“More Than Any Man Has Ever Done”

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It was the end of 1842, and Julia Smith expected the end of the world. A believer in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Baptist preacher William Miller, Smith had allowed the plants in the conservatory of her Connecticut home to go unwatered and die. She had even prepared her Ascension robe, to be worn at the Second Coming.

“I read the Bible almost all day,” she wrote in her diary on December 31, 1842. “I have eaten nothing since yesterday noon. It is the last day of the year 1842, which according to Mr. Miller could be the last year of the world.”¹

In the 1830s, William Miller had toured Protestant pulpits in New England, New Jersey and New York, preaching that Jesus’ Second Coming, or Advent, was at hand. Basing his predictions on passages in the Book of Daniel, Miller attracted between 50,000 and 100,000 followers, known as Millerites.²

Unlike the 39 members of Heaven’s Gate who killed themselves in California last year in anticipation of their heavenly ascent, Smith simply waited. Disillusioned when the Second Coming did not occur, Smith attributed the failure of Miller’s prophecies to inadequate translation of the Bible. Determined to correct the situation, 150 years ago, at age 55, Smith began to translate the Bible for herself. She spent seven years at this task, becoming the first—and only—woman to translate the Old and New Testaments into English (or any other language).³ She worked from the Greek, Hebrew and Latin, eventually preparing five 042handwritten copies of her translation. Describing her motivation, Smith wrote:

[My] translation was made for the gratification of six persons, the five sisters Smith and one friend. They were all much interested…in searching the Scriptures after the notorious Miller doctrine came out, and they met weekly for that purpose. They were all anxious to know the literal meaning of every word God had spoken.⁴

Born in 1792, the year Kentucky became the 15th state to enter the Union and George Washington successfully ran for reelection, Julia Evelina Smith was the fourth daughter of Hannah Hadassah Hickock Smith, an accomplished linguist, poet, astronomer and mathematician, and Zephaniah Hollister Smith, a minister turned lawyer. She and her four extravagantly named sisters (Hancy Zephina, Cyrinthia Sacretia, Laurilla Aleroyla, and Abby Hadassah) lived in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

Linguistically gifted like her mother, Smith was probably exposed to French at an early age (both her father and maternal grandfather could “speak like a Frenchman”); she studied Greek at a local academy. At 14 she tackled Latin, although her peers ridiculed her studious ways, accusing her of wanting to go to college. At 18 she went to live with a Haitian refugee family for two years to perfect her French. Smith left Glastonbury at 31 to teach this anguage at Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York. Although she appears to have been a success, and Willard tried to induce her to stay by offering her $200 per year, after only two terms Smith returned home, complaining of insomnia, headaches and a stiff neck. To maintain her proficiency in the language, however, she kept her diary in French for more than 30 years.

Three years after the “Great Disappointment”^a caused by the failure of William Miller’s prophecies, Smith began to translate the Greek New Testament. After completing this project, she translated the Greek Septuagint. Next, she faced the problem of translating from Hebrew, a language in which she had no training. At first her goal was modest: She desired merely to translate the proper names. As her father was no longer living, she turned to a learned friend, Samuel Farmer Jarvis, professor of Oriental languages and literature at Washington College in nearby Hartford, who possessed what was probably the largest private library in America at the time, with 8,000 to 10,000 volumes. He encouraged her to 043expand her project and learn the language. Jarvis assured Smith that Hebrew was a simple language and easily learned, as there was but one book of pure Hebrew—the Bible. Perhaps his most convincing argument was that if she learned Hebrew she could see with her own eyes “and not look through the glasses of [her] neighbors.”⁵ After making two translations of the Hebrew Bible, Smith finished her tour de force by translating the Vulgate (Latin) Bible.

Smith did not aim to produce a smooth translation:

It was not man’s opinion that I wanted as to construction or rendering, but the literal meaning of every Hebrew word and that I wrote down, supplying nothing and paraphrasing nothing, so everybody may judge the meaning for himself by the translation, precisely as those familiar with the Hebrew may construe the original. All the italicized words in the King James Version, inserted to fill out the meaning according to the construction of the translators, have been omitted by me. Let every reader supply them for himself as these translators did.⁶

Smith’s stubborn insistence on translating even idioms literally caused some strange readings. Thus, the infant Moses is placed “by the lip of the river” (Exodus 2:3) and the graceful “apple of thine eye” becomes the clumsy “pupil of the daughter of the eye” (Psalm 17:8).

She acknowledged that her use of Hebrew tenses deliberately ran contrary to scholarly practice. She deliberately ignored the waw consecutive,^b the “magic wand” that changes past to future and future to past.⁷ This, plus her refusal to use the present tense verbs of existence (am, is, are), which do not exist in Hebrew, gave her translation disconcerting changes of time and made it read in places like “pidgin-English”:

And it shall be after these words, and God tried Abraham, and he will say to him, Abraham: and he will say, “Behold, here I.”

