There are many Study Bibles available. Some are general and some are geared to a particular audience (women, men, children) or a theology (Catholic, reformed, end times). We'll look at two. A general one, The NIV Study Bible. And a specialized one, The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible. The Key Study Bible comes in several translations

Let's look at the NIV Study Bible first.

It has an introduction page in front of each book of the Bible. The introduction gives information about who wrote it, why it was written and some of the basic information about how that book is organized.

The lower half of the page has study notes for different verses—explanation of words or phrases, background infomration as well as some interpretation.

Now let's take a look at The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible. This, like its name suggests, helps you study the original languages without having to actually know those languages. As we look at the page, I'll explain what I mean.

This page has the same basic set up as the other. The verses fill the top of the page, with the cross-references in the center. But, even with this small page, you can see that there are a lot more superscripts thoughout the text. Our Heb. 11:1 verse looks like this in the Key Study Bible:

What are all those things?
1. The Key Study Bible has dictionaries in the back. The numbers you see after the word correspond to the numbers in the Greek dictionary. You will find meanings of the Greek word and how it is used in other verses.
2. The letters in front of a word are a code for the word's part of speech in Greek.
3. The letter after the word hope is the cross-reference letter.

If you look really hard, you may notice that the stood and ground at the bottom of the first column are underlined. When you see that, it means that one word in the Greek has been translated as two.

The bottom part of the page has more specific (and usually word oriented) notes than the NIV Study Bible .

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