Textus Receptus Bibles
Julia E. Smith Translation 1876
| 34:1 | Draw near, ye nations, to hear; and ye people, attend: the earth shall hear, and its fulness; the habitable globe, and all its offspring. |
| 34:2 | For the wrath of Jehovah is upon all nations, And anger upon all their army: he devoted them to destruction, he gave them to slaughter. |
| 34:3 | And their wounded shall be cast out, and their carcasses the stench shall go up, and the mountains flowed down from their blood. |
| 34:4 | And all the army of the heavens melted, and the heavens shall roll together as a book, and all their army shall fall away as the leaf falling from the vine, and as a falling from the fig tree. |
| 34:5 | For my sword was drunk in the heavens: behold, it shall come down upon Edom, and upon the people of destruction for judgment |
| 34:6 | The sword of Jehovah was filled with blood, it was made fat from the fat of the blood of lambs and he goats, from the fat of kidneys of rams: for a sacrifice to Jehovah in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. |
| 34:7 | And the buffaloes shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the strong ones; and their land was drunk from blood, and from fat shall their dust be made fat |
| 34:8 | For a day of vengeance to Jehovah, a year of retributions for the contention of Zion. |
| 34:9 | And its torrents turned to pitch, and its dust to sulphur, and its land to burning pitch. |
| 34:10 | Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up forever: from generation to generation it shall be laid waste; none passing through it forever to forever. |
| 34:11 | And the pelican and the hedgehog shall possess it; the ibis and the raven shall dwell in it: and he stretched out upon it the line of desolation and the stones of emptiness. |
| 34:12 | Its nobles shall be called to the kingdom, and none there, and all its chiefs shall be no more. |
| 34:13 | And thorns came up in her palaces, the nettle and the thorn bush in her fortifications, and it was a dwelling of jackals, an enclosure for the daughters of the ostrich. |
| 34:14 | And animals of the desert lighted upon the howlers, and the he goat shall call to his neighbor; also there the night spectre rested, and found for herself a resting place. |
| 34:15 | There the arrow-snake nested, and she will lay eggs and hatch, and brood in her shadow: also there the falcons were collected, the female with her companion. |
| 34:16 | Seek ye from the book of Jehovah, and read: One of these was not wanting; a female her companion they missed not: for my mouth it commanded, and his spirit it collected them. |
| 34:17 | And be cast the lot for them, and his hand divided it to them by line; they shall possess it even forever, to generation and generation they shall dwell in it |
Julia E. Smith Translation 1876
The Julia Evelina Smith Parker Translation is considered the first complete translation of the Bible into English by a woman. The Bible was titled The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues, and was published in 1876.
Julia Smith, of Glastonbury, Connecticut had a working knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Her father had been a Congregationalist minister before he became a lawyer. Having read the Bible in its original languages, she set about creating her own translation, which she completed in 1855, after a number of drafts. The work is a strictly literal rendering, always translating a Greek or Hebrew word with the same word wherever possible. Smith accomplished this work on her own in the span of eight years (1847 to 1855). She had sought out no help in the venture, even writing, "I do not see that anybody can know more about it than I do." Smith's insistence on complete literalness, plus an effort to translate each original word with the same English word, combined with an odd notion of Hebrew tenses (often translating the Hebrew imperfect tense with the English future) results in a translation that is mechanical and often nonsensical. However, such a translation if overly literal might be valuable to consult in checking the meaning of some individual verse. One notable feature of this translation was the prominent use of the Divine Name, Jehovah, throughout the Old Testament of this Bible version.
In 1876, at 84 years of age some 21 years after completing her work, she finally sought publication. The publication costs ($4,000) were personally funded by Julia and her sister Abby Smith. The 1,000 copies printed were offered for $2.50 each, but her household auction in 1884 sold about 50 remaining copies.
The translation fell into obscurity as it was for the most part too literal and lacked any flow. For example, Jer. 22:23 was given as follows: "Thou dwelling in Lebanon, building as nest in the cedars, how being compassionated in pangs coming to thee the pain as in her bringing forth." However, the translation was the only Contemporary English translation out of the original languages available to English readers until the publication of The British Revised Version in 1881-1894.(The New testament was published in 1881, the Old in 1884, and the Apocrypha in 1894.) This makes it an invaluable Bible for its period.