In 1783 Webster published the American Spelling Book, more popularly known as the ‘Blue Backed Speller’. Estimated to have sold more than 100 million copies, Webster’s speller has never been out of print. He followed this success up with a grammar and a reader. And although these were all significant accomplishments, the achievement for which he is best remembered was first announced in June 1800, when he placed an advert in a Connecticut newspaper telling the world that he was about to start work on a ‘Dictionary of the American Language’.12 Twenty-eight years, 70,000 entries and several grandchildren later, Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language was published. He had written every entry himself. Incarnated today as Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, it remains a standard work.
Webster’s announcement of a new American dictionary was greeted with ridicule. The idea of an American language was laughable, his critics argued. Still, mockery was nothing new for Webster; for nearly fifty years he had been vilified for his ‘vulgar perversions, horrible irregularity, subtle poison, and illiterate and pernicious ideas about language’,13 all of which testified to his critics’ uncomfortable feelings about America’s divergence from Europe. Thomas Jefferson, who profoundly disagreed with Webster’s ultra-conservative political views, described him as ‘a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding’.14
But Webster was more interested in principles than popularity. Snatches of the King James version offended his sensitivities about the correct use of language. He found the vocabulary and grammar archaic, and some of the phrases the King James Bible used were, he believed, downright indelicate. In addition to inaccuracies in grammar, such as ‘which’ for ‘who’, ‘his’ for ‘its’, ‘shall’ for ‘will’ and ‘should’ for ‘would’, Webster noted that ‘There are also some quaint and vulgar phrases which are not relished by those who love a pure style, and which are not in accordance with the general tenor of the language. To these may be added many words and phrases, very offensive to delicacy and even to decency.’15 As America’s pre-eminent lexicographer, Webster felt responsible for producing a revised version of the King James Bible with a language more in tune with the sensibilities of the time.
But for all his bluster, Webster actually made very few amendments to the King James version; he found no more than 150 words or phrases altogether that he decided needed to be revised. Even then he wasn’t consistent, often amending some occurrences of a word or phrases, and leaving others unaltered. Among the most striking are his amendments to the gentlemen in Kings and Samuel16 ‘who pisseth against the wall’. They are transformed into nothing more than ‘males’. He partially sanitizes the low-lifes of Isaiah 36.12 who, according to King James and the Hebrew, ‘eat their own dung and drink their own piss’. In Webster’s translation they merely ‘devour their vilest excretions’. Over and again Webster’s prudishness destroys both the startling, graphic impact of the verse and the direct sense of the original Hebrew.
Some of Webster’s amendments may have been considered more tasteful in 1833 when his Bible appeared, but they now seem even more archaic than the phrases they were designed to replace. In Genesis 20.18 King James tells us that ‘the Lord had fast closed up all the wombs of the house of Abimelech . . .’ Webster, finding the word ‘womb’ too indelicate, translates ‘For the Lord had made barren all the females . . .’ Not that he was unduly worried about his personal sensitivities. More importantly, he worried that some of the graphic imagery of the King James Bible, the naming of body parts and the use of evocative words like ‘stinketh’,17 would be ‘so offensive, especially to females, as to create a reluctance in young persons to attend Bible classes and schools’.18 David Daniell quite rightly ridicules this fear, pointing out that the language of the King James Bible is hardly likely to disturb schoolchildren who have always been ‘streetwise enough to know where to find the dirty bits and giggle over them’.19
Noah Webster’s Bible enjoyed limited success. It ran to a second edition in 1841 and was used for a while in Congregational churches. But its popularity didn’t last long. Its price dropped from $3 when first published, to $2 and then to $1.50. It was reprinted once but then disappeared from view altogether. It has experienced something of a renaissance today, but more for its curiosity value than anything else. Not that it was the only curious, nineteenth-century Bible notable for the singularity of its composition rather than its religious utility. Julia Smith’s was another.
The First Woman Translator
In a spectacular reversal of history, controversy and persecution – far from being the consequences of a bible translation – were in one particular case, its cause. In a small town in nineteenth-century America, prejudice and victimization led to the publication of a Bible translation. One made even more notable by the fact that, as far as we know, for the first time in over two millennia the translation was the work of a woman. And not just any woman; Julia Smith, the first woman to translate the Bible, was by all accounts a quite extraordinary character.
In 1884, at the age of ninety-one, Julia Smith made her final public appearance, delivering an off-the-cuff address to a meeting of the Connecticut State Suffrage Association.20 She had spent much of her life at the forefront of the struggle for women’s votes, a consequence of the discrimination she’d faced as an unmarried woman. The publication of her Bible translation was engendered by a similar cause. Both facets of her character – her principled, assertive reaction to discrimination and her scholarly absorption in Bible translation – were the direct result of personal victimization, the unique education her parents had given her, and her own, profound, intellectual ability.
