Image Details

Historical Society of Glastonbury, CT

A contemplative Julia Smith appears in this photo of the first—and only—woman to translate the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek. Smith began her translation in 1845 after suffering disappointment at the overwhelming failure of the end-time prophecies of William Miller. Miller had predicted the end of the world would come in the early 1840s. Blaming Miller’s error on a poor translation of the Bible, Smith decided to create her own. Working from the Smith homestead in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Smith translated the Greek New Testament, the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate and the Hebrew Bible. Her work, she later wrote, stemmed from a desire “to know the literal meaning of every word God had spoken.”