English Standard Version(ESV)

The English Standard Version is published by Crossway and produced by a translation oversight committee of evangelical scholars. First released in 2001 and most recently revised in 2016, it was built as a revision of the 1971 edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) — reworked line by line to align it with a more formal, “essentially literal” translation philosophy while keeping much of the RSV's literary quality.

The ESV aims to be as literal as it can be while still reading as natural English — favoring word-for-word correspondence to the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek wherever that's readable, and adjusting only where a strictly literal rendering would be genuinely unclear to a modern reader.

On gender language, the ESV takes a traditional approach: it predominantly translates generic masculine terms — “brothers,” “man,” “he” — as they appear in the original text, rather than systematically adding inclusive alternatives like “brothers and sisters” (a small number of exceptions exist where the ESV does use gender-inclusive wording for a clearly mixed audience). The idea is to let the English wording match the original wording as closely as possible and leave it to the reader, in context, to recognize when a passage is addressing everyone.

The ESV has become one of the most widely used translations in English-speaking evangelicalism since its release, especially in Reformed and broadly Reformed circles, and is the base text for the popular ESV Study Bible and a large library of ESV-based commentaries and devotionals.

In the summer of 2016, Crossway announced that the ESV's wording would become permanently fixed from then on — unchanging in all future printings, similar to how the KJV has stood since 1769. About a month later, Crossway reversed course and said the ESV would remain open to future revisions after all, keeping the door open for the kind of periodic updates most other translations receive.