NIV Student Bible

I was given a complimentary copy of The NIV Student Bible (e-book) by Zondervan for the purposes of this review. This does not affect my review in any way (positive or negative).

The NIV Student Bible was released in 2011.

After the table of contents is a section titled "Why the Student Bible?" The subtitles "I Get Discouraged" and "I Can't Understand It" grabbed my attention right away. This Bible addresses those concerns.

First, it has three different tracks to reading the Bible. Each track takes 5 to 15 minutes to read. Track 1 takes two weeks for each section. There are sections on Jesus, Paul, the Old Testament and other subjects. If one wishes to dig futher, track 2 presents a guided tour of the Bible. This hits the highlights and well known portions. Finally, track 3 is a slow read through the entire Bible. This plan is unique as it takes 3 years to read the whole Bible.

Secondly, the Bible has quite a bit of extra helps. The guided tour of the Bible is mostly commentary and "life questions" for applying lessons. Other notes are inserted into the text, but in a different color to distinguish them from the Scriptures. There are also the footnotes which are at the bottom right of each page.

The content of the footnotes appears to be limited to language notes, variants and other readings. The inserted notes are commentary on the text. The guided tour notes go a bit further than the commentary. On the whole I found them to be helpful. I believe they would be excellent discussion topics for a student study group.

The Scripture text itself is the NIV 2011 edition. While I like the layout, style and content of the notes, I am not sure about the 2011 NIV. I prefer the 1984 edition. Still, if looking for a Bible for a student group I would certainly consider this one.

NIV Student Bible