Episode 2 Craig Foster on Joseph Smith and the Charge of "Pedophilia"

Episode 2 Craig Foster on Joseph Smith and the Charge of "Pedophilia"

William Daubney (1900) on the Use of the Apocrypha in the Anglican Prayer Books

Commenting on the books of the Apocrypha (“Deutero-canon”), we read the following from Article VI of the Articles of the Church of England (taken from the 1801 American revision):

 

And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners: but yet doth it not apply to them to establish any doctrine: such as these following:

 

The Third Book of Esdras,
The Fourth Book of Esdras,
The Book of Tobias,
The Book of Judith,
The rest of the Book of Esther,
The Book of Wisdom,
Jesus the Son of Sirach,
Baruch the Prophet,
The Song of the Three Children,
The Story of Susanna,
Of Bel and the Dragon,
The Prayer of Manasses,
The First Book of Maccabees,
The Second Book of Maccabees.

 

All the Books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and account them Canonical.

 

Interestingly, while not used to establish or prove doctrine, they have been used in the prayer and devotion of Anglicans. Commenting on the positive use of the Apocrypha in their prayer books, Anglican William Daubney (Vicar of Harlington, Bedfordshire, and Rector of Leasingham, Lincolnshire) noted that:

 

The Great use made of the Apocrypha in our Prayer-Book is thoroughly in accordance with Bp Coverdale’s opinion. The reformers of our public offices of devotion evidently thought very highly of it, when they accorded to it, or rather retained it in, the position in which we find it. In our Lectionary at the present moment there are no less than forty-four apocryphal first lessons, forty for ordinary, and four for holy days; but as it left the hands of our reformers there were a still larger number. For in the Prayer-Book of 1549 there were 108 apocryphal daily lessons, which number was increased in the Prayer-Book of 1552 by two proper lessons, and again in 1558 by 25 further proper lessons. This reading of the Apocrypha in place of the Old Testament, advisedly continued in our Church on the model of the earliest times, marks it out as treated by them with distinguished honour, and raised above all other religious writings (In the revised Lectionary, substituted in 1561 for that in Elizabeth’s Prayer-Book of 1558, Wisd. i. replaces Deut. xxiii. As the first lesson at evensong on Whitsunday, and so continued in our Lectionary reached its maximum).

 

The American Church, which had removed all apocryphal lessons form her Lectionary, has recently re-introduced a considerable number of them.

 

Then there is one entire Canticle at Morning Prayer, the beautiful Benedicite, taken from the Song of the Three Holy Children (Even so temperate a writer as the Rev. F. Procter betrays a lurking prejudice against the devotional use of the Apocrypha, when he says that “Although the Benedicite may be thought suitable to the first lessons of some particular days, or as a substitute . . . during Lent, yet the general and safe practice is always to use the Te Deum, at least on Sundays.” [History of Common Prayer, 10th ed., p. 226.] In his Elementary Introduction [ed. 1894], written jointly with Dr G. F. Maclear, the Benedicite is spoken of without any sign of disparagement. The word ‘safe’ may however only refer to strict liturgical propriety); and there are the two offertory sentences from Tobi in the Communion Service. These are all acknowledged extracts from the Apocrypha, given as such in the Prayer-Book: a considerable proportion, especially when we remember that the whole Apocrypha in bulk is less than three-quarters of the New Testament, the former standing to the latter in the ratio of 176:240.

 

But beside these obvious places in which the Prayer-Book avails itself of the devotional treasures of the Apocrypha, there are many others which are not to universally and necessarily known.

 

The phrase in the Litany, “Spare Thy people, and be not angry with us for ever,” is adapted from II. Esdras viii. 45; while the earlier part of the same prayer, “Remember, not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take Thou vengeance of our sins,” is borrowed word for word from the Vulgate of Tobit iii. 3, part of the prayer of Tobias: thus the whole of that suffrage of our Litany, with the exception of one clause, is traceable to apocryphal sources. The greater part, too, of this suffrage from the Litany is used again at the commencement of the Visitation of the Sick, so that it was evidently deemed a worthy one.

 

Nor is this the only service of the Prayer-Book which is indebted to the Book of Tobit. In the exhortation which opens the Solemnization of Matrimony the phrase “to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts that have no understanding” is based upon the Vulgate of Tobi vi. 17, being part of the advice which the angel Raphael gives to Tobias concerning his marriage to Sarah; the question, too, about giving away the woman, and the rubrics which direct the pair to take one another’s right hands, take their origin from Tobit vii. 15 (13); and the phrase in the first blessing, “fill you with all spiritual benediction and grace,” is derived from the same quarter. In the Prayer-Book of 1549 there was an explicit mention of “Raphael, Thobie, and Sara the daughter of Raguel,” in the prayer after the Versicles. The present mention of Abraham and Sarah was substituted in 1552.

 

Moreover, the Apocrypha supplies some of the excellent expressions which are embodied in our Collects. For example, the familiar words, “who hatest nothing that Thou hast made” are taken from Wisd. xi. 254. (Cf. Ecclus. Xv. 11, Heb.) These words have been great favourites with the Collect-writers, especially for Lenten use, for they occur in the invocations of three distinct Collects for that season, viz. those for Ash-Wednesday, the third for Good Friday, and the last in the Commination. The two former were new compositions of the reformers in 1549: thus they were not merely continuing apocryphal phrases which they considered harmless, but they were deliberately introducing them where they had not occurred before. The same is the case with the ancient Collect for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, the invocation of which Cranmer altered when he translated it, from “God of hosts” to “Lord of all power and might,” a clause which he culled from the closing words of Judith’s prayer before starting for Holofernes’ camp (ix. 14)” (The reference to Wisd. xii. 16 supposed by Canon Bright [S.P.C.K. Student’s P.B. art, ‘Collects’] to exist in the XIth Sun. after Trin. Collect seems very doubtful). The phrase “Who knowest our necessities,” in the 5th Collect (Composed in 1549) at the end of the Communion Service, appears to have been suggested by the words of Esther’s prayer, xiv. 6, “Tu scis necessitatem meam,” in the Vulgate. An expression in the Collect after a Victory at Sea, “in whose hand is power and might,” appears to come from the same source; and there are probably many others which have escaped observation from our being, to our loss, insufficiently conversant with the terms of the Apocrypha (E.g. the phrases in the long Commination Address “too late to cry for mercy when it is the time of justice. O terrible voice of most just judgment,” may well have been suggested by II. Esd. vii. 34, 35, where for ‘misery’ in the A.V. [v. 33] the best Latin text would give ‘mercy’ [misericordiae]. So R.V. [v. 33] substitutes ‘compassion’ for ‘misery]).

 

In the old service for King Charles the Martyr, four verses from Wisd. v. were incorporated in the canticles to be sung instead of the Venite. It may have been to these, but it was more probably to the reappearance of the apocryphal lessons, that Sir Walter Scott, in Peveril of the Peak, makes Sir Geoffrey refer immediately after the Restoration, when he takes, in the course of conversation, a simile from Judith and thereupon expresses “his joy at hearing the holy Apocrypha once more read in churches” (chap vi. P. 79 centenary edition).

