Leading Lady Julia Smith

A leader in the women’s suffrage movement, Julia Smith (1792–1886) is the only woman to translate the entire Bible—and she published the translation herself. According to her biographer, Emily Sampson (With Her Own Eyes, The University of Tennessee Press, 2006), Smith’s work “has been alternately ignored or disparaged by subsequent biblical scholars. This is in part because no English translation other than the King James Version attracted significant attention until the appearance of the Revised Standard Version in 1952.” To describe Smith’s method and intentions, Sampson quotes Smith herself, from a late 1875 interview with a reporter from the New York Sun:

I have used only the lexicon, and, of course, have looked up the King James translation, but I have consulted no commentators. 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 . . .I wanted every reader to see the exact original and nothing else through my rendering as through glass.