Deciphering the meanings of the Bible’s ancient languages involves a host of efforts: the study of the languages themselves, the comparative study of cognate languages from the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, the disciplines of philology and linguistics, and the historical study of the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which the Bible was written. The NRSVue took special care not to use terms in ways that are historically or theologically anachronistic, though, as in every translation, anachronism is unavoidable.