For years, I’ve collected study Bibles. For a while, this was my hobby, but I recently acquired what I believe will probably be the last study Bible I ever buy, both because of the expense and because I doubt any will come out in my lifetime that I like better.
As well as a collector, I am a compulsive Bible annotator. I anotate as a kind of religious discipline: In my office, with no illumination except a desk lamp, bent over the page and writing in my finest print with a Sakura Pigma Micron, I have my own little scriptorium.
Although I own many more than that number, I have over my life used three study Bibles to hold my notes and am now on the fourth. I started with an NIV Study Bible I scribbled in as a teen, followed by the Nelson Study Bible I purchased from its editor at a retreat, followed by the HarperCollins Study Bible, which I purchased while in graduate school, took two years to read, and carefully wrote in for over a decade.
My HarperCollins is now falling to pieces. For that reason, I reecently spent a year and a half consolidating all of my notes. Then I purchased my fourth and (as I anticipate) final study Bible, into which I have begun copying all that work. I expect this project, the complete duplication of my annotations in a new volume, to take three years at least. I will probably add to these notes until I die or at least become incapacitated.
My notes are eclectic: They consist of everything from summaries of sermons to summaries of archaeology journal articles to quotations ranging from Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad-Gita. There is no theme or discipline to my notes; they consist of things related to the Bible, either directly or through thematic association, that I want to be able to find again.