EPISODE FOURTEEN: ON BOVINES AND BIBLE TRANSLATION

…you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

My intention with this Set Free series has been to encourage my sisters in the faith to embrace who God made them to be. This need was driven home to me again this week. I asked the members of my Bible study group (a mixed group) to reflect on a verse, passage, or Bible story that had a significant impact on their lives. Several shared, including a pastor’s widow who had joined the group last year at a friend’s invitation.

Cheryl quoted Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” and briefly discussed how the verse’s truth had affected her sense of her value to God. After the study, we spoke privately for a bit longer about what she had shared.

I then shared with her a little of what follows in this episode.

Let’s return to the last verses I mentioned in Episode Thirteen.

“As good stewards of the manifold grace of God, each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve one another. If anyone speaks, he should speak as one conveying the words of God. If anyone serves, he should serve with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.” (vss 10-11)

I recently discovered Julia E. Smith. Smith is an example of a woman who took what God had blessed her with and used it to the best of her ability to serve the Lord. She also used what God had given her to make a point! Let me tell you a little about her.

Julia Evelina Smith (1792-1886) was the first woman to translate the entire Bible from the original languages into English.

Julia was well educated and gained a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and she read the Bible in the original languages. At the time, Baptist preacher William Miller had gained notoriety for predicting that the world would end in 1844. This prediction was based on a literal interpretation of the “math,” or numbers, mentioned in the King James Version. It is sad to say that others, supposedly speaking in God’s name, have taken His Word and twisted it to say what it doesn’t mean. William Miller was not the first (read Jeremiah, for example), and he certainly hasn’t been the last! When his prediction failed, it sparked in Smith the idea that this departure from the truth of Scripture required a new, completely literal translation of the Bible based on the original languages. She did not want preachers to lead her astray!

She began her work at the age of 55 and completed it eight years later. In the preface to the work, Julia wrote: “I was so much interested and entertained to see the connection from Genesis to Revelation, that I continued my labours and wrote out the Bible five times, twice from Greek, twice from Hebrew, and once from Latin.”

Smith was one of five daughters born to Zephaniah Hollister Smith, who, during his lifetime, served as a pastor and later became a lawyer. The family was well-to-do. After their father’s death, with no male members in the household, the two surviving sisters assumed responsibility for managing their inheritance, including paying taxes on their father’s property.

Julia discovered that she and her sister, along with a couple of widows in the community, were being taxed more than their male neighbours, a corrupt tax collector’s attempt to take advantage of the women. They took exception and protested, but because women didn’t have the right to vote at town meetings, their concerns fell on deaf ears. The women subsequently joined the suffragette movement and protested taxation without representation, going so far as to refuse to pay taxes.

The local sheriff came to collect and took cows from their herd to cover the taxes owed. Julia and her sister, Abby, then went to the public auction, where the cattle were sold, and bought them back!

The Smith women were also active in the temperance movement and were ardent abolitionists. A local newspaper picked up their story, which spread across the country. Eventually, it was discovered that the tax collector had illegally made a deal with a neighbour of the Smiths to seize some of their best land. The case went to court, and the sisters won.

In her translation, Julia had insisted on being brutally literal, so she did not yield to what the majority of translators after her have done—rearranging the words into sentences that would make reading them in English easier and more comfortable. Though she was highly educated compared to the women of her time, there were some errors, particularly in her use of tenses in parts of her translation, which also created awkwardness.

But the translation had never been intended for publication. When word got out that a woman had produced such a work, the critics were swift to appear, most notably declaring that women had no business engaging in something beyond their intellect. Thirty years after the work was completed, the sisters decided to publish the translation to prove the foolishness of such a claim.

Smith’s biographer, Emily Sampson, noted that “…her translation anticipated many trends followed by later translators. While it fell into obscurity because of the difficulties of the language created by its literalness, it is worth noting that this translation was the only English translation of the complete Bible out of the original languages available to English readers until the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, as the early Revised and the American Standard versions were partly adaptations of the text of the King James.”

And, as an interesting aside, Julia married at over 80 years of age—to a man who appreciated her mind and was attracted to her because of her translation of the Bible.

This story is another example of how women have found their voices and spoken accordingly, using the gifts God has given them to be and do what they were divinely designed to do.

What’s the takeaway here? For me, if nothing else, I am reminded that I need to be a student of the Scriptures. Like the Bereans in Acts, I need to search the Word and trust the Spirit of God, our Promised Guide and Teacher, to lead me into all truth. That is not to say I do not value the words and counsel of others. It IS to say that all of us who are believers have the Spirit of the Lord within us and the Word of God provided for us—we are responsible more than anyone else for our spiritual journeys.