Genesis 22:1

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And it shall be as Joseph came to his brethren, and they will strip off his tunic, the tunic reaching to the soles of the feet which was upon him. And they will take him and will throw him into the pit; and the pit empty; water not in it.

Genesis 37:23–24^c

Often this peculiarity of Smith’s translation makes historical narrative read as though it were predictive:

And it will be at the time of the evening, and David will rise from off his bed, and will go upon the roof of the king’s house: and he will see from the roof a woman washing herself; and the woman good of aspect exceedingly.

2 Samuel 11:2^d

Smith wrote:

It is very possible that the readers of this book may think it strange that I have made such use of the tenses, going according to the Hebrew grammar. It seems that the original 045Hebrew had no regard to time and that the Bible speaks for all ages. If I did not follow the tenses as they are, I myself should be the judge, and man must not be trusted with regard to the word of God. I think that the promiscuous use of the tenses shows that there must be something hidden, that we must search out.⁸

To the modern scholar this view is odd, but it should be remembered that at one time, biblical languages were thought to be divinely created. Before archaeologists discovered bills, letters and other pedestrian texts written in the Koine Greek of the New Testament, for example, this language was thought to be a simplified Greek designed by God to help disseminate the gospel. Against this background, Smith’s attitude toward Hebrew tenses seems less quixotic. Her claims that the awkward fluctuation of tenses was evidence of truth obscured by God, and that the peculiarities of New Testament Greek were “due of the influence of the Holy Spirit,” were a matter of faith, a belief in the divine nature of the text.⁹

If it weren’t for small-town politics, seven cows and the suffragist movement, however, Smith’s translation might never have been made public.

In 1872, the taxes of Julia and her sister Abby, the remaining members of the Smith family, were increased by a hundred dollars. Julia, then 80, found that only she, her sister and two widows had been so assessed; no man had been similarly treated. Incensed, Abby complained at a town meeting, but the sisters received no relief. They refused to pay the unjust taxes, and the town seized seven of their eight Alderny cows to pay their debt. The sisters were shocked, mostly because their neighbors tried to take advantage of the situation at a town auction.¹⁰

The Smith sisters’ tax protest became a cause célèbre of the suffragist movement. Souvenirs made from the hair of the Smith cows appeared as far west as Chicago. Isabella Beecher Hooker, one of Connecticut’s most prominent suffragists, suggested that “kine couchant” (cows resting) on the grassy bank of the beautiful Connecticut River be pictured on the state suffrage banner.¹¹ The original bill of sale for the famous cows was framed and exhibited as an “object of historical interest” at a Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Meeting.¹² The Springfield Republican compared the Smiths to those American patriots who had protested England’s “taxation without representation.”

In 1876, as America celebrated the centennial of the American Revolution, the Smith sisters celebrated their belief in the biblical mandate for justice by bringing forth The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, Translated Literally from the Original Tongues, the translation that Julia had begun almost 30 years earlier. In a letter, they wrote, “We thought it might help our cause to have known that a woman could do more than any man has ever done”—that is, translate the entire Bible without assistance.¹³

The sisters spent the bulk of their savings to have Julia’s translation printed by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut. They hoped not only to give evidence of Julia’s intellectual prowess but also to thwart the tax men by spending their savings, which were subject to seizure.¹⁴ Just 1,000 copies of the translation were printed, at a cost of $4,000. Of these, 950 were clothbound, and 50 had library bindings.¹⁵ The Bible was sold through the mail for $2.80, postpaid. Copies were available from the Smith sisters, the American Publishing Company and the Boston offices of the weekly suffragist newspaper The Woman’s Journal.¹⁶ An 1884 inventory of Smith’s possessions indicates that only 50 remained undistributed.¹⁷

The Old Testament of the Smith translation follows the Masoretic text so closely that it duplicates 054the Hebrew order of books and Psalm numbering rather than that of Protestant Bibles.^e It does not, however, use the Hebrew names for the books. The New Testament is Smith’s translation from Greek.¹⁸ The translation from the Greek reads more smoothly than that from Hebrew. Although some have maintained that this indicates a better command of Greek,¹⁹ the difference truly arises from the differences between Semitic and Indo-European grammar.