 

The expression “crown her with immortality in the life to come,” in the 1st collect of the Accession Services, is probably based upon the beautiful words of Wisd. iv. 2, “εν τω αιωνι στεφανηφορουσα πομπευει.” (William Heaford Daubney, The Use of the Apocrypha in the Christian Church [London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1900], 63-67)

 

Possible Partial Fulfillments of D&C 87:4

In D&C 87:4, the so-called "Civil War prophecy," we read that:

 

And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war.

 

It is generally believed that this is a prophecy that would be fulfilled after the U.S. Civil War and still in the future from our perspective. Consider the following from standard commentaries on the Doctrine and Covenants:

 

H. Dean Garrett and Stephen E. Robinson, A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 3:

 

4. Slaves shall rise up against their masters. The time frame here is the key to understanding this statement. "Many days" after the Civil War and "many days" after the world wars in which Britain and her allies call upon other nations for help, then will slaves rise up against their masters. In chronological context, it will be seen that the reference cannot be to the black slaves of the nineteenth century South, who for the most part did not rise up against their masters, but to all inhabitants of the earth who are in political or economic bondage in a period after the world wars. Brigham Young stated that Joseph Smith and the brethren had been pondering the slavery both of black Africans in the Americas and of all the peoples of the world when this revelation came to him.17 In other terms, a worldwide outbreak of demands for independence and self-determination on the part of every conceivable ethnic, political, racial, economic, linguistic, or religious group will tear the nations of the world apart and engulf the earth in blood and war. We have seen this process at work specifically in such former Communist Bloc countries as Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, and so forth. No doubt we will see more in the future.

 

Hyrum M. Smith, Janne M. Sjodahl, Doctrine and Covenants Commentary:

 

In all these important particulars the prophecy has been fulfilled. There are other parts which yet remain unfulfilled, but they, too, will come to pass, in time. "Slaves are to rise up against their masters" (v. 4), and the "Remnant" is to "vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation" (v. 5). There will, finally, be "famine, and plague, and earthquakes, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also," and thus the inhabitants of the Earth will feel the wrath of God (v. 6).

 

Notwithstanding, there were some events in the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) that would be understood as “partial fulfilments” of D&C 87:4, similar to how Antiochus Epiphanes was a partial fulfillment of Danie's "Abomination of Desolation" prophecy during the Maccabean period. Consider the following excerpts from James Oakes, Freedom Nation: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865:

Nestled within the larger secession debate over the fate of slavery was a smaller but equally fascinating dispute over what the slaves would do. On January 12, 1861, the same day that William Seward was warning his southern colleagues in the Senate that the salves might take advantage of a civil war by rising in rebellion, a Democratic newspaper in Cleveland dismissed the forecast of salves insurrection as a “popular error” among Republicans. If there is a way, the editors predicted, “no class of beings will be less troublesome than these blacks. Docility is the leading feature of the race.” The slaves “are more happy and contented than any other race of people on the earth.” Left alone, the editor explained, a “pure blooded African . . . has no aspirations for liberty as we understand it.” Republicans started from a very different premise. They generally assumed that African Americans harbored the same instinctive desire for freedom that all human being shared. “Whenever our armies march into the Southern states,” Orville Browning wrote, “the negroes will, of course, flock to our standard—They will rise in rebellion, and strike a blow for emancipation from servitude and to avenge the wrongs of ages. This, “ he declared, “is inevitable.” . . . Traveling through the slaves states in May of 1861, William Howard Russell found that “[n]one of the southern gentlemen have the smallest apprehension of a servile insurrection. They use the universal formula ‘Our Negroes are the happiest, most contented, and most comfortable people on the face of the earth.’” On a plantation in South Carolina, Russell noticed that the “fidelity” of the slaves was “undoubted.” The house, he observed, “breathes an air of security.” The doors and windows were unlocked. There was a single gun on the premises. Here, as elsewhere, the planter had no “dread” of any of his slaves. Near Fort Picks in Florida, Russell struck up a conversation with a slaveholder who had joined the Confederate army, leaving his wife and children “to the care of the niggers.” Aren’t you “afraid of the slaves rising?” Russell asked, ”They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be sure,” the master answered, “but as yet they’re faithful.” Russell heard the same thing in Alabama. “Not the smallest fear is entertained of the swarming black population.” Similar reports came in from farms and plantations across much of the South.

 

But Russell was skeptical of all the talk of loyal slaves. He knew that insurrection panics had erupted across the South during the election campaign and the succession crisis, and he had read recent accounts of slaves murdering their masters—accounts that at the very least suggested more anxiety than the slaveholders were letting on. “There is something suspicious in the content never ending statement that ‘we are not afraid of our slaves,’” Russell observed. He concluded that the slaveholders were relatively unconcerned because southern slave society had made itself into something close to an armed camp. “The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and the watch-houses, and the police regulations prove that strict supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary.” As long as the South was able to maintain this police system, Russell believed, it was not surprising that white southerners would feel secure in their own homes.

 

When the war began, the slaveholders’ first instinct was not to lock down their plantations but to beef up the local militias, redouble the slave patrols, organize “home guards,” and enforce the curfews. These were the official and semi-official institutions that maintained order within the plantation by sustaining the master’s authority without. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and local police were only one part of a much larger network of accomplices who upheld the security of southern slavery. It worked well enough. Slaves resisted in various ways but rarely rose in outright rebellion. They ran away all the time in the Old South, but only a tine fraction of fugitives succeeded in escaping from slavery. It's not surprising that when the war began, so many slaveholders expressed confidence in the security of their system.

 

And yet there were indication that the slaveholders were more anxious than they let on, at least to English reporters. They nervously read reports on disturbances among sales, especially those nearby. Daniel Cobb, a slaveholder in southeastern Virginia, reported no disruption among his own slaves, but he peppered his diary with rumors of insurrection plots and tales of slaves who murdered their masters. He paid close attention to the stories about other peoples’ slaves escaping to Union lines. In January of 1861, Cobb heard that a “bachelor was taken by his servants from his bead at Midnight. Carried out of the house and beat to death with an ax.” Outsiders may have been impressed by open windows and unblocked doors, but Cobb was upset b the news that on the farm where the ax murder took place, “the door was left unfastened by the house Boy.” In March, Cobb reported that “People has several Negroes Runaway &c.” In April he “hurd of several fires round that Could not be accounted for.” By June, as Union forces had begun to establish bases in northern and eastern Virginia, Cobb heard reports of slaves in groups of ten or twenty who “had made there escape.” Daniel Cobb was fifty—too told, he thought, to join the Confederate army. But he made his own contribution to the southern cause by helping to organize a local “Home Guard” to monitor “all misconduct of negroes and low life white people of the County and to keep the state of affair right.” Yet despite all this concern with security—or perhaps because of it—there was no disruption among Cobb’s slaves through the first year, except in November when the Confederate government began impressing some of his slaves to work on local embankments.

