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The SBL Handbook of Style (SBLHS) is a style manual (like APA or MLA) for biblical studies and related disciplines. This is the standard format for academic research in biblical and theological studies. Be sure to check your syllabus or ask your professor for their preferred citation style
The SBL style, like Turabian, is a substantial supplement to The Chicago Manual of Style (now in its 17th edition). Chicago style has a "footnote" style as well as an "in-text" style like APA or MLA.
SBL style follows Chicago's footnote style. Using a footnote style has many advantages when writing academic papers; notably, it won't clutter up the main text of your paper with many parenthetical citations thus making for smoother reading. Footnotes also allow for explanatory comments or tangents which would otherwise be unacceptable within the main text of the paper.
The SBL Handbook of Style (SBLHS), now in its 2nd edition, provides specialized terminology and examples for biblical studies and ancillary disciplines that go beyond the rules found in The Chicago Manual of Style. In particular, SBLHS provides standard titles and abbreviations for modern and ancient sources, as well as citation examples of specialized literature like commentaries, lexicons, journals, and other complex reference works.
This guide is meant to help you conform your paper to SBLHS by summarizing important concepts and offering examples of common format and citation questions.
General style issues pertaining to biblical and theological studies have to do with things like punctuation, numbers, terminology, and transliterations. Regarding punctuation, should you use an apostrophe s or just an apostrophe with a noun that ends with an s (for example, Jesus' or Jesus's)? Or what is the proper way to refer to a biblical verse: Rom 1.16 or Rom 1:16? Regarding numbers, when do you spell out a number or not? Regarding terminology, often specialized disciplines have many terms that are perhaps spelled a certain way or have a specialized meaning (for example, what's the difference between lowercase gospel and capitalized Gospel?). And with regard to transliterations, characters in languages that do not use a Latin script (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, etc.) are given standard Latin characters for consistent representation where a word processor does not use non-Latin characters.
These general issues are discussed at length in §4 and §5 (pages 12-67) of SBLHS.
Even though SBL is a footnote style, you should prefer in-text references to biblical passages, unless you're referring to more than three biblical texts in the same parenthesis. After a quotation, paraphrase, summary, or allusion to a biblical passage, you should place the passage in parentheses using the standard abbreviation for the biblical book, chapter, and verse. Multiple references in the same parenthesis should be separated as in this example: (Eph 1:1, 12; Deut 21:23; Rom 8:1-4; 12:10). Here's a longer example of how it might look in the text of a research paper:
"When Paul states that 'the righteous will live by faith' (Gal 3:11), he is quoting Hab 2:4: 'But the righteous person will live by his faithfulness' (NIV). Notice how Paul drops the pronoun 'his.' To make things more complicated, in the Septuagint (the Greek OT) the pronoun seems to have been changed from 'his' to 'my' (Hab 2:4 NETS). It's hard to tell if Paul relied on the Septuagint or the Hebrew text as represented in the NIV for his quotation. Perhaps looking at Paul's quotations of other OT texts in this same passage could help (viz., Lev 18:5; Deut 21:23; 27:26)."
