Helen Spurrell

Many thanks to El Shaddai Edwards, Rick Mansfield and David Reimer for the ongoing success of this series on women Bible translators. Rick mentioned Helen Spurrell in a comment on El Shaddai's blog. I will be getting to Frances Siewert soon.

In Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study by F. Danker, page 188, we can read,

The nineteenth century saw a number of noncommittee type versions of the Bible, but the most noteworthy is a version of the Old Testament, published in 1885, whose claim fo fame was obscured by the prestige of the RV, which apeared in the same year.

At the age of fifty, Helen Spurrell, already accomplished in music, painting, and sculpture, decided to learn Hebrew with a view to translating the Bible of Israel. using the unpointed Hebrew text as her base, "she made free use," observes Pope, "of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint version, substituting their readings for that of the Hebrew text in a number of passages ... She printed her text in paragraphs, not in verses, with the poetical passages laid out as poetry - devices that had just been adopted in the Revised Version.

Here is the only excerpt that I can find from her translation, Psalm 119:150-151,

"When designing pursuers approached me, who are far from thy law;
then Thou, O Jehovah, wast near, with all thy faithful commandments..." Surrell

They draw nigh that follow after mischief: they are far from thy law.
Thou art near, O LORD; and all thy commandments are truth. KJV

To get some sense of her theology we can read,

In her translation of the Old Testament Scriptures, Helen Spurrell expressed the following wish for all who should read her translation: "May very many exclaim, as the translator has often done when studying numerous passages in the original, I have found the Messiah!"

She is also mentioned in the introduction to Let Her Speak for Herself by Marion Taylor and Heather Weir. Anyone interested in women in biblical scholarship will find this book fascinating reading.