The Voice of the Psalms Review

The Voice is a new Bible translation project that involves many artists, scholars and writers, headed up by Chris Seay, in an attempt to provide a translation that is accurate and yet maintains the creative style of the original text. Which makes the book of Psalms a great fit, as this translation style keeps the lyrical, flowing format and puts them into wording that is modern but not to the extent of paraphrases such as The Message. Personally I found it very readable.
As well as all 150 Psalms this book contains short, half page reflections to go with 75 of them which are insightful and help you not just read the words of the Psalms but respond prayerfully and apply them to your own life. While I appreciated the reflections provided, I would have preferred if there had been one for each Psalm, as several of my favourites were missing a reflection.
Visually this is a pretty well designed book, with the psalms set out with various words capitalized or in italics to give you a sense of the emphasis that would be put on various words in their original sung format which was a nice touch. And the page design is a bit more artistic than your typical bland white page book.
The book does only include the Psalms, so content wise it is a bit light for a standalone book (but at least it isn’t a standalone book of Jude…) – the inclusion of several other books would increase its value (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes would come to mind as suitable for the Voice treatment).
This is a great book for people who want to engage with the Psalms and find the Psalm section of their regular Bible a bit bland for what is meant to be a collection of songs of praise to God and yet want something more accurate than The Message. The reflections included help you understand and make this book very useful for daily devotions.
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