The ESV Study Bible was designed to help a reader understand Scripture at depth, and the apparatus is on a scale few study Bibles attempt: twenty thousand study notes, eighty thousand cross-references, over two hundred charts, more than fifty articles and two hundred and forty full-color maps and illustrations.

It won the ECPA Book of the Year award and has sold more than a million copies. The volume runs to 2,752 pages at six and a half by nine and a quarter inches, with the Bible text in a single column. This edition is bound in deep brown cowhide, which is the binding to choose if it is going to be used for decades.