"The Letter Kills but the Spirit Gives Life": Julia Smith's Translation of the Bible

ON a farm that sloped gently from the eastern hills down across the flood plain to the Connecticut River there lived during the nineteenth century a family of fierce intelligence with the prosaic name of Smith. To offset such a common surname, the father and mother named their five daughters Hancy Zephina, Cyrinthia Sacretia, Laurilla Aleroyla, Julia Evelina, and Abby Hadassah. Just as the intricacy of their first names countered the plainness of their last, so the complexity of their intellectual lives countered the parochialism of Glastonbury, the Connecticut village in which they dwelt. It was in making their town the laughingstock of a nation that Julia and Abby first won their fame and, in the process, brought a little levity into the stern selfrighteousness of the women's suffrage movement. But from that levity also sprang serious proof that women were clearly the intellectual equals of men, for Julia became the first woman ever to translate and publish the Bible in its entirety. The notorious event that started it all took place when Julia and Abby, the two remaining sisters, were eighty-two and seventy-seven years old-quiescent ages for most people, when political activism is something about which to reminisce. Discovering in 1874 that the Glastonbury town fathers had increased the assessment on their land and on that of two widows but had not increased the assessment on land