The making of books is without limit"—so the writer traditionally identified with King Solomon warned in the Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes. But the making of Bibles is really without limit. After all, when PW conducted an extensive online survey this spring, with a sample representing 13% of the U.S. population, it found that more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they bought a Bible in the previous year. Publishers of the Christian and Jewish Bibles (and the Qur'an, too) continue to produce a bewildering number of versions of the great monotheistic sacred texts for a similarly diverse audience of readers of all spiritual orientations and preferences.

The author of Ecclesiastes went on to call books "a wearying of the flesh." There is something about the Good Book that makes it virtually impossible to get it just right in some finite number of translations, versions and packages that might satisfy enough people to allow the wearied-of-flesh Bible industry to take a breather. (Of course, why would they want to? Though it would be impossible to put a dollar figure on annual Bible sales, they account for a substantial portion of the revenue of some of the largest religion publishing houses.)

The problem goes to the nature of the text itself. Four peculiarities about the book explain why publishers will still be bringing out uncountable Bible versions years and decades from now. The same four qualities more or less define the major trends in Bible publishing. They are relevance, potential for offense, fidelity of translation, and ease of comprehension. Relevance is the hottest issue now. How can publishers make an ancient work accessible and exciting to modern readers?

Chasing Youth

Paul Caminiti, Zondervan's v-p and publisher of Bibles, is particularly distressed about the spiritual trends at work in the ages 18—34 demographic. The company has split its Bible division in two, with an "18—34 team" and a "35—55 team," the emphasis decidedly on the former group. Said Caminiti, "Our research finds that 40% of kids who grow up in a church are choosing to leave church on graduating from high school." In response, this coming February the publisher will initiate what it calls the biggest Bible launch in history—unveiling the complete Today's New International Version (TNIV). The TNIV New Testament appeared in 2002. The earlier NIV (New International Version), which the TNIV updates, remains the topselling translation (and will still be a core product for Zondervan), according to CBA, the trade association of Christian retailers (though a Barna Group survey finds that people are much more likely actually to read the old King James Version, by 5 to 1).

With the completion of translation work on the entire scriptural text, Zondervan will simultaneously bring out nine separate new TNIV Bibles in 24 separate SKUs, with variations in style, color and format. There is a women's Bible, True Identity, and a men's Bible, Strive. Aimed at younger readers, there is a pocket Bible that, said Caminiti, "will fit in someone's cargo pants." There is a condensed Bible, The Story, leaving out the more inaccessible parts of Scripture (Leviticus comes to mind), reading "much more like a novel" and including "Tolkienesque" maps.

The TNIV translation, 10 years in the making, is itself targeted at the 18—34 age range. Caminiti said the youthful demographic group cares about accuracy and clarity, but also about a more modern concern. TNIV is a "gender accurate" translation, meant to avoid excluding female readers. Thus, for example, the translation will often substitute "they" or "them" for "he" or "him."

Courting Controversy

When the TNIV New Testament was released two years ago, this feature worried some conservative Christians. TNIV's intended constituency is itself conservative and evangelical, yet the Southern Baptist Convention denounced Zondervan "for this inaccurate translation of God's inspired Scripture." The SBC-owned LifeWay Christian Stores chain, along with some independent Christian stores, has said it will not sell TNIV Bibles.

Caminiti responded that the translation is much more conservative than critics say: "These people who are making these judgments are not linguists. Some of these stores have been misinformed." To illustrate, he cited instances where other translations and paraphrases popular with evangelicals (Tyndale's New Living Translation, The Message from NavPress) blur gender, but the TNIV retains the traditional masculine language—"my son" as opposed to "my child," for instance, in Proverbs 3:1.

This April, SBC publisher Broadman & Holman released its Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and general editor Ed Blum clearly wanted to avoid any meddling, not least of the politically correct kind, with what he regards as the most faithful rendering of the Bible's own words. In the evangelical Christian context, the HCSB translation is considered the Southern Baptist alternative to the TNIV Bible. Blum said his Bible is "for the conservative constituency. I don't expect the Episcopal Church to adopt it."

Relevance is the name of the game for other Christian publishers as well, resulting in an array of specialty and niche Bibles, so that no potential student of Scripture should feel left out. At Nelson Bibles, director of marketing Tim Jordan wants to "take away the angst and the intimidation of the Bible. I mean it's this big, black, scary thing!" Replacing the old black leatherette cover is the "gift" Bible. In January, Nelson will release a series of Nelson's Life and Style Bibles, small, portable, under $20 and enclosed in a clear acetate box. These Bibles, said Jordan, will be "seasonally driven, just like if you walked into a retail environment like Macy's or Dillard's, where they reset their styles for the season." There will be spring, summer and fall lines, varying in color.

With a different, less upbeat market in mind, in November Nelson will publish The Billy Graham Training Center Bible, aimed at "connecting with people who are hurting," said Jordan. "That pretty much includes us all. We all have issues, modern-day relevant challenges"—from addictions and AIDS to divorce, fear, grief and financial difficulties.

