindle functionality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 January 2021Verified Purchase
Truckey
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 January 2021
The other irritating oddity with the Kindle version is the big change in font size between the text of the Bible and the hyperlinked notes to verses of the Bible, shown in the attached photos. The notes appear by default in a font size that is about 11 if you used that for the text but a normal reading size for the text would be 4 or 5. You can reduce the size of the notes once you have opened them - they seem to open in font size 5 - but the smallest you can get them to is a font size 1 which is just about OK but that approximates to a font size 9 for the Bible text which is larger than necessary and so takes more page space that is ideal. The result is that you always have to reduce the font size to a minimum when opening any note and then increase the font size of the text of the Bible when you go back to the text because on the font size setting you've selected for the notes, the text is now far too small to be comfortable to read.
Am I doing something wrong here? Has anyone else with the Kindle version had this problem. As you can see the fonts for the text and notes seem to have been deliberately set up in different sizes for some reason. This is a pity because the NOAB is an excellent resource and the Kindle edition is very competitively priced.
This failure really does make the Kindle version an unnecessary pain to use. In addition, my "trial" copy of the Kindle version did not seem to include any of the maps at the end of the Bible that are offered in the physical copy, despite the Kindle's contents page saying that the maps followed the "end of the text".
I have returned the full Kindle version that I bought and have bought a hard copy of the NOAB in its place - which is very nicely produced and much easier to read with good sized (bigger font) text and reasonably (smaller sized) notes - but it would have been much nicer and preferable for me to have been able to read the NOAB (and easily carry it around with me) in a usable Kindle format.
I'm still in two minds about buying the Kindle version, despite these formatting problems because of the convenience of having such an excellent study Bible with me at all times.
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Edward Nickell
Poor kindle version of good content
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 July 2019Verified Purchase
