Description

American Standard Version Bible. ASV Bible

The Revised Version, Standard American Edition of the Bible,more commonly known as the American Standard Version (ASV), is arevision of the King James Version and was released in 1901. It wasoriginally best known by its full name, but soon came to have othernames, such as the American Revised Version, the American StandardRevision, the American Standard Revised Bible, and the AmericanStandard Edition. By the time its copyright was renewed in 1929, ithad finally come to be known by its present name, the AmericanStandard Version. Because of its prominence in seminaries, however,it was sometimes simply called the "Standard Bible".

The ASV was the basis of several later Bible revisions. Theywere the Revised Standard Version (1946-1952/1971), the AmplifiedBible (1965), the New American Standard Bible (1963-1971/1995), andthe Recovery Version (1999). The ASV was also the basis for theWorld English Bible and Kenneth N. Taylor's Bible paraphrase, TheLiving Bible, which was published in 1971.

The ASV is now considered antiquated, and rare antique editionsare hard to find.

Features
The divine name of the Almighty (the Tetragrammaton) isconsistently rendered Jehovah in the ASV Old Testament, rather thanLORD as it appears in the King James Bible. The reason for thischange, as the Committee explained in the preface, was that "...theAmerican Revisers... were brought to the unanimous conviction thata Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacredto be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or anyother version of the Old Testament..."[2] Other changes from the RVto the ASV included (but were not limited to) substituting "who"and "that" for "which" when referring to people, and Holy Ghost wasdropped in favor of Holy Spirit. Page headings were added andfootnotes were improved.