the better-known versions of this passage in English. The Revised Standard Version (RSV), which is based on Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, for example, treats verses 1–3 in this way: Young's usage of English present tense rather than past tense has been supported by scholars ranging from the medieval Jewish rabbi Rashi (who advised, "[I]f you are going to interpret [this passage] in its plain sense, interpret it thus: At the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was (or the earth being) unformed and void [...] God said, 'Let there be light.) to Richard Elliott Friedman in his translation of the Pentateuch in The Bible with Sources Revealed (2002). The translation is not perfectly literal. It renders one passage as "And on the first of the Sabbaths" while it translates another as "And on the first of the week" even though the two phrases are identical in the Greek texts. To quote the preface, "Every effort has been made to secure a comparative degree of uniformity in rendering the original words and phrases. Thus, for example, the Hebrew verb , which is rendered by the King James' translators in different ways... has been restricted and reduced to , and so with many others. It is the Translator's ever-growing conviction, that even this smaller number may be reduced still further." David Dewey, in A User's Guide to Bible Translations, mentions that Young's "method of translating Hebrew tenses makes his Old Testament in places virtually unreadable." Eternity or age Another important feature of YLT is its treatment of the Hebrew word () and the Greek word (). These two words have basically the same meaning, and YLT translates them and their derivatives as "age" or "age-enduring". Other English versions most often translate them to indicate eternality (eternal, everlasting, forever, etc.). However, there are notable exceptions to this in all major translations, such as: "I am with you always, to the end of the age” (NRSV), the word "age" being a translation of . Rendering to indicate eternality in this verse would result in the contradictory phrase "end of eternity", so the question arises whether it should ever be so. Proponents of universal reconciliation point out that this has significant implications for soteriology and the problem of hell. However, "age" and "age-enduring" imply indeterminacy which may be either timeless and atemporal or pertaining to an indefinite period of time, the