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 "nathan", which is rendered by the King James' translators in "sixty-seven" different ways... has been restricted and reduced to "ten", 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."