Building a Theological Library

In this article, I’ll introduce you to several different categories of Biblical study aids and reference works. For each category, I’ll point you to some free online resources and then direct you to scholarly resources that will cost a little more money.

If you want to understand the Bible better, I would recommend that you spend most of your time looking at the actual Biblical text. Time spent in the Bible itself is almost invariably more valuable than time spent reading books about the Bible.

I recommend picking up a good study Bible (personally, I love the ESV Study Bible, which I purchased digitally from ESV.org and can now access from any device through ESV’s mobile app). For an excellent guide to reading, interpreting, and applying the Bible, I cannot recommend Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays (now in its fourth edition) highly enough.

If you want help understanding the Bible better, however, here are several categories of reference tools:

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Concordances

Free: The most basic Bible study tool is a concordance, which allows you to search for every occurrence of a particular word in one Bible translation. This makes it easy to do basic word studies. When I enrolled in Bible college back in 2003, I bought the thick, expensive Zondervan NIV Exhaustive Concordance. Today, however, the Internet has changed the game. Free websites like ESV.org and BibleGateway.com allow you to do instant word searches (the latter also allows you to search across multiple translations and even multiple languages).

$$$: ESV Exhaustive Concordance

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Lexicons

Free: Of course, as I’m sure you already know, the Bible wasn’t originally written in English. In order to do word studies in the original Hebrew and Greek, you will need tools called lexicons that are essentially dictionaries for Greek and Hebrew words. ESV.org offers both Hebrew and Greek lexicons, along with interlinear and reverse interlinear options (allowing you to read the ESV text and the original languages side by side), with the creation of a free account.

$$$: The standard lexicons are the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) for the Old Testament and A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG) for the New Testament.

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Bible Handbooks, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Atlases

Word studies are useful for tracing how individual words are used in the Bible. However, in order to get the most out of a Biblical passage, you will need to delve into the cultural, geographical, and historical background of the world in which the Bible was written. There are several kinds of resources that help you do this. Bible handbooks typically feature large glossy photographs. They typically walk through each book of the Bible and are meant to be read alongside the Bible. Bible dictionaries offer definitions and essential information on each word in the Bible. Bible encyclopedias typically feature longer, in-depth articles about people, places, events, and customs in the Bible. Finally, Bible atlases contain maps that allow you to get the “lay of the land” of different Biblical stories.

Free: BibleGateway.com offers a number of free resources in this area, including an older

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