of death”; “as long as I live” vs. “for ever”). By the seventies this kind of deference to tradition was no longer necessary, especially since several new translations incorporating the marginal readings had already appeared. The committee now had the opportunity to bring the RSV into harmony with the best scholarship of the seventies and eighties. The program was, therefore, this: to update grammatical forms, to eliminate sex-biased vocabulary, and to incorporate the results of sound biblical scholarship