Review: Greatest Stories of the Bible

This is another one of those books I don't quite know what to do with.

The Greatest Stories of the Bible (NKJ) is most of the narrative portions of the Bible stripped out and displayed in a storybook kind of format — e.g., each story is a "chapter" in the book. It contains most of the narratives plus a few extracts from the epistles (which are, frankly, out of place) but no law, no prophets, and few genealogies. It's a very pretty tome, but it's just the text of the New King James Version. The text is well displayed with large fonts and large margins, but there are no illustrations unlike most other "Bible storybooks" I've seen.

So who's this marketed toward? It's not really a child's book without any illustrations (not to mention the use of the NKJ). For adults or older children, you can skip from one narrative to another in your Bible if you want.

So why buy it?

Well, if you want to read the Bible as a narrative, this could be a good book for you. And there's great benefit in looking at the narrative of the Bible, in seeing the big picture of the story from the Garden to the cross to the New Earth.

So here's my dilemma: I would never have bought this book. (Thankfully, I got it for free -- review copy.) But it's not terrible.

If, for whatever reason, you want a book like this -- a Bible storybook, or a narrative-only Bible -- this would be a decent choice. But I'll just stick with a regular Bible.