Background
He was born on September 13, 1801 at Northford, Connecticut, United States, the son of Polly (Whitney) and Eli Smith, who was a farmer and a manufacturer of tools, shoes, and leather.
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He was born on September 13, 1801 at Northford, Connecticut, United States, the son of Polly (Whitney) and Eli Smith, who was a farmer and a manufacturer of tools, shoes, and leather.
In 1821 he was graduated from Yale. Entering Andover Theological Seminary, he was graduated in 1826.
He taught for two years in Georgia. He was ordained in Springfield, May 10, 1826. Several months before graduation, he was appointed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregational) as associate editor of its publishing house at Malta, then the center of all printing operations carried on by the American missionary societies working in the Mediterranean. He arrived in Malta after a two months' journey from New York, which he had left in May.
A few months later he left for Syria in order to study Arabic and prepare himself for translating the Bible into Arabic, but after the battle of Navarino in October 1827 he was forced to leave Syria with other American missionaries, and he returned to Malta. In early 1829 he made a tour through Greece, and in March 1830 with Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, who had recently arrived from America, he undertook an extended journey of exploration through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Georgia into Persia, from which he returned by way of Constantinople early in 1831.
The results of the journey, made with a view to opening mission stations, were published by the two travelers under the title Researches of the Rev. E. Smith and Rev. H. G. O. Dwight in Armenia: Including a Journey through Asia Minor and into Georgia and Persia, with a Visit to the Nestorian and Chaldean Christians of Oormiah and Salmas (2 volumes, 1833).
Shortly after his return from this journey, Smith went back to America. There he prepared the account of his travels for publication and published a volume of Missionary Sermons and Addresses (1833). In January 1838 at Cairo he joined Edward Robinson, who had been his teacher at Andover, and accompanied him on his epoch-making explorations in Sinai, Palestine, and southern Syria. In the fall Smith accompanied his friend to Germany, where he arranged for the casting of fonts of Arabic type for the mission press at Beirut, and then went back to America.
In 1841 he returned to Beirut. Since his own health was now seriously undermined, he was forced to leave for America again in 1845. Smith devoted the last decade of his life to the translation of the Bible into Arabic, for which everything else had been preparatory. In 1856 ill health compelled him to give up his work, and he died of cancer at Beirut the following January.
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Besides knowing Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and the principal European languages, he was well acquainted with Turkish and knew Arabic so well that it had become almost a second vernacular to him.
On July 21, 1833, he married Sarah Lanman Huntington, daughter of Jabez Huntington, who accompanied him to Syria that fall and died at Smyrna in September 1836. He married his second wife, Maria Ward Chapin, a daughter of Judge Moses Chapin of Rochester, New York, on March 9, 1841, she died the following year. They had one son.
He married his third wife, Hetty Simpkins Butler of Northampton, Massachussets, on October 23, 1846. They had two daughters and three sons, one of whom, Benjamin Eli Smith, was born after his father's death.