Julia Smith was born in May 1792, the youngest of four daughters. A fifth would soon arrive. Her mother Hannah was, according to Julia’s account, a highly educated woman, unusual for those times, whose father had taught her Latin and French and who shared his taste for astronomy. Hannah, who devoted her life to the temperance and anti-slavery movements, raised her daughters in the spirit of her own commitment to social justice. Julia’s father, Zephaniah, had trained as a Congregationalist minister but had fallen out with his congregation. At the time of Julia’s birth, Zephaniah was studying for what would turn out to be a highly successful legal career.
Julia and her sisters were raised in an intensely intellectual environment. This was still a world in which boys were educated and girls were not. But with no sons to educate, and knowing of no reason why girls should not receive an equivalent level of attention, Hannah and Zephaniah gave their daughters the very best education that their considerable wealth could provide. A life of needlework and home-making was not what they had in mind for their daughters. The five girls studied French, Latin, Greek, history and mathematics, and were further encouraged each to develop her own unique talents. The oldest daughter built her own boat, and invented a device for shoeing cattle, which was adopted by local blacksmiths. The second was a talented horticulturist who developed her own varieties of fruit. The third daughter was an accomplished artist and teacher of French while Julia’s youngest sister, Abby, was a political campaigner, an activist in the movement for women’s votes.21 But Julia’s talents excelled them all.
Julia’s diary, a thirty-year-long endeavour which she wrote in French, just for fun, shows that in addition to novels, newspapers and history she read Virgil’s epic poetry, the works of the medieval theologian Erasmus, the sermons of John Knox, Shakespeare’s plays and many other classics, textbooks on law, mathematics and chemistry. Over a ten-year period, from 1824, she read through the Old Testament three times annually and the New Testament eleven times. But however much of a bookworm she was, she was more than just a drudge; her diaries record dances, social excursions to neighbours, charity work and the frequent entertaining of visitors to the family home. All in all, Julia’s was the sort of normal social life one would expect from a well-off, small-town young lady at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, her sociability surpassed that of her sisters; she was the only one
of her siblings to marry, despite managing to put off the event until she was eighty-seven years old.
In the 1830s, William Miller, a Vermont farmer and preacher, experienced visions which he believed to be prophetic, about the imminent Second Coming. He found a text in the book of Daniel which convinced him he could place a precise date on the event; Jesus would return on 22 October 1844. Miller announced his prediction in churches, at public meetings, in tracts and in pamphlets. His utopian prophecies caused a commotion; people flocked to hear him. During the course of the decade the number of his followers burgeoned; as the eschatological moment approached reports began to circulate of believers selling their homes and possessions in preparation for their imminent ascension; of farmers refusing to harvest their crops for the coming year as to do so would show bad faith and tempt Providence to delay the redemption. When, in February 1843, a comet appeared in the sky it seemed a sure sign that Miller’s prophecy was true. Even the Smith sisters were intrigued. They decide to examine the Bible for themselves, to see if they could find support for Miller’s predictions.
Although they had read the Bible in English many times, Julia felt that to really examine it properly she should study it in its original languages.
Between 1845 and 1860 Julia Smith translated the Bible. She made five different translations, each time trying to get closer to the original meaning. Twice she translated from the Septuagint and once from the Vulgate, drawing on the Latin and Greek her parents had endowed her with. Then she translated it from the Hebrew, even though there was nobody in the area to teach her. She learned the language alone, working only from a lexicon and cross-referencing with the King James Bible. It was an astonishing feat of self-education.
Nobody knows for sure how Julia procured a copy of the Hebrew Old Testament. Such things were not readily available in nineteenth-century Connecticut. She did have a friend in a nearby town, an Episcopalian minister named Samuel Jarvis, whose extensive library included many Bibles, among them Tyndale’s, the Bishops’ and the Douay. The best guess is that she borrowed a Hebrew Old Testament from him, if indeed he had one.
Julia’s self-taught Hebrew education resulted in a somewhat idiosyncratic translation. Not that she minded. Unlike the King James translators she was not seeking to create a readable, literary English Bible that the public would warm to and accept as their own. She was translating for her own purposes and trying, in English, to get as close to the original Hebrew as she possibly could, irrespective of style or nuance. In an interview that she gave many years later she confirmed this approach. ‘I have consulted no commentators. It was not man’s opinion that I wanted . . . but the literal meaning.’22
Julia was aware that the King James translators, like many before them, had inserted words into their translation to make better sense. Biblical Hebrew has no verb corresponding to ‘is’; the word is simply taken for granted. Other pronouns are sometimes missing. The King James Bible had frequently inserted such words for greater clarity, using italics to signify an interpolation. Julia Smith chose not to add any clarifying words to her translation. Emily Sampson may be right in suggesting that Julia believed that the true meaning of the text only comes out in in the reader’s struggle to comprehend; anything which eliminates this struggle by smoothing out the language is counter-productive. In Genesis 22.1, in the King James version, Abraham says ‘Here I am.’ Julia has him say ‘Here, I.’23 Similarly, the King James tells us that Noah’s flood did not begin to subside ‘until the tenth month, in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen’. Julia Smith however follows the Hebrew literally: ‘until the tenth month, in the tenth on the one of the month the heads of the mountains were seen’.24
After she had finished her first Hebrew draft, Julia Smith decided to make a second translation. She may have found the first version too stilted even for her tastes. In her second translation she paid closer attention to the subtleties of Hebrew grammar. This time she took account of a Hebrew grammatical device which changes the tense of a verb from future to past; a device she’d ignored the first time round. In her first version nearly every verb which indicated a past event had been translated as if it would take place in the future. Once she paid closer attention to the conversion of tenses from future to past, her Bible made better sense. But she didn’t introduce the modification because she had an audience in mind; her second translation, like the first, was made for her own personal use. Originally, she’d had no intention of publishing either version. But she felt compelled to do so, when she and her sisters found themselves the victims of discriminatory, misogynistic prejudice on the part of the local tax authorities.
