A Couple Thousand Years Were Spent Adding Features. Oh Boy, Did They Ever
I am heaving a sigh at the thought of posting a disclaimer, but this is the internet, so it must be done. I intend to have it done quickly. Bibles have options. A surprising number of options, actually, and I wanted to make a Choice Compass using those options because that is what Octivary does: take a giant pile of choices, let you decide what matters, and hopefully turn that pile into something resembling a direction.
I'm not pan-handling faith but I do want to tell my story below. This Choice Compass is intended to be useful for everybody, whether you are religious, curious, researching Christianity, studying history or literature, an atheist trying to understand what everybody has been arguing about for thousands of years, a person of another faith, or somebody who wandered onto this page because Google performed one of its mysterious little somersaults. The aim of this entire domain is to help people make choices and not to spread hate.
If this page is of absolutely no help to you, might I suggest checking out The Pudding, because it is just fun. There. Legal-ish internet throat clearing complete. We may proceed.
Choosing a Bible Is Weirdly Complicated
Before working on this Choice Compass, I knew there were different Bible translations. Obviously. What I had not fully appreciated was how dramatically two physical Bibles containing essentially the same biblical material can differ as books.
You can have a compact Bible, giant-print Bible, study Bible large enough to qualify as home gym equipment, journaling Bible with glorious acres of empty margin, Bible with maps, Bible with timelines, concordances, dictionaries, red letters, black letters, imitation leather, genuine leather, hardcovers, softcovers, thumb indexes, ribbons, book introductions, reading plans, cross references and apparently enough other variations to keep a checkbox designer employed indefinitely.
This makes the Bible an interesting experiment for Octivary. I wanted to see whether a Choice Compass could genuinely help with books, especially when the decision is not simply which book do I want? but which version of this particular enormous and deeply established book works for the way I intend to use it?
A Bible meant to sit open on a desk during long study sessions does not need to solve the same problems as one being tossed into a backpack every Sunday. Somebody who loves pages full of notes and explanations may see a chunky study Bible and think, yes please, deploy the footnotes. Another person may look at the exact same page and feel like the Bible somehow opened sixteen browser tabs inside itself.
Different reader. Different priorities. Choice Compass territory.
My Reasons for Reading Started Before I Knew What a Translation Was
Surely most of us eventually go through things that make us ask questions we cannot neatly close with a browser tab. Are we watched over? Are we heading somewhere intentionally? Is there something after this? Do we have a ticket to a particular destination after death? Is life mostly beautiful chaos, or is something underneath it holding the scaffolding together?
Sometimes those questions deviate from reading a book. Mine started with accidents.
One accident in particular left a physical mark and a very strange memory. I was extremely young, around four or five, when I lost my footing on a large outdoor garden ensemble involving concrete. My skull unfortunately volunteered to handle the landing. Without getting into the details of the scene, what I remember is not pain. It was more shock following a blackout. I remember hopping in and out of consciousness, but that is not what made the experience stay with me.
What stayed with me was the sensation, experience, memory, whatever word actually belongs here, of perceiving the setting from outside my body. This is where explaining it becomes weird because our vocabulary is built around bodies. How do you explain seeing to people without eyes? How do you explain comprehension of smell, taste, sound and touch while describing yourself as somehow disconnected from the nose, tongue, ears and limbs we normally credit for those things? I don't have a neat diagram for you. I have a memory.
There was a second accident later in life, one involving some difficulty keeping blood where blood is generally supposed to remain, and that one somehow felt like less of a close call. The strangest memory from that experience was the sensation of viewing my own eye sockets while the “vision” associated with my actual eyes seemed to drift in and out of alignment. Again, no pain in that portion of the memory. No perception of panic, foreboding or sadness. Just peace.
I'm not presenting either experience as laboratory evidence of anything. I cannot hand you a clipboard, recreate the experiment and ask the control group to please whack themselves on some concrete. Absolutely not. I can only tell you what I remember.
So, in summary, I guess this makes me a little kooky and a believer. It is my story. It could put some people off. Whatever.
¯\*(ツ)*/¯
That is also part of why I wanted this particular Choice Compass to make room for somebody who is curious but knows absolutely nothing about buying a Bible. You should not need to arrive already carrying the vocabulary.
The Translation Alphabet Soup Problem
Walk into Bible shopping from scratch and almost immediately you encounter NIV, NLT, ESV, NASB, KJV, NKJV, CSB, NRSVue, CEB, NET, MSG and more.
Excellent. The alphabet has unionized.
Nothing says “beginner-friendly” quite like being greeted by enough unexplained acronyms to suspect you accidentally opened a trigonometry exam.
ಠ_ಠ
Those letters represent genuinely different translations and translation approaches, but expecting a brand-new reader to understand all of that before choosing a Bible feels bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
I will give credit where it is due because I have noticed that some Christian websites and Bible stores are growing wise to this problem. The explanations can still become quite verbose because this is a complicated subject, but some places now provide beginner guides or little help me choose experiences instead of throwing forty translations onto the screen and wishing you Godspeed.
