it is based on the 1901 "american standard version", the greek "majority text", and the hebrew "biblia hebraica stuttgartensia" with some minor changes made because of alternative readings in the dead sea scrolls and the septuagint but these alternative readings are ignored or restricted to the footnotes. there are seven passes of editing and reading for each book. the first pass updated about 1,000 words, phrases and grammatical constructs. the first manual pass was to add quotation marks and other punctuation, and to check the version against the greek and hebrew texts where there are large textual variants or the meaning is not clear.