What to write in the
margins of your Bible

The margin is half an inch wide and the book is meant to outlast you. Both of those facts should decide what goes in it. Most of what people write in a Bible margin is the thing they were thinking on a particular Tuesday, and most of what is worth writing there is the thing they will want to find again in ten years. Those are not the same list.

What ages well

The date. Six characters, and the highest-value note you can make. A date beside a verse turns the book from a text into a record: this is what I was reading the week she was born, the month the job ended, the winter I could not sleep. Ten years on, the date is worth more than whatever you wrote next to it, and it costs nothing. If you write only one thing in your margins, write the date.

A cross-reference. Rom 8:28 beside Genesis 50:20 is eight characters and it is the whole architecture of the Bible in your own hand. It never goes stale, it is always true, and following the chain of them years later is one of the few ways of reading Scripture that gets better the longer you have owned the book.

The question you could not answer. Not an answer you copied — the question. Why does he say this twice? Who is “they”? A written question is a promise to come back, and the margin beside it is where, one day, the answer goes in a different year’s ink. A copied answer is finished the moment it is written and teaches you nothing the second time.

One word. If you use the four-category code and do not have the colours to hand, the category in a word does the same work: promise, command, warning, or what the passage says God is like. A single word survives any pen and any paper.

A definition. The word you looked up, and what it turned out to mean. Propitiation is not a word you want to look up twice.

Where you heard it. A name and a date — the preacher, the friend, the funeral. Not what they said. Where you were when the verse landed is a fact about your life; what somebody said about it is a fact about theirs.

Write the thing you will want to find again. Not the thing you are thinking.

What does not age well

Sermon notes. The commonest thing in a Bible margin and the one that reliably goes dead. They are the preacher’s outline, not your reading, and they fill the margin of Romans 8 with somebody else’s three points in a hand you were rushing. Sermon notes belong in a notebook, where they have room and where they can be forgotten without spoiling a page you will read for the rest of your life.

Other people’s business. The same rule that quietly ruins a prayer journal applies with more force here, because a Bible gets lent, left open, and eventually read by your children. A first name and a date is a prayer. A paragraph about what she did is not something you want in a book that outlives you.

Anything you would not want your children to read. That is not a warning against honesty — the honest question in the margin is the best thing in it. It is a reminder of what the book is for. A marked Bible is one of the few things a person leaves behind that says what they actually thought, and it will be read in that spirit. Write for that reader too.

Paragraphs. The margin is for a sentence. If the thought is longer than a sentence it is a journal entry, and it wants the notebook beside the Bible, not the half inch beside the verse — because you will squeeze it, abbreviate it, and in five years be unable to read your own hand.

A small margin is not the problem

People buy a wide-margin Bible because the half inch felt like a limit. It is a limit, and it is a useful one — it is what forces the sentence instead of the paragraph. Before replacing the book, use the room the book already has.

The top and bottom margins are wider than the side ones on nearly every Bible, and almost nobody uses them. A running note across the foot of the page has more room than three side margins put together.

A symbol set. A small circle for a promise, an arrow for a cross-reference, a question mark for a question, a bracket down the side for a passage rather than a verse. Four symbols, kept for years, carry more than four colours and take up a tenth of the room.

A number. When a thought is too long for the margin, write a small number beside the verse and write the thought under that number in a notebook. It is how scholars have annotated books for centuries, it is free, and it means the margin stays legible while the notebook holds the paragraphs. The chronological-plus-marking structure for a journal was built to hold exactly this kind of entry.

The blank pages at the back. They are the same paper as the text — unlike the front flyleaf, which is usually heavier — and they are the right place for the longer notes that belong in the Bible itself: the list of the passages you go back to, the outline of a book you worked through, the verses you want read at your funeral.

What to write with

A pigment-ink fineliner between 0.3 and 0.5 mm — the reasons are on the pens page, and the short version is that pigment ink does not feather on thin paper and does not lift when a highlighter goes over it later. Pencil is honourable and erasable, and it has one quiet failure: over years in a closed book, graphite transfers to the facing page as a grey shadow. A harder lead — 2H rather than the usual HB — smears far less and still erases. If you are staying in pencil, that is the whole upgrade.

There is one product mentioned below and the link to it is a paid, sponsored link — I earn a commission if you buy through it, at no extra cost to you. I have not written in my own Bible with these; the case for them rests on the ink type, which is on the manufacturer’s listing, and it is made in full on the pens page.

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When the margin is finally full

Then, and not before, the wide margin is the right purchase — what a journaling Bible actually is, and what the extra inch and a half costs, has its own page. A full margin is not a problem to solve. It is the residue of having read the book, and the second Bible you buy to keep going is a better purchase for having been earned.

Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart. Proverbs 7:3