When
buying a new Bible, you will need to ask yourself what you are
looking for in a study Bible: how you like to study, what you want to
get out of your studies. You need to make two decisions: the
translation you want for the actual Bible text, and the type of study
notes you want incorporated into it.
One kind of study notes
are "life application" notes. They draw out how the
concepts in the text call us to make particular choices in our own
lives.
One kind of notes are traditional interpretation notes.
This is what you will usually find in a Zondervan study bible. The
notes tell you how the church has historically understood the text.
It draws out relationships between the passage you are reading and
other passages, and may quote historical Reformation scholars
regarding the meaning of the text. These notes are likely to lean
toward a presumption of literal inerrancy.
Another kind of
study notes are textual criticism. These are the kind of notes you
will usually find in an Oxford study bible. They draw on secular
historical research, comparison with ancient non-biblical,
archeological evidence and scholarship, to present an empirical view
of how the texts were compiled and what their meaning might be in
historical context. They tend to lean away from the presumption of
literal inerrancy.
The translation itself can range from the
historical language of the King James Version, to a great many
modern-language versions. Modern language versions may attempt to
preserve the tone of the King James Version (as the Revised Standard
Version does); to use an extreme level of simplicity for the sake of
easy reading and understanding (as the Contemporary English Version
does); use beautiful modern English freshly retranslated from
original texts (as the Revised English Bible does), stick as closely
as possible to the original words (a 'literal' translation), preserve
the connotations of the original text by translating them into more
modern idiom (a 'dynamic equivalence' translation), or use slang or
casual modern idiom to present the original text in a fresh, relevant
way. Translations may be prepared by an individual scholar, by a team
from a particular denomination or organization, or by a broad
spectrum of scholars from many faiths and universities. And they may
follow different rules about which books to include: the 66-book
canon that Protestants generally accept; the 72-book canon of the
Vatican, the Syrian canon used by Eastern Orthodox churches, or the
79-book canon of Old Testament/Apocrypha/New Testament used by
Anglicans; so you need to know which canon you are looking for.