Where's my Jewish athlete's bible?
Aside from the occasional women’s Torah commentary, Jews mostly just have commentaries with no special emphasis or purpose other than to commentate.
But I was in a bookstore today and was struck by the incredible proliferation of weird Christian bible commentaries, or study bibles, as most were labeled. I wrote down some of my favorites:
- The Urban Devotional Bible
- James Earl Jones Reads the Bible (audio book, appropriately reading from the King James Version)
- The Bible in Varsity Colors (I’m in Austin, TX, so I assume the bright orange of the cover was intended to be burnt orange, though it clearly was not )
- God’s Game Plan: The Athlete’s Bible
- AXIS: A Study Bible for Teens
- The Teen Study Bible (is AXIS the evil version of this one?)
- The Word of Promise Next Generation New Testament Dramatic Audio Bible (this one was read by an “all-star cast” including the likes of Sean Astin, the black kid from High School Musical and an old American Idol winner)
- The Rhyming Bible
- The Adventure Bible
- The Maxwell Leadership Bible (is this like the hagadah?)
- God’s Word for Students with Stylish Prism Cover
- Etc.
On the one hand, I found most of these rather laughable. On the other hand, I found myself wondering seriously if we Jews are missing out on something here. Is the fact that we don’t have all of these specialized biblical commentaries just a function of our relative market share?
CORBIN BLEU READS THE BIBLE? I gotta get me some of that 😛
Also, have you been witness to either my “3 Minutes a Day EXTREME DEVOTIONS For Girls” or my “Beauty is Soul Deep” collection of devotions? The first one in the latter book has a passage from Esther 😀 haha
I’m rather fond of the Cake Bible myself.
http://www.amazon.com/Cake-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0688044026
Warren, somehow I think that’s a different sort of thing.
New thought: Perhaps the Urban Devotional Bible is referring to any one of the number of popes Urban?
We have a large selection of Bible commentaries (http://www.jewishpub.org/product.php?category=1), though I can’t say our titles are as creative as the ones on your list.
It has nothing to do with market share.
We don’t live according to the Bible! We live rabbinic Judaism.
A fine point, uzi. So where’s my Athlete’s Daf Yomi Study Guide? Or the Shulchan Aruch for Teens with Prism Cover?
I bought my mom the james earl jones audio bible. The KJV text didn’t bother me. We were looking forward to hearing him read bereshit…To hear that rich, chocolate voice read “and g-d saw the light, that it was good” would have been as spiritual as havdalah. However, we were disappointed to learn the set was only the new testament. Never ended up listening to it.
The haggadah seems to be the preferred Jewish medium for this sort of thing.
em, that’s a great point. In writing this post, I hadn’t thought about the insane proliferation of highly specific haggadot.