 

The slaveholders’ anxiety revealed itself most clearly in their concerns about the ability of government to maintain order. They wrote pleading letters to state and local officials, and even to the new Confederate president. Less than two weeks after the capture of Fort Sumter, Charles Mitchell wrote to Jefferson Davis from Louisiana about the “great fear” of a northern invasion down the Mississippi River and the “sense of insecurity” that was already widespread. There was “a deep seated anxiety in regard to negroes,” a widespread fear that a Yankee invasion would likely provoke a “panic” that could only “be ruinous to our cause.” A week later William H. Lee, of Bell’s Landing, Alabama, wrote to Davis suggesting that the best way to thwart slave insurrection (and alleviate white fears) was for the Confederate government to order all black men “in the army and make them fite.” Barely a month after the war began, George Gayle of Dallas County, Alabama, was already worried that so many of the locals had joined the Confederate army that if any more enlisted, there would not be enough men left “to save ourselves from the horrors of insurrection.” The slaveholders knew that the security of slavery depended on the viability of their government.”

 

This is what made an invading Union army so worrisome—not merely its capacity for physical destruction or even its attractiveness to runaway slaves, but its profound threat to the civil authority in the South. Runaway slaves and insurrection panics were nothing new to southern slave society. This was different, however, because at stake was the South’s ability to police the slave system in the face of an invading army. Union authorities claimed that northern invasion of the Confederacy was necessary to restore “civil authority” to those parts of the Southern where it had ceased to function properly—that is, loyally. Hence, the U.S. Army had to be sent in to fill the presumed void. This means that whatever else the Union army was, it was not an extension of the slaveholders’ authority. If the sectional conflict proved anything, it was that the slaveholders’ power was ultimately political power.

 

The slaves could hardly remain unaware of this, if only because their masters were so often indiscreet. During the 1860 election campaign, observers noticed that the “colored population” of Georgia was “manifesting an unusual interest in politics, and the result of the Presidential election.” In Macon “every political speech” attracted “a number of negroes” who “managed to linger around and hear what the orators say.” Thomas Johnson, a Virginia slave, recalled that in 1860 “there was a great excitement in Richmond over the election of Mr. Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The slaves prayed to God for his success, and they prayed very especially the night before the election. We knew he was in sympathy with the abolition of Slavery. The election was the signal for a great conflict for which the Southern States was ready.” Further South, George Womble in Talbot County, Georgia, overheard his owner declare that “he was going to join the army and bring Abe Lincoln’s head back for a soap dish. He also said that he would wade in blood up to his neck and keep the slaves from being freed.” In Montgomery, Alabama, the governor gave an impromptu speech “in which he dwelt on Southern Rights, Sumter, victory, and abolitiondom,” while nearby “[t]here were a number of blacks listening.” The slaves have “been talking a great deal about Lincoln freeing the servants,” A Mississippi mistress worried in her diary in May of 1861. The slaveholders made no attempt to disguise the fact that they had seceded because Abraham Lincoln had been elected president. When he was a young slave in Georgia, Levi Branham recalled, one of his “young masters” told him about the 1860 election and said “that if Mr. Abe Lincoln was elected the negroes would be free. Then he asked me if I wanted to be free and I told him ‘yes.’” How would the slaves not know what was going on? (James Oakes, Freedom Nation: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013], 84-89)

 

On June 10, 1861, six slaves from Howard County, Maryland, escaped to nearby Washington, where they found a regiment of Union soldiers from Connecticut. Clearly aware of the politics of the sectional crisis, the fugitives declared—or so a Union officer reported—that their masters were “secessionists in sentiment and opinion and members of secret military organizations hostile to the Government.” The runaways thereby created a dilemma for Alfred H. Terry, the colonel in charge of the regiment. Maryland was a loyal state, yet many of the state’s slaveholders sympathized with the South. If what the fugitives were saying was correct, could Colonel Terry send them back to their traitorous owners? Slaves in Kentucky made the same claim under similar circumstances. In November, shortly after Union troops arrived in the state, ten runaways appeared at Camp Nevin claiming that “there masters are rank Secessionists, in some cases in the rebel army—and that Salves of union men are pressed into service” for the Confederate. Like the Maryland counterpart, the Union commander in Kentucky, Brigadier General Alexander McD. McCook, was not sure how to respond. Despite the pro-southern sympathies of many of the state’s slaveholders, Kentucky had not seceded from the Union. McCook had “no faith in Kentucky’s loyalty” but no particular interest in helping slaves escape, especially if it might weaken the unionists in the states. What, he asked his superiors, was he supposed to do? Slaves often had good reason to believe that their master’s disloyalty would justify their emancipation. During the first summer of the war, a black woman who “absconded the premises of her master” was captured and returned to her owner, only to run away a second time. Brought before a provost judge, she “complained of certain bad treatment from her master.” Her owner, having refused to swear his loyalty to the Union, was barred from testifying. The slave “was liberated and her master sentenced to be incarcerated.”

 

Denouncing their masters as “secessionists” was only one of the ways escaping slaves tailored their biographies to suit the criteria for freedom established by different Union commanders in different Border States. Where Union troops were under orders to exclude slaves from their camps, fugitives often presented themselves as free blacks. In late 1861, Major George Waring examined the blacks working in a Union army camp in Rolla, Missouri, and found “they all stoutly asserted that they were free.” Unable to disprove their claim, though he realized it could not possibly have been true, Warring was unwilling to risk expelling free blacks. By claiming they were already free, the refugees evaded the order to keep “fugitive slaves” from Union camps.

 

Slaves often provided northern troops with important military intelligence about the location of rebel troops or their supply depots, and Union officers were extremely reluctant to turn over such slaves to their owners. Two slaves in Fulton, Missouri—to give but one example—proved such useful guides and had provided so much “valuable information” to the Union army that General John M. Schofield “permitted them to remain under the protection of our troops. To drive them from the camp,” he explained, “would subject them to severe punishment, perhaps death.” Beyond the immediate value of slaves who provided military intelligence, there was the increasingly urgent question of the military value of slaves to the rebels. “Every negro returned to these traitors adds strength to their cause,” one Missourian explained to the secretary f war in December of 1861. Why, he wondered, would the U.S. Army waste precious resources “hunting up & guarding the slaves of traitors while the secessionists are robbing & plundering loyal men in the western part of the state?” (Ibid., 167-69)

 

Once authorized by the proclamation, black enlistment began swiftly, accelerated steadily, and became organized. On January 13, 1863, Secretary of War Stanton authorized General Daniel Ullman “to raise a brigade (of four regiments) of Louisiana volunteer infantry.” They would serve three-year enlistments of the duration of the war. Exactly the same order went out, on exactly the same day, to Colonel James Montgomery, instructing him to raise “a regiment of South Carolina volunteer infantry.” Two days later the adjutant general authorized the governor of Rhode Island to raise “an infantry regiment of volunteers of African descent.” On January 26, Stanton himself authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to do the same. These last instructions to northern governors would eventually produce a regiment of free blacks from several northern states that became famous as the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. By the end of January, General Saxton was reporting the successful organization of the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers and urging his superiors in Washington to let the men prove themselves in battle, thus “giving them a chance to strike a blow for the country and their own liberty.”

