New American Standard Bible

The 1977 update was the first full revision of the New American Standard Bible, issued six years after the translation's completion in 1971. Covering the complete Bible, it was prepared from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, with critical editions of the original-language texts serving as its base. Like its predecessor, it follows a formal-equivalence philosophy, seeking to render the wording and structure of the source texts closely, and it is classified as a substantial update rather than a fresh translation, taking the 1971 NASB as both predecessor and base translation. Among its distinctive features, it retained more traditional English than later NASB revisions, preserving older forms that subsequent editions would modernize. The NASB itself stands in the line of the American Standard Version tradition, and the 1977 text long served readers, students, and teachers who valued a closely literal English rendering for study and comparison.