The problems began in June 1869, when the local tax collector visited the home in the town of Glastonbury, Connecticut, where Julia and her four sisters lived. He had come long before he was expected, to collect a tax that didn’t fall due until the following autumn. He came early because the town was struggling to pay the wages of its labourers, and he’d picked on the Smith household because they were all women. Normally, the local tax burden fell only upon men, but the male taxpayers in the town had refused to pay before the levy fell due. The tax collector guessed that the wealthy Smith sisters would be a soft touch. He was right, they paid. But having got money out of them once, he tried again, sending the Smith sisters a second bill in October of that year for the same amount. He explained that the money was needed this time in order to employ someone to record the names of all the men who were eligible to vote.
This time the sisters were more resilient. They asked whether, as taxpayers, their names would also be recorded on the voting register. When told that paying tax did not qualify them to vote, that the franchise was reserved for men only, Julia was outraged. She was being asked to shell out for men to receive a right which was denied to her as a woman. Julia Smith and her sisters, who had been brought up to promote and fight for social justice for others, suddenly saw themselves as people to whom the same justice was denied. She and her sister Abby determined to do something about it. They joined the women’s suffrage campaign.
Three years later the tax collector turned up again. This time he called to advise them that their taxes had been increased. It wasn’t an increase which applied to the whole town: only the Smith sisters and two other widows were liable for the extra charge; none of the men had been asked to pay more. Once again the sisters dutifully paid the tax, but they swore they would pay nothing more until they had a say in how the money was spent.
The following year the authorities in Glastonbury, standing firm against what had become a national campaign for women’s suffrage, reaffirmed their refusal to register the Smith sisters as voters. Soon afterwards, when the tax demand arrived at a level higher than for any other property in the town, the eighty-one-year-old Julia, and her seventy-six-year-old sister Abby refused to pay. The slogan ‘No taxation without representation’, a complaint first hurled at the British crown during the Revolutionary era, had once again become a rallying cry in a national campaign. The Smith sisters took it to heart. The more certain it became that the authorities in Glastonbury were unable to comprehend the changes taking place in the world beyond their town, the more the Smith sisters dug their heels in. They would not pay their taxes without being granted the right to vote.
The response of the town authorities to the sisters’ tax strike was to seize seven of their eight Alderney cows. It was a heavy-handed gesture that proved to be a step too far. The evocative image of the elderly sisters’ cows being sadly led away in a procession to be auctioned became national news. The Boston Post proclaimed that the Smiths’ cows would ‘take their place in history with Caligula’s horse, the goose that by its cackling saved Rome, the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and the ass that spoke for Balaam’.25
Still the sisters refused to pay, and still the town pressed for their money. The next step in the saga came when the authorities moved to seize the sisters’ property. It took Julia and
Abby some time to find an attorney who would agree to represent them; they encountered a similar level of prejudice from the legal profession as they had already received from the tax authorities. Eventually however they did find a lawyer and the case went to court. The sisters won the first round, the town immediately lodged an appeal, and the judge delayed proceedings for so long that it seemed obvious to Julia and Abby that his intention was to wear them down.
Julia Smith had one card she could play. It wasn’t directly relevant to her case but it made a point. She was convinced that the only reason she and her sister had been picked out was because the town thought that women were easy prey; that they had neither the political muscle nor the intellectual capability to stand up to men. Julia resolved to do something ‘more than any man has ever done’.26 She decided to publish her translations of the Bible. Bible translation was, she acknowledged, ‘the most difficult task that the most erudite scholars can set themselves’. It was time the town officials understood that ‘the woman who knew not enough to manage what she rightfully and lawfully owned had actually done what no man ever had’.27
This was not arrogance on Julia Smith’s part. She did not consider herself better than anyone else for having translated the Bible. But she did think she should be sufficiently respected that men would not take advantage of her.
Julia Smith translated the Bible for her personal satisfaction, as a means of affirming her own skill to herself. She never intended it for educational or congregational use. Even so, its publication received a mean-spirited reception in some small-minded quarters; one newspaper, which had not even seen her translation, declared that it simply proved that some women will deign to do things for which they are not suited.
Nor did it stop the town from pursuing her for her taxes. Towards the end of her life, after Abby had died, Julia married Amos Parker, a lawyer from New Hampshire. In a magnanimous gesture of male responsibility he took it upon himself to pay the tax bill for her. Julia was not at all pleased; reimbursing him was the mildest of her responses.28
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 20