 

Yet despite the alacrity with which blacks were recruited, the Union army never treated them as the equal of white soldiers. Black regiments were strictly segregated and nearly always commanded by whites. At the outset, black soldiers were paid—when they were paid at all—at a lower rate than white soldiers. Not until June of 1864 did Congress abolish the distinction in pay for black and white soldiers. Even after that, most black soldiers found the traditional avenues to promotion blocked. Long after they had proved themselves in combat, black regiments were often relegated to garrison duty or manual labor. Meanwhile Confederate captors refused to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Former slaves captured in uniform were to be re-enslaved, their officers were to be executed, and though the Confederate government did not officially sanction mass executions it did almost nothing to punish the southern troops who massacred black prisoners.

 

Hoping to thwart the mistreatment of black prisoners, Lincoln issued an order of retaliation in July of 1863, and subsequently halted all prisoner exchanges until the Confederates agreed to treat black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Helleck urged Grant to use his influence and prestige to combat racial “prejudice” within the Union army, and in speech after speech, Lorenzo Thomas warned white soldiers that they would be punished for racial intolerance. Racial prejudice within the ranks did seem to diminish. White soldiers who were initially hostile to black troops often came to admire them. (Ibid., 379-80)

 

In theory the Union was committed to universal emancipation in the seceded states, but in practice its armies could not possible emancipate three million slaves in the areas covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. If nothing else the Confederate counterrevolution ensured that untold numbers of slaves would never make it to the freedom they were promised once they entered Union lines. Even without fierce resistance from the slaveholders, though, universal emancipation would have been impossible to achieve in practice. Congress would pass a law freeing the slaves of all rebels, and Lincoln could proclaim emancipation everywhere in the rebel states, but not even the Union army at full strength could make that happen. Most slaves never reached Union lines, and Union troops never reached most of the slaves. If Lincoln was right, if the only guarantee of post-war freedom was actual physical emancipation during the war, most slaves would still be enslaved when the war was over.

 

“WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THE NEGROES?”

 

And yet black men enlisted by the tens of thousands. Families and communities uprooted themselves. For the chance of freedom they risked separation from their loved ones, reprisal by their masters, capture by the Confederates, and indifference or worse from their Union liberators. The Union army was never prepared for them. From the earliest months of the war Union officers were daunted by the numbers of contrabands coming into their lines. A steady stream of pleading letters flew up the military chain of command all of the time asking the same question: What am I do to with them? Many arrived half-starved after strenuous escapes or having borne the brunt of wartime shortages to their own farms and plantations. After complaining the most slaves seemed unwilling to escape his lines, even General Sherman was soon overwhelmed by those who did some. A year earlier General Frémont had boldly declared the emancipation of all rebel-owned sales in Missouri, Sherman noted ruefully, but how would he have responded to the vast number of “refugee negros” now streaming into Union camps? “What could he do with them?” They were “free,” he admitted, “but freedom don’ clothe them, feed them & shelter them.” From Louisiana, General Benjamin Butler sent letters to Washington wondering how he could provide food and shelter to the tens of thousands of freed people, even as his own commissary was providing rations for thousands of starving whites. John Eaton, father up the Mississippi Valley, raised the same issue. Aware of the looming humanitarian disaster, Lincoln administration officials, including Lincoln himself, ordered Union generals to provide the freed people with food and shelter from army supplies. By the second year of the war the military was feeding tens of thousands of freed men and women and desperately trying to find shelter for them. It was the largest program to provide direct aid to individuals the federal government had ever undertaken. (Ibid., 416-17)

 

By 1862 the number of slaves flooding into Union lines was so great that the government was transferring them to “contraband camps” in all parts of the South occupied by the army. Freed people arrived in steady numbers, often in boatloads. On a single day in October of 1862, three hundred and sixty emancipated slaves arrived in Washington from Virginia, “having at different times made their ways within our lines. They were immediately sent to the contraband camp.” In November there were reportedly more than five hundred contrabands in the camp. In May of 1863, six hundred and fifty more contrabands arrived in Washington from Aquia Creek in a single afternoon. Quickly overwhelmed, the camps soon became notorious for their filth, disease, and criminal violence. Drinking water polluted by the sewage led to outbreaks of dysentery. In December of 1862, the overcrowded contraband camp in Cincinnati, Ohio, was described as “disgraceful to barbarism.”

 

The Emancipation Proclamation only worsened the problem by increasing the numbers. IN early 1863, visitors to the camp in the District of Columbia were warned “not to enter because smallpox was prevalent there.” By then there were three thousand people living in the camp, with as many as twenty dying each day. As long as the epidemic raged, no one was permitted to leave the camp, and the criminal element began preying on the desperate. Gangs of angry whites sometimes attacked the contraband camps. In June of 1862, the Union cavalry was dispatched to the camp in Washington to put down an assault by “some disorderly whites.” Conservatives complained that blacks were living in “idleness” at the expense of the taxpayer. More reliable accounts described the inhabitants of the camps as “suffering intensely, many without bed covering & having to use any bits of carpeting to cover themselves—Many dying of want.” By late 1863 and 1864, conditions in some of the camps improved as Union officials became familiar with the problems and as private relief agencies pitched in to help. Federal officials set up “model” camps, notably Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia, on the confiscated state of Robert E. Lee’s wife. It is not clear, however, that there was general improvement over time, if only because the numbers of contrabands grew exponentially and the army remained overwhelmed.

 

The alternative to the camps—or at least the alternative that came immediately to the minds of antislavery Republicans—was to put the former slaves back to work as free laborers. Though “able-bodied male contrabands” could enlist in the Union army, Lincoln admitted, “the rest are in confusion and destruction.” Rather than let him suffer in camps, it would be better for the Union army to locate abandoned plantations and “put as many contrabands on such, as they will hold—that is, as can drew subsistence from them.” Loyal owners could employ them “on wages, to be paid to the contrabands themselves.” Responding to Lincoln’s suggestion in March of 1863, General Stephen Hurlbut ordered two large contraband camps on the Mississippi River “to be broken up, and all the negroes not in the actual service of the United States will be sent to Island no. 10 and set to work.” This, at least, was more consistent with general Republican Party principles. If emancipation meant anything, it meant not contraband camps or colonization but free labor.

 

Yet even as General Hurlbut was closing down contraband camps and sending the freed people to work for wages on abandoned plantations, other Union officers were rounding up unemployed freed people on the streets of New Orleans and Memphis and sending them to contraband camps to earn their own “subsistence.” In an attempt to prevent the recapture and re-enslavement of freed people, the Union army, especially in the Mississippi Valley, forcibly removed thousands of contrabands from their farms and plantations to areas at a safe distance from the Confederates—not only onto islands in the Mississippi River but also to Memphis and sometimes as far away as Cincinnati. (Ibid., 419-20)

 

Patriarchs being Evangelists

Richard Packham, a former Latter-day Saint and critic of the Church wrote the following against Joseph Smith’s abilities as a linguist:

 

"evangelists"       The sixth "Article of Faith" says that Mormons believe in the "same organization that existed in the Primitive [New Testament] church..." and lists various offices of the primitive church, including "evangelists."

            "Evangelists" are mentioned only three times in the New Testament.   Philip was an evangelist in Caesarea (Acts 21:8), but there is no hint as to why he was called that.   Evangelists are listed among other callings (prophets, teachers, pastors, apostles) at Ephesians 4:11, without defining what an evangelist is.   But Paul hints at what an evangelist is in 2 Timothy 4:1-5, where it seems clear that an evangelist is one who works at spreading the Gospel.   Since the Greek word for "gospel" is 'euangelion' and the verb meaning "to preach the gospel" is 'euangelizein', clearly the Greek word for "evangelist" (euangelistes) means "preacher of the gospel."

