(Bible) — Julia Evelina Smith (trans.) | First edition of the first complete English Bible translated by a woman

(Bible) — Julia Evelina Smith, trans.

The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, 1876

4to (245 x 156 mm). Lightly toned. Original publisher’s brown pebble-grain cloth, blind stamped boards, spine and upper cover lettered in gilt; corners bumped, head and foot of spine lightly rubbed, spine speckled with white paint.

First edition of the first complete English Bible translated by a woman.

“It may seem presumptuous for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world…” (1).

Born in Glastonbury, Connecticut in 1792, Julia Evelina Smith taught herself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French while earning a living as a schoolteacher and, later, as an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist. In 1843, she began to test the English Bible against the originals and soon resolved, as she writes in her preface, "to put the same English word for the same Hebrew or Greek word, everywhere” (1). Smith's method is uncompromisingly literal: Hebrew tense shifts and Greek word order are preserved even when the English prose becomes rugged. The translation therefore offers modern readers an unfiltered view of the underlying languages and stands in pointed contrast to the smoother, interpretive revisions then underway in Britain and America.

Working verse by verse over the course of seven years, Smith produced five complete drafts—twice from Greek, twice from Hebrew, and once from Latin—finishing in 1855. When commercial publishers declined to issue such an unconventional text, she underwrote the project herself, consigning it to Hartford's American Publishing Company in the nation's centennial year. 

The resulting volume is the first complete English Bible translated by a woman and remains the only one executed single-handedly without an editorial committee or co-translator. 

REFERENCES

Simms, The Bible in America, p. 149-50; Stanton, The Woman's Bible, p. 151