Nelson certainly hasn't forgotten the under-18 crowd—its "Bible-zines" for teenagers have sold more than 650,000 copies. Two were released in 2003 and 2004, complete with colorful sidebars and full of photos of kids in punk, hip-hop or Abercrombie & Fitch—style duds. Refuel is for boys ("Extras: Girls, Cash, and Cars") while Revolve is for girls ("Are You Dating a Godly Guy?").

A similar look is apparently what Tyndale has in mind with nt:sport, an October release with an initial print run of 75,000 that turns the New Testament into a sports magazine (headlines: "Tips: Improve your performance!" "Personal Assessments: Where r u on the field?"). Tyndale has its own Bible for the cargo-pants crowd, the Metal Bible, which comes bound in a slim metal box stamped with a dog tag (July). With its own more literal translation, the English Standard Version, Crossway will bring out the ESV Battle Zone Bible (Nov.), reminiscent of the Metal Bible, with a brushed aluminum cover sporting a stylized red cross on the front. With a more conventional approach to getting teens to read their Bible, presenting the text along with questions and answers, Our Sunday Visitor offers Prove It! The Catholic Teen Bible (Sept.).

Besides teenage boys, the Metal Bible and the Battle Zone Bible may appeal to military enthusiasts. So, too, Broadman & Holman's military editions of the Holman Christian Standard Bible, including The Soldier's New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs. In July, B&H published Bibles stamped with the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines seals, along with The Sportsman's Bible, in a camouflage cover. The latter includes articles on topics such as "God the Hunter" and "Giving Thanks Is Essential for the Turkey Hunter."

Beauty and the Bible

If turkey hunters need their own Bible, why not the more artistically inclined? There is no Artists Bible (yet), but there are artistic Bibles, a much older genre of the published Scriptures, going back to the illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages. Feldheim will publish Visions of the Psalms: Through the Gates of Colors (Nov.), a $125 coffee-table volume featuring the text of the Book of Psalms and illustrated by 150 lithographs from the Jerusalem artist Moshe Tzvi HaLevi Berger. The Jewish Publication Society will offer The Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden (June 2005), in $75 and $150 editions, reproducing an illuminated manuscript by the artist Debra Band. On the Christian side, there is The Saint John's Bible, whose creation is being overseen by British calligrapher Donald Jackson from a scriptorium in Wales. The first volume to be reproduced and published is Gospels and Acts, retailing for $70 (Liturgical Press, Feb. 2005).

Rounding out the category of relevant Bibles is The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible from Harper San Francisco (Apr. 2005), with an initial printing of 75,000 plus an additional 10,000 in leather. According to editorial director Michael Maudlin, "spiritual formation" is the next step for a Christian after he has become a Christian. The book, he said, is above all for "evangelicals who grew up in the church, but are getting a little frustrated with a spirituality they picked up in their adolescence. They're a little restless for something more substantial and deeper." Maudlin reflected that while "most Bibles are designed for a particular market, this Bible cuts across all the segments." Or so he hopes—Maudlin pointed out that of new Bibles, "The vast majority are not successful."

Politically (In)correct

So publishers face the dilemma: go narrow, or cast the net wide? Either way, the relevance of the scriptural product could count for little if it ends up somehow offending its intended audience—as the TNIV did Southern Baptists. Hence a second impulse among some Bible publishers—to avoid offense.

AltaMira Press will publish the second volume of The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures: Volume II: The Prophets (Oct.). This will complete a translation, The Inclusive Bible, whose novelty lies in seeking to avoid offending anybody. An introduction to the volume lays out the rationale behind "inclusive language," with an emphasis on gender neutrality: thus, for instance, God is never referred to with a pronoun ("He"). More notable is that in The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures, even wicked people have their feelings respected. As we read in the introduction, " 'wickedness' can just as easily be translated 'corruption.' "

For all that the Bible is potentially offensive, another sacred text may be much riskier: the Qur'an. Two new translations are exceedingly careful in treating verses that have worried non-Muslims. Consider the famous wife-beating verse. In the translation you probably read in college, N.J. Dawood's for Penguin, it reads: "Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them" (4:34). Toning this down, The Qur'an, translated by Thomas Cleary (Starlatch, July), has the prophet advising husbands merely to "admonish them; then leave them alone in bed; then spank them." A new translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford, July) does allow husbands, in the same circumstance, to "hit" their wives.

Another incendiary verse is rendered by Dawood as, "Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends. They are friends to one another" (5:51). Here the new translations agree: Muslims need only avoid having Jews and Christians as "patrons" (Cleary) or "allies" (Haleem). In defending Cleary's translation, Ibrahim Abusharif, editor of Starlatch Press, cited Islam's "history of tolerance and mutual understanding and so forth." He said he has already sold out a first printing of 5,000 copies.

Another sacred text that will be controversial in some circles comes in November from Doubleday, which will publish the first trade edition of The Book of Mormon from a commercial nonchurch publisher, with an initial print run of more than 100,000. Doubleday's v-p of religion books, Michelle Rapkin, said, "We think that our audience is primarily practicing Mormons who want to give the Book of Mormon to their non-Mormon friends, as well as people who are simply curious about faiths other than their own."