            However, Joseph Smith declared: "An Evangelist is a Patriarch, even the oldest man of the blood of Joseph or of the seed of Abraham."   (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 151) He goes on to say that the function of a "patriarch" in the Mormon church is to give blessings.   It is not primarily to preach or to spread the gospel.  

            There are thus two problems with the "evangelists" of the sixth "Article of Faith."   First, Joseph Smith gave a completely new meaning to the word, justified neither scripturally nor linguistically.   And second, there is no such title or office in the Mormon church.   (The Reorganized LDS Church, now renamed "Community of Christ" at least calls their patriarchs "evangelists," but they are no more correct linguistically than the Mormons.)

 

When Joseph Smith said that an evangelist is a patriarch, he was not claiming that they meant the same thing; instead, within the realm of being a patriarch, one is an evangelist. It would be akin to saying “a bishop is a missionary” or “a mother is a chef.” In a special way, patriarchs spread the gospel, so Packham is reading too much into the use of “is” in order to score a point against Joseph Smith.

 

Taylor Drake, himself a critic of the Church (he holds to some form of the “Joseph became a fallen prophet” thesis, one that David Whitmer also held to) wrote the following about Patriarchs being Evangelists:

 

 

Patriarchs are Evangelists

 

The great patriarchs of golden times, including Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and many other evangelists (meaning “missionaries”) of the simple gospel of Jesus Christ. Joseph himself said that “an evangelist is a patriarch” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 38-39). Don’t be confused by this term. We are not talking about the man called in each stake to give patriarchal blessings to those who request them. Instead, the scriptures describe an evangelist (and thus a patriarch) as one who has the priesthood to minister the gospel unto the inhabitants of the earth. It is a lineal priesthood that is passed down from father to son, as we have previously discussed. This is not to say the great patriarch/evangelists did not ultimately receive the Melchizedek Priesthood. The distinction is that they first had the Patriarchal Priesthood by lineal descent and right and may alter have received the higher priesthood of Melchizedek, being called by God’s own voice form heaven.

 

Abraham, of course, was the prime example of a patriarch whose responsibility was to bear the tidings of the gospel to foreign lands, both personally and through the posterity. That is the essence of the Abrahamic Covenant. Abraham was told this directly by God himself:

 

I have purposed to make of thee a minister to bear my name in a strange land which I will give unto thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession, when they hearken to my voice. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee above measure, and make thy name great among all nations, and thou shalt be a blessing unto thy seed after three that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations; And I will bless them through thy name for as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name and shall be accounted thy seed, and shall rise up and bless thee, as their father; And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee (that is, in thy Priesthood) and in thy seed (that is, thy Priesthood), for a Give unto thee a promise that this right shall continue in thee, and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessing of salvation, even of life eternal. (Abraham 2:6, 9-11. The New Testament is also very consistent in linking the concept of an evangelist with the work of the ministry. See Acts 21:8; 2 Tim 3:5; Ephesians 4:11-12. Likewise D&C 107:39-40 teaches that only those identified as the seed of Abraham through revelation should be ordained as missionaries)

 

As can be plainly discerned, the Patriarchal/Evangelical Priesthood is synonymous with preaching the gospel to the world . . . (Taylor Drake, Joseph in the Gap: The Hidden History that Explains Mormonism's Past, Present and Future [2021], 236-37)

 

Note on Ecclesiastes 3:20-21; 12:7 and Latter-day Saint Theology

 

 

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (Eccl 3:20-21)

 

Then shall the dust return to earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. (Eccl 12:7)

 

While reading a scholarly work on the book of Ecclesiastes (AKA Qohelet), it struck me that the Latter-day Saint belief in the spirit world/intermediate state (and it not being “heaven”) helps harmonise these two biblical texts that the traditional view (the righteous dead go immediately to heaven) does not:

 

12:7. The first sentence, “and the soil returns to the earth as it was before”, applies both to the earthen vessel, lying broken in the well, and to the human body, lying buried in the ground, bereft of life-breath.

 

In 3:20–21, Qohelet said that man has no advantage over the beast because no one knows whether man’s life-spirit goes upward at death. In 12:7 he states that man’s life-spirit goes back to God, and this must be upwards. There is indeed a contradiction here, but it is not between a belief in an afterlife and a rejection of that belief. The return of the life-spirit to God simply means death. Neither verse affirms an afterlife. Schoors (1985b) examined the passages that refer to death and concluded that Qohelet views death as extinction.

 

At death, whether of man or beast, the elements of life—body and breath—separate, and God takes back his gift of life. Ps 104:29, in describing the death of all creatures, says: “You gather in their life-spirit and they expire, and they return to their dirt”; see also Job 34:14f. and Sir 40:11 (Hebrew). In the ancient Hebrew anthropology, the person is the body, no less than the animal’s body is the animal. The life-spirit or breath (ruaḥ) is an addition that vivifies the person. This concept is evident in Ezek 37:8–10 and Gen 2:7. The creature God forms is a man before he gets the ruaḥ, at which time he becomes a nepeš ḥayyah, a living being. (The notion that man is a soul who has a body is Greek in origin; the only glimmer of this concept in the HB is in Qoh 3:21.) When the spirit is removed, the person, and not only the body, is said to go to the earth, or to Sheol, or to darkness (Ps 104:29; Qoh 6:4; 9:10; and often). Thus 12:7 does not imply continued existence of the sort that would overcome death and compensate for the miseries of life. The verse says that at death a person’s body returns to the dirt and his life-spirit is withdrawn, in other words, he is deprived of breath, without which he is a helpless, weary semi-being.

 

The contradiction between 12:7 and 3:21 lies in the significance they attribute to the spirit’s ascent. In 3:20–21 Qohelet expresses doubt that the life-spirit rises at death but implicitly grants that this event would distinguish man’s demise from mere animal death, and moreover that this ascension would save man from being hebel. In 12:7, on the other hand, Qohelet assumes that the spirit returns to God but takes this event to mean death and nothing more, and this assumption does not prevent a hebel-judgment in the next verse. If the return of the spirit did mean something more than the extinguishing of life, some form of salvation for the individual, Qohelet would be reversing the entire pessimistic, worldly thrust of the book in one sentence without context or preparation. Moreover, the very next sentence, the declaration of universal absurdity, would be undermined, for if the essential part of man, the soul (as ruaḥ would mean in that case), were to survive with God, man would not be hebel, however that word is defined.

 

Since 12:7 does not imply afterlife, it is actually more pessimistic than 3:21. In the earlier verse, Qohelet at least allows that the life-spirit’s ascent to God would redeem humanity from absurdity, whereas in the later verse he affirms such an ascent and yet sees no escape from death’s obliterating power or life’s universal absurdity.