I want to take that idea further with an Octivary Choice Compass.
Instead of requiring somebody to already know that they want an NLT, NIV, ESV or NASB, I added sections where they can describe what they actually want the reading experience to be like. The Compass can then use those priorities alongside the normal book specifications.
One beginner-friendly section is Translation Type, with values such as More Literal, Balanced, Thought-for-Thought and Paraphrase. You can still learn what those terms mean, but you do not need to build the whole decision around acronyms.
Then there is Reading Difficulty, ranging from very easy through challenging; How Modern Should the Language Feel?, from very modern through very traditional; and What Kind of Reading Experience Do You Want?, where you can favour smooth and conversational, clear and straightforward, balanced, detailed and precise, or formal and literary.
I also added How Much Help Do You Want While Reading? Maybe you want just the Bible text. Maybe you want a little guidance. Maybe you are starting completely cold and would deeply appreciate the book explaining why everybody is suddenly wandering through the wilderness again.
Another section asks What Are You Mainly Hoping to Do? Maybe this is your first read. Maybe you want to understand the big story. Maybe you want to learn what Christians actually believe rather than assembling your entire understanding of Christianity from political arguments, television dialogue and one aunt's Facebook feed. Maybe you want deep study. Maybe you simply want to follow along at church.
Most importantly, these beginner sections can be ignored completely. If you leave them untouched, they do not need to influence your results. They are there for somebody starting at zero, not as homework everybody must complete before Octivary graciously unlocks the books.
Sign Me Up for the Understandable Version
Fun note: I am not a difficult-read-Bible kind of person.
Sorry if that knocks several points off my theological toughness rating, but I do not see much use in reading something I cannot comprehend even after going over the same lines multiple times. At some point my brain stops studying scripture and starts performing archaeological excavation on the sentence.
If the meaning is hiding behind six layers of wording and I have read the paragraph four times while absorbing approximately the nutritional equivalent of air, I am going to want help.
Sign me up for the TLDR Bible when that comes out, okay?
Okay, maybe not that TLDR.
But explanations, please.
Surely some people can relate to this. There is no medal waiting at the end because you picked the translation that made you squint the hardest. If beautiful traditional language helps you connect with the text, fantastic. Drag that preference up. If modern straightforward language keeps you reading rather than quietly watching the words evaporate from your brain, drag that preference up.
The goal here is not to crown one translation Supreme Champion of All Bibles. The goal is to help find a physical Bible that the person standing in front of the Compass will actually want to open again tomorrow.
That seems considerably more useful.
Study Bible or Portable Research Department?
Then we get into features: study notes, book introductions, outlines, character profiles, maps, charts, timelines, concordances, dictionaries, cross references, topical indexes, reading plans, footnotes and harmony-of-the-Gospels material.
Spill the tea, apparently my Bible can also contain a small research department.
These features can be extremely useful, but more is not automatically better. A heavyweight study Bible packed with commentary can be wonderful if your idea of a nice evening involves falling down a historical-context rabbit hole and emerging three hours later with seven bookmarks.
For someone else, all of that material may simply make the book larger, heavier and visually busier.
That is why the Choice Compass separates Study Depth from Physical Size, Weight, Print Size and Primary Use. You may want deep study, large print and enough explanatory material to build a small fort. Somebody else may want a simple readable Bible they can comfortably carry.
Both are legitimate. The rankings should behave accordingly.
Large Print Has Its Own Tiny Rabbit Hole
I initially thought “large print” would be straightforward.
Cute.
Bible typography has to perform a strange engineering trick because there is an enormous amount of text to fit into a physical book without producing something roughly the dimensions of a microwave.
That means labels such as standard print, comfort print, large print and giant print are useful, but I also want to record the actual font size whenever I can find it. Your eyeballs do not care what the marketing department named the typography. Your eyeballs care whether they can read Deuteronomy at 10:30 p.m. without filing a workplace grievance.
So the Choice Compass can contain friendly print-size categories while the listing itself stores more precise information behind the scenes.
Nerdy data layer underneath. Understandable buttons on top. That is very much the Octivary philosophy.
Six Bible-Buying Questions That Deserve Normal-Human Answers
A handful of beginner questions kept jumping out at me, and the answers do not need to become dissertations. Do I need the same translation my church uses? Nope. Matching can make following along easier, but your personal Bible can absolutely be different. Is a study Bible a different Bible? Usually the named translation is still the biblical text, while the study notes and explanations are extra material wrapped around it. Are the red words more important? No. Red-letter editions simply make words attributed to Jesus visually easier to identify. Some people love that, some would rather everything stop shouting in red. Do I have to start at Genesis and march straight through? Also no. Nobody confiscates your bookmark if you start elsewhere or use a reading plan. Does an expensive Bible contain more Bible? Usually what you are paying extra for is things like binding, cover material, paper, construction, size, design or study content, not a secret DLC chapter. Can I start with an easier translation and move into something more literal later? Absolutely. There is no skill tree where you eventually unlock Hard Mode Bible after collecting enough XP. Start somewhere you can actually understand, then explore from there if you want.