Smith was proud of her accomplishment: “Shortly after my Bible was published, Professor [Edward James] Young at Harvard University came to see me. He had been professor of Hebrew there seven years. He examined my Bible and said, ‘I must have one of these. I am astonished that you could get the translation so correct without consulting some learned man.’ He was surprised I used the tenses as I did. I said, ‘You acknowledge that I have translated according to the Hebrew Idiom?’ He replied, ‘O yes, you have.’”²⁰

Nevertheless, Smith’s translation faded into obscurity. One finds few references to it in contemporaneous journals or in later Bible scholarship. A rare exception appeared in the Unitarian Review of 1876: “[Smith’s] style of translating may defeat its own object by attaching literal and arbitrary meaning to words which are capable of expressing a variety of ideas. But in these days of ‘mythical,’ and ‘natural,’ and ‘tendency,’ and what other theories, there is something rather refreshing in such a method of going to work…For daily devotion we are not likely yet to give up the old version. But we ought to welcome the labors of any new hand and brain in this department of study, and we trust the public will not give an inhospitable reception to the work of this New England woman.”²¹

In the 1890s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her collaborators produced The Woman’s Bible, which included excerpts from and commentaries on biblical passages featuring women. In an appendix to this book, Frances Ellen Burr, a Hartford journalist and close friend of Smith’s, states that the committee used Julia’s translation as “their ultimate authority for the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew text.”²² But this claim merits close scrutiny, for Smith’s translation is surely not the text quoted at the beginning of the passages of commentary. That text appears to derive from a bowdlerized version of the King James Bible.

Smith’s influence is most directly felt in Lillie Devereux Blake’s commentary in The Woman’s Bible. Blake quotes directly from Smith’s translation of Genesis 3:20: “And Adam called his wife’s name Life for she was the mother of all living.” Blake observes: “It is a pity that all versions of the Bible do not give this word instead of the Hebrew Eve. She was Life, the eternal mother, the first representative of the more valuable and important half of the human race.”²³

More recently, New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger has criticized Smith’s translation as “excessively wooden.” He writes: “Miss Smith illustrates dramatically a fact which some persons do not appreciate, namely, that most words have more than one meaning, and in translation the more specific meaning of a word in a particular context has to be determined from that context. Perhaps her initial mistake was to seek no help or advice in her venture.”²⁴

This evaluation overlooks Smith’s modernization of the text through the elimination of the archaic third person -th ending as well as her use of “Jehovah” for the tetragrammaton, YHWH, instead of the traditional “LORD.” This latter innovation not only anticipated the American Standard Version by a quarter of a century but brings Smith the distinction of having the most comprehensible translation of Psalm 110:1 extant: “Jehovah spake to my Lord.”^f Moreover, in his eagerness to present the clumsiness of her language, Metzger ignores the sensual breathlessness of more poetic passages: “My beloved is white and ruddy, bearing the standard of ten thousand. His head purified gold, his locks waving branches, black as a raven. His eyes as doves upon channels of water washed with milk, sitting upon fulness. His cheeks as beds of spices, towers of aromatic herbs: his lips lilies, dropping overflowing myrrh” (Song of Solomon 5:10–13).²⁵

Acknowledging Smith as the first woman to translate both the Old and New Testaments, Ernest Frerichs of Brown University describes Smith’s work as part of a widespread 19th-century search for a more literal translation. This movement has been attributed to “the pressure of ‘scientific’ conceptions of learning.”²⁶ At this time the Church of England undertook a revision of the King James Version. This effort resulted in the English Revised Version (ERV), completed in 1885. The American Standard Version (ASV), which drew heavily upon the labor of the English committee, appeared in 1901. Both the ERV and the ASV used the technique of concordant consistency (the uniform use of the same translated word in rendering an original word), as had Julia Smith. These translations were rejected by the public, as was Smith’s, because of their awkward language and uninspiring style.

Unfortunately, Frerichs misleadingly suggests that Smith was motivated in part by the dominating presence of men “not only in the Bible…but also in the history of translation.”²⁷ Smith, however, attributed her motivation solely to her desire to read for herself. Her translation may be considered feminist insofar as it was nurtured within a circle of women and it reflects her self-confidence in her competence as a translator. However, she did not promote gender-inclusive language and expressly denied any such intention. When accused of having translated the “righteous man” of James 5:16 as the “just one” because that included women as well, Smith replied, “Such a word or thought never entered my head, for I knew it referred to our Savior.”²⁸ However, her motivation for publication was certainly feminist, for through her translation she intended to show that she was the intellectual equal of any male.

Julia Smith was not the only woman to translate scripture, nor was she the first. Ann Francis translated the Song of Solomon in 1781, and both “Bloody Mary” Tudor and her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I, are credited with translating portions of the New Testament in the 16th century. But no woman before or since has matched her achievement in translating the entire Bible. As Smith’s translation of Proverbs 31:31 has it, “Her works shall praise her in the gates.”

It was the end of 1842, and Julia Smith expected the end of the world. A believer in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Baptist preacher William Miller, Smith had allowed the plants in the conservatory of her Connecticut home to go unwatered and die. She had even prepared her Ascension robe, to be worn at the Second Coming. “I read the Bible almost all day,” she wrote in her diary on December 31, 1842. “I have eaten nothing since yesterday noon. It is the last day of the year 1842, which according to Mr. Miller could be the last […]