 

The contradiction in the assumptions behind these two verses cannot be reconciled logically, but it does not have major implications for the book’s meaning. In 3:21 Qohelet is countering an idea that was probably appearing in Jewish thought for the first time: the ascent of the soul to eternal life. Having discounted that possibility as unknowable and thus irrelevant, Qohelet leaves it aside. When, at the climax of his grim description of death in chapter 12, he speaks of the departure of the life-breath, he perceives it in the ancient way as signifying God’s repossession of the life force. (Michael V. Fox, Qohelet and His Contradictions [Decatur, Ga.: The Almond Press, 1989], 308-9)

 

For a discussion (and refutation) of “soul sleep,” see:

 

Response to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology

Examples of Traditional Latter-day Saint Readings of Daniel 2: Dennis D. Chamberlain and Keith Donovan

Dennis D. Chamberlain, The Biblical Evidence of the Restoration (2004)

 

The Stone Became a Great Mountain

 

An amazing prophecy in the second chapter of the book of Daniel foretells the time when God would set up a kingdom on earth. Like a stone, this kingdom would start small and grow until it became a great mountain. “And the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” (Dan. 2:35)

 

King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a great and terrible image and called on Daniel to explain the meaning of his dream. God revealed to Daniel that this image represented a succession of empire that would rise over a period of more than 2,600 years from 605 B.C. until the end of all worldly kingdoms and the messianic reign of Jesus Christ.

 

Hippolytus, who lived from A.D. 160 to 236, recorded the earliest known interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy. This ancient scholar named four world kingdoms that he believed corresponded to parts of the image. The head of gold was Babylon. The beast and arms of silver were the Persians and Meads. The belly and thighs of brass represented Greece. He thought the legs of iron represented the Roman Empire, which was the sovereignty of his own day. HE concluded that the feet and toes, which were part iron and part clay, were emblems of kingdoms that were yet to rise. [1]

 

Most modern Bible scholars agree with this assessment of Daniel’s prophecy. Yet even today, scholars express frustration that an explanation of the feet and toes of the image remains elusive. Though a number of solutions have been proposed, none of them seem completely satisfactory. [2]

 

Why is this part of the prophecy so difficult?

 

The ear of kings symbolized by the feet and toes of iron mixed with potters clay is the most important part of the prophecy. It makes known to us the time when God would set up his kingdom on the earth. Do students of Bible prophecy expect to wake up one morning and read these headlines?

 

GOD SETS UP KINGDOM

Strange phenomena observed today as a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands.

 

 

While this would satisfy the prophecy, this king of news flash is not likely. Daniel’s revelation, like the start of Bethlehem, is a guide to help students of the Scriptures recognize a monumental event which, in its early states, would either be unnoticed or unrecognized by the world.

 

In a search to understand the predicted establishment of God’s kingdom, a historical analysis of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream will be presented in this chapter. Hopefully, this information can help resolve the mystery of the feet of clay and iron. The historical record provides a fascinating validation of the entire prophecy and is another witness of the divine origin of the Bible.

 

When he organized his church, Jesus Christ set up the kingdom of God on the earth. The leaders of this church were apostles who held the keys of the kingdom and were guided by revelation from God. (Matt. 16:17-19) How then is the kingdom spoken of by Daniel related to the church that Jesus established? And why would God set up a kingdom if it were already upon the earth?

 

. . .

 

“What shall be in the latter days”

 

Nebuchadnezzar, in his second year of reign as king of Babylonia (604 B.C.), dreamed a dream that was very troubling to him. He called in the magicians, astrologers, sorcerers, and the Chaldeans to find someone who would tell him its meaning. The Chaldeans said to Nebuchadnezzar, “O king, live for ever: tell thy servants the dream, and we will shew the interpretation.” (Dan. 2:14) The wise and rather cynical king realized that if he told the dream, anyone could make up an interpretation. His answer to the Chaldeans was, “The thing is gone from me. If ye will not make known unto me the dream, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill!” It was little comfort to the Chaldeans that they were offered “gifts, rewards, and great honor” for making the dream and its interpretation known. (Dan. 2:5-6)

 

The Chaldeans complained that no man on earth could do such a thing and this was a rare thing for a king to require of any magician, astrologer, or Chaldean. This response made the king so furious that he put out a decree that all the wise men of Babylon should be slain. (Dan. 2:10-12)

 

Daniel and his followers were among the wise and were therefore under the king’s decree of death. A Captain of the king told this to Daniel, who immediately sought the mercies of God so that he and his fellows should not perish with the wise men of Babylon. (Dan. 2:15-18)

 

God revealed the secret to Daniel, who rejoiced and gave praise and thanks to God. He then told Arioch to spare the wise men of the kingdom. Arioch brought Daniel before the king, saying, “I have found a man of the captives of Judah, that will make known unto the king the interpretation.” (Dan. 2:19-25)

 

Daniel told the king that wise men, astrologers, magicians, and soothsayers could not show him what he wanted to know. “But there is a god in heaven that revealeth secrets, and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days. Thy dream, and visions of thy head upon thy bed are these.” (Dan. 2:27-28)

 

“Behold a great image”

 

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.
Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image because a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
This is the dream; and we will tall the interpretation thereof before the king. (Dan. 2:31-36)

 

After Daniel told the king his dream, as the Lord had revealed it, he gave its interpretation. When he concluded he confidently proclaimed, “the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.” (Dan. 2:45)

 

Thou, O king, art a king of kings; for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all.
Thou art this head of gold. And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. (Dan. 2:37-40)

 

Our historical analysis begins with Nabopolassar, who became the first king of the New Babylonian Empire in 626 B.C. With help from his Median allies, he ended the Assyrian empire n 612 B.C. His son, Nebuchadnezzar, became king of Babylonia in 605 B.C.

 

Babylon was at its height of splendor under Nebuchadnezzar. During his reign the city of Babylon was rebuilt on a grand scale. Walls around the city were built 85 feet think. Huge inner walls and a moat surrounded and protected the inner city. Eight bronze gates provided access to the city. The grandest of these was the Ishtar Gate, which stood on a paved avenue and was decorated with black glazed figures of dragons, lions, and bulls. Between this gate and the Euphrates River was the palace of King Nebuchadnezzar and the Hanging Garden of Babylon which the ancient Greeks describes as one of the seven wonders of the world. [3] Referring to the New Babylonian Empire (626-539 B.C.), Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar, “Thou art this head of Gold.” (Dan. 2:38)

 

The second kingdom, the image’s breast and arms of silver, was the Persian Empire (539-331 B.C.) Cyrus captured Babylon in 539 B.C. by diverting the flow of the Euphrates River and going under the outer wall through the dry river channel. He then entered the inner city through brass gates left open by the overconfident Babylonians. [4] This fulfilled a prophecy of Isaiah that said Cyrus would enter the city through “two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.” (Isa. 45:1-2)

 

The Persians were a nomadic people. The kings lived in stone palaces, but most of the common people lived in mud huts. [5] When the Persian invades captured Babylon, Babylonia became the wealthiest area in the Persian Empire. Daniel saw a second kingdom that would be inferior to Babylonia. But how could the Persian Empire that conquered Babylon and which extended from the Aegean Sea to the River Indus be inferior? Not in power or size, for it was a more extensive kingdom. However, Persia was notably inferior to Babylon in wealth, luxury, and magnificence. [6] “And after three shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee.” (Dan. 2:39)

 

The third kingdom was the image’s belly and thighs of brass. This was the Macedonian-Greek empire of Alexander the Great (331-146 B.C.). Alexander the Great was king of the Macedonians and is considered one of the greatest generals in history. After he conquered Persia, his empire extended from the Mediterranean Sea to India and formed much of what was then considered the civilized world. [7] “And another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over the earth.” (Dan. 2:39)

 

Alexander became seriously ill with a fever brought on from exhaustion and the effects of battle wounds. In 323 B.C. he died at the age of 32 in Babylon, the capital city of his empire. No one succeeded him as ruler. His leading generals became governors of various areas and fought among themselves for control of the vast empire.