There. Six questions. Seminary avoided.
Please Drag Sections Around In The Choice Compass. That's The Point My Friends.
The easiest thing to miss about the Choice Compass is also probably the most important: move things around.
Drag the sections. Drag the options inside those sections. The higher something sits on your list, the more important you are telling the scoring system it is to you.
If large print matters more than leather, put large print higher. If you desperately want red letters but could not care less whether the cover is burgundy, your ordering should say exactly that. If translation matters more than everything else, send it upstairs.
The same thing applies within sections. Suppose your Translation Type order is Balanced → Thought-for-Thought → More Literal → Paraphrase. Somebody else's might be More Literal → Balanced → Thought-for-Thought → Paraphrase.
Same inventory. Same filter. Different human.
That is the juice.
Traditional website filters are usually binary little gatekeepers: yes or no, include or exclude. MCDA lets you say, “I strongly prefer this, I would happily accept that, this third thing is fine, and I care approximately zero potatoes about the fourth.”
Real preferences usually work more like that.
The Physical Book Still Matters
I do not want this Choice Compass to become so focused on translation and theology that it forgets we are strictly comparing books.
Physical books have ergonomics. Can you hold it comfortably? Does it lie reasonably flat? Is the text large enough? Is it something you would actually carry? Are there margins for writing? Do you prefer one column or two? Do you want thumb indexes, maps, ribbons or a cover that can survive being ricocheted around inside a tote bag with three pens and an emergency granola bar?
A wonderful translation printed in a format you hate using is not necessarily a wonderful purchase for you.
Think about where you will actually read it: bed, desk, church, transit, couch, kitchen table. Are your eyes tired at night? Do you write twelve words in the margins or twelve paragraphs? Are you looking for something portable or something that will happily remain on one desk until the end of civilization?
Those practical questions deserve points too.
And Then Etsy Wandered Into the Chat
There is one other Bible-shopping rabbit hole I want to mention because I have seen some genuinely beautiful versions on Etsy.
Some sellers take already-published Bibles and turn them into much more personalized physical objects by adding tabs, decorative elements, customised covers, page-edge treatments, accessories and other embellishments. Naturally, that extra work can mean an upsell over buying the plain published edition directly.
And you know what?
Some of them are kind of gorgeous.
This is not really something my Choice Compass can rank cleanly because the seller is often adding craftsmanship or personalization after the underlying Bible was published. The actual Bible may be an ordinary NIV, NLT, KJV or another edition underneath, while the seller has turned it into something that looks like it should be sitting on a cottage desk next to pressed flowers and suspiciously photogenic tea.
So I actually encourage checking Etsy after you use the Compass.
Use Octivary to figure out the boring but important bones first: translation, print size, study depth, layout, physical size, features and the kind of reading experience you want. Then, once you have narrowed down the type of Bible that works for you, go see whether somebody has turned that edition into something spectacular.
Yes, the decorated one may cost more.
Yes, I may still stare at it.
We are complicated animals.
Can an MCDA Filter Actually Help Someone Choose a Bible?
That is what I want to find out.
This particular Choice Compass is partly an experiment because books are different from coffee machines, earbuds, tents or streaming subscriptions. A lot of the value exists in the relationship between the reader and the material. There is no specification sheet capable of announcing with 97.4 percent certainty, “Congratulations, Brenda, we have mathematically located your Bible.”
SMH. We are not doing prophecy by sorting algorithm.
What I can do is collect useful characteristics, translate some of the more confusing ones into normal-human language, let you decide which matter most, and reduce a giant wall of nearly identical-looking books into a smaller group that makes more sense for you.
For experienced Bible readers, that may mean going straight to translation, binding, references, study depth, layout and print size. They already know what they like. Wonderful. Zoom zoom.
For beginners, it may instead mean saying: I want modern language. I don't want reading to feel difficult. I want explanations. I am trying to understand the big story. I need something comfortable enough that I will actually read it.
Those are perfectly legitimate buying criteria.
The Compass can handle the translation between human preference and book specification without demanding that somebody learn an entire Bible-shopping dialect first.
And if the result gets someone closer to a Bible they actually enjoy reading, studying, researching, questioning, annotating, carrying, comparing or simply exploring out of curiosity, then I think the experiment has done its job.
No sermon required. Just choices, arranged according to the person making them.
[ priorities ] > [ noise ] > [ enormous pile of Bibles ] > [ hey... this one fits ]