Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I tell my students every chance I get to read and become familiar with the Old Testament Apocrypha as the most important literature outside of the Protestant canon that they could encounter. Since these Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books are part of the Bible for the majority of the world's Christians (i.e., Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians), however, they are also readily available in many modern translations. These translations are considerably better (being done by groups of scholars on the basis of the best textual evidence and modern research on the original languages) and more readable than the older public domain translations. So I would advise readers to check out the editions of the Apocrypha in the NRSV, ESV, or CEB (all of which also include 3 and 4 Maccabees, two essential writings from Hellenistic Judaism left out here) and purchase one of these in an inexpensive edition. As for 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Book of Jasher, the same translations included here (R. H. Charles did his translation of 1 Enoch before World War I) are freely available on many sites across the web, and 1 Enoch (also a very important book for understanding early Judaism and Christianity) is now available in an excellent modern translation by James VanderKam and George Nickelsburg. The combined cost of a modern Bible with the Apocrypha and this new translation of 1 Enoch is less than the list price of this collection. Calling this the "Researcher's Library" of these texts is, I just have to say, shamelessly misleading. As a researcher, I would turn to the editions in R. H. Charles's 2-volume Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament for the sake of the copious annotations it contains and the editions of 1 Enoch and Jubilees in the collections by James Charlesworth and H. F. D. Sparks. Bottom line, by all means read the Apocrypha, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees (the value of Jasher is somewhat dubious to me, since it is probably a more modern forgery), but seek out the better (and much more readable) translations.