 

The fourth kingdom, seen in the vision as the image’s legs of iron was the Roman Empire (146 B.C.-A.D. 476). The Roman Empire conquered Macedonia, Greece, and Syria in a series of Macedonian wars, which ended in 146 B.C.

 

Rome had a republican form of government and was considered a world power by 264 B.C. Internal conflicts began in 133 B.C. when the aristocratic ruling class became selfish, arrogant, and addicted to luxury. The politician and military leader Julius Caesar overthrew this government in 45 B.C. After his victory, Caesar made reforms in an attempt to overcome corruption and restore prosperity.

 

Rome’s height of power was reached in 27 B.C. when Augustus Caesar became the first emperor of the Roman Empire. The period from 27 B.C. to A.D. 180 was known as Pax Romana (Roman Peace) because no country was strong enough to threaten the empire. [8] “And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron.” (Dan. 2:40)

 

The writings of Christian scholar Hippolytus, who lived to see the Roman Empire begin its decline in A.D. 193, gives us an ancient perspective on Daniel’s prophecy: “Already the iron rules; already it subdues and break all in pieces; already it brings all the unwilling into subjection; already we see these things ourselves.” [9]

 

Christianity endured years of severe persecution under various emperors. However, Constantine I, who became emperor in 312, made Christianity the official religion of the empire. The Roman Empire was split into the Eastern and Western empires in 395.

 

During the late 3002 and 400s, Germanic tribes migrated into the empire from the north. The Vandals moved in to what is now Spain; the Visigoths invaded the Italian Peninsula and then moved westward. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons invaded Britain, and the Franks conquered the area now known as France. These and other Germanic tribes overran and divided the empire, until the last emperor of the West Roman Empire was overthrown in 476. [10] “And as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.” (Dan. 2:40)

 

“Iron mixed with miry clay”

 

And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they shall not cleave ont to another, even as iron and it not mixed with clay. (Dan. 2;41-43)

 

After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, the Roman Catholic Church became the most powerful force on the continent. European trade that had developed under the Roman Empire collapsed, and the economy became more dependent on local farming. Serfs on manors owned by wealthy lords worked the land. This gradually developed into a military and political system known as feudalism where the lords became very powerful. Eventually, town started to spring up along developing trade routes, creating middle-class merchants who supported the kings against the feudal lords.

 

Daniel’s vision of the images’ feet and toes of iron and clay described powerful monarchies, which had the strength of iron such as the once held by the Roman Empire. These kings, who believed it was their divine right to rule in all secular matters, began to become a powerful force in Europe in the 1300s and continued to gain strength into the 1600s. The religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s weakened the Catholic Church ad led the kings to increase their power in order to maintain peace among the people. [11] “The kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron.” (Dan. 2:41)

 

During the Reformation some of the kings broke away from the pope. Protestant kings were considered God’s representative, not only in secular matters but in religious matters as well. Protestant beliefs spread rapidly through northern Europe during the 1500s. The individual’s religion was the choice of their king. The subjects took the religion of their king, but divisions and contentions between Protestant and Catholic kings eventually erupted into war. Speaking of these kings, Daniel prophesied: “They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.” (Dan. 2:43)

 

The Thirty Year’s War raged through Europe from 1618 to 1648. This devasting war between Protestants and Catholics was centered in Germany, where it is estimated that more than one -third of the population perished. When the war ended, a treaty called the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 that had a profound influence on the subsequent history of Europe. “The treaty permanently and gravely weakened the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburgs, ensured the emergence of France as the chief power on the Continent, and disastrously retarded the political unification of Germany.” [12] “The kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.” (Dan. 2:42)

 

“In the days of these kings”

 

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. (Dan. 2:44)

 

In Daniel’s vision of the image’s feet and toes made part of iron and part of clay, he saw three distinct conditions of Europe at the time when God would set up his kingdom on earth.

 

1. The rise of powerful kingdoms.

2. Great divisions between kingdoms, resulting from the Reformation.

3. Religious and political wars that would leave Europe partly strong and partly broken.

 

These three conditions were present in Europe by the early 1600s and continued about 300 years, as the monarchy remained an influential form of government. Under these circumstances, history places “the days of these kings” in a window of time from about 1600 to about 1900. The following events took place during the days of these European kings:

 

In the days of these kings, 1620-1900, thousands left Europe seeking a home in a new land where they could worship according to their own conscience rather than the dictates of the king they served. They brought with them a book, even the Holy Bible that many righteous and valiant individuals had given their lives to preserve.

 

In the days of these kings, 1776-1789, thirteen colonies in Great Britain, declared their independence from their king, and for the purpose that man might be free, God established a Constitution by the hand of men who Latter-day Saints believe, were raised for this very purpose.

 

In the days of these kings, 1805-1820, God raised up a prophet. Not a learned man steeped in the false doctrine of the day, but a young boy with a simple question, “Which church should I join?” . . . In the days of these kings, 1847, the infant kingdom was established in the midst of the Rocky Mountains, where it could be nurtured away from the world. From this location, the gospel of Jesus Christ, like a stone cut out of the mountain without hands, could roll forth until it became a great mountain and filled the earth. “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed.” (Dan 2:44) . . . [concerning D&C 65:1-2, 5] Keys are not always comfortable, but the keys of the kingdom of God had been committed to man on earth on the earth. This group of saints, living in a frontier town in Ohio, had been given the charge to spread the gospel to all nations and to call on the Lord that the inhabitants of the earth would receive it. (Dennis D. Chamberlain, The Biblical Evidence of the Restoration [Millennial Mind Publishing, 2004], 61-63, 67-76, 77, 79)

 

Notes for the Above

 

[1] Hippolytus, “Treatise on Christ and Antichrist,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, V:210, in The Prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation, Uriah Smith (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1944), 65-67. This interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy is also presented in the writings of LDS apostle Parley P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning, which was first published in New York in 1837.

 

[2] Timothy J. Dailey, Ph.D. and David M. Howard Jr., PhD., consultant, Amazing Prophecies of the Bible (Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International, Lrd., 1998), 135.

 

[3] The World Book Encyclopedia, “Babylon” (Chicago: World Book, Inc., 2002), 2:12.

 

[4] Uriah Smith, The Prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1994], 47.

 

[5] The World Book Encyclopedia, “Persia, Ancient” (Chicago: World Book, Inc., 2002), 15:296-297.

 

[6] Uriah Smith, The Prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1944), 51.

 

[7] The World Book Encyclopedia, “Alexander the Great” (Chicago: World Book, Inc., 2002), 1:342.

