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Rating: 
Summary: Recommended for conservative Christians
Review: If you are a conservative Christian with strong fundamentalist leanings you will find this an excellent survey of the Old Testament books. If you are not then you will probably find difficulty with many portions of it. However, you may still find value in the large number of photographs, charts, tables, and graphs. The author does an excellent of distilling chapters of information into tables that clearly show the relationships. For example, he has illustrations of the chronological relationship between the Old Testament books (no the Bible does not have them in chronological order), God's covenants with Israel, and a chronology of Israel's judges. Hardly a page goes by without a picture, illustration, chart, or other visual aid to help the reader understand the author's comments. However, some of the pictures belong more in a tourist pamphlet than a serious Bible survey book. (For example, there are pictures of places "tradition" assigns as significant, like the "burial place" of Samuel. There is no evidence of this being factual but even in the Middle Ages traders recognized the value of having a religiously significant location within your city. So, many "traditional" sites suddenly sprang up.) Fortunately these sorts of pictures are few in number when compared with the large number that enhances the text. While the mainstream or more liberal Christian may find something of value in the charts and tables, "Survey of the Old Testament" is really recommended mainly for conservative Christian readers who will find it a valuable resource strongly slanted toward that belief system.
Rating:
Summary: Recommended for conservative Christians
Review: If you are a conservative Christian with strong fundamentalist leanings you will find this an excellent survey of the Old Testament books. If you are not then you will probably find difficulty with many portions of it. However, you may still find value in the large number of photographs, charts, tables, and graphs. The author does an excellent of distilling chapters of information into tables that clearly show the relationships. For example, he has illustrations of the chronological relationship between the Old Testament books (no the Bible does not have them in chronological order), God's covenants with Israel, and a chronology of Israel's judges. Hardly a page goes by without a picture, illustration, chart, or other visual aid to help the reader understand the author's comments. However, some of the pictures belong more in a tourist pamphlet than a serious Bible survey book. (For example, there are pictures of places "tradition" assigns as significant, like the "burial place" of Samuel. There is no evidence of this being factual but even in the Middle Ages traders recognized the value of having a religiously significant location within your city. So, many "traditional" sites suddenly sprang up.) Fortunately these sorts of pictures are few in number when compared with the large number that enhances the text. While the mainstream or more liberal Christian may find something of value in the charts and tables, "Survey of the Old Testament" is really recommended mainly for conservative Christian readers who will find it a valuable resource strongly slanted toward that belief system.
Rating: 
Summary: Guide to Scriptures.
Review: Most Christians enjoy reading the Bible. However, just about everyone who reads the Bible has trouble understanding how all the different names, concepts, dates, numbers, etcetra fit into the overall picture. For people who don't own a study Bible that explains many of these textual references, Paul N. Benware's SURVEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT is a great book to have. The book is very compact and rather small, making it easy to carry around. It's written in modern English and is easy to read. It's full of pictures, charts, and diagrams as well as a brief overview of each book of the Old Testament. Even for those who have a study Bible and are familiar with the Old Testament, SURVEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT is a nice companion piece to have as a reference. After all, you can't always chug Strong's Concordance, a book of Ancient Atlases, and other materials with you everywhere you go. But you can bring along this small companion piece.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent study of the New Testament
Review: Paul Benware has written an excellent review of each book of the Christian Scriptures (New Testament). He discusses the authorship, date, purpose, outline, themes and summary of each book. This survey is written from a Fundamentalist Christian point of view. For example, the author belives that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written by authors with those names. A liberal Christian would not find this book to be particularly helpful.
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