Random ASV Bible Verse

The American Standard Version was published in 1901, the work of American scholars who had helped produce the English Revised Version a generation earlier. It quickly earned a reputation as one of the most precise Bibles in the English language.

Precision is the ASV's whole personality. The translators followed the Hebrew and Greek so closely that seminaries used it as a study text for decades, and it became the ancestor of many later translations.

The NASB and the Amplified Bible are direct revisions of it, and the RSV, which later gave rise to the ESV, also traces back to the ASV. If you read almost any formal modern translation, you are reading its grandchild.

The ASV is public domain in the United States, so any verse the tool above gives you is free to copy and share.

Why draw a random verse in the ASV

The ASV rewards readers who like to look closely. A random verse here often preserves the shape of the original sentence, which makes it a good sparring partner for comparison with a modern translation.

It is also a window into history. When you read a verse like Isaiah 40:31 in the ASV, you are reading the text that trained a century of pastors, scholars, and translators.

Some readers turn the randomizer into a study prompt. Draw a verse, read it slowly, then check how two or three other translations render it. Where the wording differs, something interesting is usually going on underneath.

Reading notes

The ASV's most famous feature is the name "Jehovah". Where the KJV prints "the LORD", the ASV renders the divine name directly, so a verse like Psalms 23:1 will look slightly unfamiliar at first.

The English is formal and sometimes stiff. Word order can feel inverted in places because the translators chose faithfulness over smoothness.

It also keeps "thee" and "thou", partly to preserve the difference between singular and plural that the original languages make and modern English blurs.

If a verse feels knotty, the knot is often in the original too. Reading the surrounding verses, or setting the ASV beside a modern translation like the BSB, usually clears things up.