There is, of course, no issue in translating the Mormon sacred text. The religion's founder, Joseph Smith, said he had already done that from the original source: inscribed gold plates he found buried in the earth at the direction of the angel Moroni. What is different about Doubleday's edition—aside from its broader channels of distribution—is that this Book of Mormon won't be burdened by the copious footnotes and cross-references of the Church's own official editions, making the book more user-friendly to the general reader.

Faithful Words

Catholics, meanwhile, no less than evangelicals, have their own internal tensions, expressed in the almost-completed first major revision of the New American Bible's Old Testament, which Paulist Press will bring out, along with other Catholic publishers. Publishing a Catholic Bible is not simple, said Rev. Lawrence Boadt, president and publisher of Paulist Press. Boadt, an Old Testament scholar who himself overhauled the Book of Ezekiel, said the work must first secure the official approval of a committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. That won't happen before January 2005. Then it must be granted Imprimatur by the full conference, authorizing the translation for use in public prayer. Any commentary must also be approved.

Boadt noted that arriving at an accurate translation is still more complex: "In almost every book [of the Hebrew Bible], close to a quarter of the sentences have linguistic problems in them. Some of them are probably unsolvable technically." Classical Bible commentators struggled with the same problem: "In some cases they were guessing just like I am," Boadt said.

An honest admission. The Hebrew Bible in its original language is a very hard book to make sense of at the most basic level, the sentence—a fact not dealt with by free renderings, like The Message Remix, or by easy-reading novelizations or narrative compilations like Testament: The Story of God from Adam to the Apocalypse, due out in February 2005 from Continuum. However, Testament's publisher, Henry Carrigan of Continuum's T & T Clark International imprint, said that this "reader-friendly" version "contains enough of what's difficult for folks to know how difficult [the text] is." He described the project as "an enticement. If you get caught up in the story, you can later go back and read the entire thing." Comprehending the cryptic scriptural text and revealing the scaffolding behind the scenes of a translation is the fourth and final special problem posed by the Bible.

Translating Torah

Among Jewish publishers, Mesorah's Artscroll Series of elucidated and translated Bibles, Talmuds, commentaries and prayer books stands out for comprehensiveness. Rabbi Nosson Scherman, Artscroll's general editor, put his mission simply: "We want to be accurate, but we are not trying to be 'scholarly.' We're trying to help people understand what it said." In traditional Jewish scholarship, the commentator par excellence, illuminating the Bible and the Talmud, was Rashi (1040—1105 C.E.). All of Artscroll's translations have been guided by his work—until now.

In October, the publisher will bring out the first volume of the Torah commentary of Nachmanides, a towering medieval authority of a more mystical bent, covering the first 25 chapters of Genesis. With extensive clarification for maximum accessibility, the book will include a translation of the scriptural text, but guided by Nachmanides' understanding rather than Rashi's—making for a markedly different take on some key verses, including Genesis 1:1.

A non-Jewish publisher, Oxford, has put out The Jewish Study Bible (Jan. 2004), based on the Jewish Publication Society translation, while a Jewish publisher, KTAV, will take a totally different tack. In November, KTAV will take a lesson from Christian Bible publishers, who have tried to make the Bible easier to understand, with The Torah: The Five Books of Moses: An Easy-to-Read Translation by Sol Scharfstein. Another method would be to simply cut down the amount of scriptural text a reader has to wade through. This is the approach chosen by SkyLight Paths, which will publish The Hebrew Prophets: Selections Annotated & Explained (Nov.) in its SkyLight Illuminations series. In the same series, SkyLight is bringing out The Hidden Gospel of Matthew: Annotated & Explained (Oct.).

Much the opposite strategy will set apart U.C.-Berkeley scholar Robert Alter's translation for Norton, The Five Books of Moses (Sept.). Making the Torah "easy to read" may achieve that, but Alter's editor, Steve Forman, pointed out that the Pentateuch is full of "intentional nuance, intentional ambiguity." Translations that aim for ease of comprehension "obscure the ambiguity and nuance of the ancient Hebrew," said Forman. Though describing the Torah as "manifestly a composite construction"—the work of a hypothesized "redactor" compiling the work of more ancient authors—Alter otherwise takes much the same view as traditional Jewish sages, who saw the cryptic nature of the divinely authored text as intentional, not the result of sloppy editing.

The perfect Bible translation, it seems clear, will remain elusive, as will the perfect way to package the Bible. Meanwhile, the consumer passion for Scripture goes unquenched. The vast array of choices is not only producer-driven, said Harper SF associate publisher Mark Tauber, "it's consumer-driven, in that the Bible is the central text for all these believers, so again and again and again through their spiritual lives they are going to come back to it."

The form in which they come back to it will necessarily change as they do, which is the nature of spiritual life. Only if Americans stop evolving spiritually will the Bible market ever stop evolving. Next year's range of choices, it is therefore safe to assume, will be no less dizzying than this year's.