Holman Christian Standard Bible Personal Size Gift Bible--Brown

I ordered it. It shows it was delivered. They must have delivered to the wrong address. I have no way of asking for a refund.

I carry it in my car along with a spare Bible and a pocket concordance. It has happened to me that God send divine appointments and it is necessary to have these resources available to share the Gospel anywhere. I love the size and the quality of this dictionary. Color illustrations and a fairly decent letter size meets the needs for a portable dictionary. Needless to say, it is very concise but just enough to solve the most basic questions. I also carry a magnifier with these resources, just in case.

I am very pleased to see this translation. Though there are a multitude of English Bible translations available--very few are highly accurate translations. The best modern translations, in my opinion, are the New King James Version, and The New American Standard Bible. These are very accurate, and they are highly recommended. But they can be a bit difficult to read and understand, and an easier to understand Bible would be helpful to many people, yet accuracy is almost always lost when we leave the literal Bible translations. The NIV is good, but it has flaws, and so does the more recent ESV. Example, you will not find certain verses in those versions:Matthew 17:21and Mark 15:28 those verses are relegated to footnotes in both the NIV and ESV. Nor do the ESV and NIV capitalize personal pronouns referring to the Deity. But both the NKJV and the NASB include the verses mentioned as well as capitalizing personal pronouns referring to the Deity. This brings us to the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). The HCSB includes the verses above, and it also capitalizes the personal pronouns for the Deity. It basically has the quality of the NKJV and the NASB but with the readability of the NIV and ESV. So we finally have both an easy to read and understand, and an accurate Bible in the HCSB. Holman is also very reasonable in the prices for their Bibles, as well as having high quality Bibles. All this may sound too good to be true, but it is true. Do yourself a favor get one of these very high quality Bibles, we finally have a much needed modern translation that you need not worry about the accuracy of.

The King James Version of the Bible is, as far as I am concerned, the standard against which all translations must be measured. Beautiful English couple with excellent scholarship to make for a piece of literature that has helped shape our culture in ways we don't even suspect.Unfortunately, the English language has changed somewhat over the past 400 years, and Biblical scholarship has advanced light years. We need a new standard. Although modern translations are thick as fleas on a dog's back, no one translation seems to stand out above the rest, and none compare to the KJV. Finding a translation to replace the KJV has been an itch I've been trying to scratch for decades without much satisfaction. I have tried almost every translation I can lay my hands on, from the Amplified Bible to the Simplified Bible, from the New American Bible to the New Jerusalem Bible. You can find at least thirty different translations of the Bible on my bookshelves, and they have all been weighed against the KJV and found wanting.Then I found the HCSB. It is as readable as any modern translation, and more readable than most. Its translation philosophy seems to be just the right mixture of "formal equivalence" versus "functional equivalence." It is not an unreadable word for word rendering, nor is it a paraphrase which plays havoc with the Greek and Hebrew sentence structure.The scholarship is excellent, and the text is heavily footnoted with manuscript references and variant readings. Sometimes it puts the variant I would prefer in the footnote. E.g. Genesis 37:3 speaks of Joseph's "robe of many colors" and puts "robe with long sleeves" in the footnote. Translators can't quite decide how to translate that term, with a plurality opting for "many colors" a minority rendering "long sleeves," and many opting for a middle ground such as "richly ornamented," which could cover either meaning. A long sleeved robe would be more likely to anger Joseph's brothers. It was unfit for manual labor, and Jacob's giving Joseph a long sleeved robe would mean he didn't expect him to work.The translation philosophy seems to lean toward the traditional. If there is a tie between a translation that conforms to the KJV and another translation, the KJV translation prevails. As much as I like the KJV, I'm not sure that's a good criterion for selection between competing translations.Most modern translations fumble the translation of technical words. Take "Sheol," for instance. You could translate it "Hell" or "the grave" or leave it at "Sheol" and footnote it.No rendering of the term is 100% satisfactory. The HCSB has made the best of a bad situation. The translators devised an apparatus of bullets to place before such words. When you come across a bulleted word, you know you're dealing with a technical term, and you can find its definition (or an explanation of what scholars think it may mean) in a glossary in the back.So much for readability and reliability. The work also h

The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is a new translation, now only available in the New Testament, is spearheaded by the Southern Baptist Convention but with translators from many Christian denominations. This version, like the International Standard Version (only available in the New Testament), tries to take the best of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence and meld a translation using "optimal equivalence."For the most part, this translation lives up to its preface. The translation is fairly literal in the sentence structure, that is, it does not rearrange the word order as much as other versions, such as God's Word. This translation does have a few quirks, which are mentioned later in this review.The HCSB uses traditional theological vocabulary, which requires a bit more on the reader's part. This translation is pretty consistent but does use the phrase "declare righteous" for "justified" several times in Romans. Other stylistic variations exist, which will probably be smoothed out in subsequent revisions: "mute" and "could not talk" are both used; iniquity was used once, which seems a bit out of place in this translation.One example of the HCSB taking some translation liberties was it preference for "stumble" or "depart" for "fall away" in the Parable of the Sower; in Luke 8:13, the verb "aphistemi" even has the meaning that such a person has become "apostate." Yes, "depart" does carry the meaning but is softer than "fall away" and is not as accurate based on the context. Elsewhere, the translation also has a tendency to use "evangelize" where a literal rendering would be closer to "preach the Gospel," such as in Acts 8:40 and elsewhere. The HCSB violated its own translation philosophy by using a more abstract term, "evangelize," which can mean many different things to many people when the original "preach the Gospel" ("literally preach the evangel") is quite clear. However, one rendering to be commended is its choice of "slave" for the Greek "doulos." Most translations tend to use servant, which does not accurately convey the meaning.Overall, IMO, the HCSB rates better than most bibles in print today, especially the de-facto Bible standard, the NIV. However, this reviewer hopes that the above-mentioned problems will be fixed in subsequent editions. In this reviewer's opinion, the best study version for one to use is still the NASB, with a very close second going to the International Standard Version (for reading devotions).