 

[8] Ibid. “Europe,” 6:409.

 

[9] Hippolytus, “Treatise on Christ and Antichrist,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, V:210

 

[10] The World book Encyclopedia, “Europe” (Chicago: World Book, Inc., 2002),6:409.

 

[11] Ibid. 412.

 

[12] Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, “Thirty Years’ War” (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, Inc., 1979), 23:131-132.

 

Keith Donovan, “Reflections on Daniel 2”

 

 

The Book of Daniel contains many complex visions of the future.  Because of their complexity and often vague symbolism, the various churches of the world are unable to come to an agreement about their interpretations.  Even the simplest of the visions, recorded in Daniel Chapter 2, elicits scores of interpretations from various sources.  I believe that this particular chapter is a key to the other chapters.  It is simple yet it covers a broad span of history, and is the basis upon which all the other visions in Daniel are to be understood.  This page is an effort to establish an interpretation for this vision which is consistent with itself.

 

Many modern critics explain Daniel's visions in terms of events occurring locally in respect to both location and time to Daniel.  They are forced to these conclusions based on the assumption that prophets do not exist and that there can be no prediction of future events beyond an obvious extrapolation from current events.   My assumptions are quite different.  For many reasons which are far beyond the scope of this essay, I assume that Daniel was a prophet.  Along with most Christian religionists of today, I assume that Daniel actually saw the visions he claimed to see, that they came to him from God, and that they are prophecies which cover vast periods of time.  This analysis takes for granted the standard Christian interpretations of the chapter, up to the same point were most the commentaries seem to diverge.

 

Summary of  Daniel 2

 

I recommend you start by reading Daniel Chapter 2, it is short and self-contained.  This chapter discusses a dream that was originally given to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar.  Daniel sees the dream because he took on the task of interpreting it for the King.   In this dream the King sees "a great image [who's] head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay".  Then "a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces".  Then "the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."  Daniel then interprets the dream and tells Nebuchadnezzar that each section of the image represents a succession of kingdoms which "bear rule over all the earth".  He specifically tells us that the head is the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar, but then another kingdom will replace that one.  He gives some characteristics of each kingdom without specifically identifying them.   Then he tells us the stone is a kingdom set up by God which "shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever".  Daniel also tells us that "the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure."

 

Interpretation of Daniel 2

 

Despite the fact that Daniel gives us an interpretation, we must interpret his interpretation so we can see the point of it all.  Actually, 90% of the chapter is interpreted the same way by the vast majority of Christian religionists.  The few important arguments that exist are about the fifth part of the image and the stone at the very end of the dream.  I intend to show that the beginning part of the dream establishes a pattern by which the end of the dream must also be interpreted.

 

First notice that Daniel says that each body section of the image represents a new kingdom, not simply a new king  Looking at world history and knowing the kingdoms of the world, almost all commentators agree that the various parts of the dream represent the following kingdoms.

 
 

Object	Material Type	Kingdom
Head	Gold	Babylon
Breast and Arms	Silver	Media/Persia
Belly and Thighs	Brass	Greece
Legs	Iron	Roman Empire
Feet and Toes	Iron / Clay	?????
Stone	Stone	Kingdom of God

 

It is this fifth material that causes all the contention and the various interpretations.  The kingdom that the fifth material represents can be determined by following the pattern given in the first four.  The first 4 kingdoms have these characteristics:

 

1. Each new body section / material is a New Kingdom
Each new kingdom is represented by a separately named body section and a new material from which it is composed.  Daniel tells us that the second kingdom will be "inferior" to the first.  This is represented by the type of material that is used to represent the kingdom.  Starting with the most precious metal, the value of each successive material is inferior to the previous one.  The type of metal can also be used to describe the type of the kingdom.  For example, iron is a good description for the Roman Empire.  Daniel  describes very well the nature of ancient Rome when he said "the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise".  Some commentaries have long discussions about how each material or each body part represents the details of the various kingdoms.  I am not concerned with all the details now, just the grand sweep of history.

 

2. Each New Kingdom describes "The Dominant World Power" of its respective time
Each new kingdom is not some minor kingdom taken at random from among many other kingdoms.  Each kingdom was considered "the" most powerful, most influential kingdom of its time.  It describes the dominate leadership and governmental forces of the world.

 

3. Each New Kingdom is the direct successor to the previous kingdom
There are no gaps in time. The vision starts with Babylon which was "The Dominant World Power". As Babylon declined in power Media/Persia became "The Dominant World Power". As Media/Persia declined in power Greece became "The Dominant World Power". As Greece declined in power Rome became "The Dominant World Power".

 

4.  Each of these transitions in power were the result of military conflicts between the two kingdoms

These transitions of power came as a result of being conquered by "The New Dominate World Power (DWP).  Babylon became The DWP  in approximately  614 BC and remained dominate for 75 years until Cyrus the Persian captured the capital city of Babylon in 539 BC.  Persia (which had previously been joined with the Medians) therefore replaced Babylon as The DWP.  Persia held this status for 208 years until it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 331 BC.  This is when Persia ceased being The DWP and Greece began its 185 year reign as The DWP.  Meanwhile the Romans were gaining more and more power and in the year 146 BC at the end of the 3rd Punic War, the Roman Empire defeated the Greeks and became The DWP.   In all of these cases there were many reasons why one kingdom decreased in power as another increased in power, but the vision does not go into these details.   There was often several years of fighting and give and take of dominance between the two powers, but there was one final military event that caused a transition in power to take place.  The transfer of world domination occurred as each successive kingdom defeated the old kingdom in battle.

 

The Feet and Toes of the Vision

In interpreting the rest of this vision we must maintain the pattern given, or we must have a very good reason not to.  Preferably there should be a scriptural reason not to.  And not some obscure scripture with some tenuous tie to Daniel such as something out of the Book of Revelation, which was written hundreds of years later.  The dream was given as a whole to Daniel, and needs to be interpreted as such.  There must be some reason within this vision to indicate that we should now ignore the established pattern of events.  Since there is no indication that there should be a break in the pattern, then we need to follow the same pattern.

 

The feet and the toes are a new kingdom.   We know this for several reasons.  Firstly they are separately named body parts, made of a new material.  Now granted they are not made of a completely new material, since there is iron mixed in with the clay.  But any blacksmith in comparing iron with iron mixed with "miry" clay (or elsewhere translated as "ceramic", "common", or "brittle" clay) will tell you that they are not the same material.  This new kingdom may be slightly different from the previous ones because it contains a mixture of the old kingdom with the new. This only shows that instead of a clean break between kingdoms of different traditions and locations, this last may be a change in the kingdom, a mixture of a new material, which created a new thing.  Daniel nevertheless describes it as a separate body section which in every other case in the vision meant a new kingdom.   Secondly, our knowledge of history tells us that the Roman Empire does not now exist. Everyone as heard of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"  The part of the image represented by the legs fell, as did all the previous kingdoms.  The part of the image represented by the feet and toes must follow the established pattern and be The New DWP after Rome.

 

To contend that the feet and toes are still part of the old Roman Empire, breaks the pattern given that each new body section, made of a new material, represents a new kingdom.  To contend that the feet and toes are some kingdom that is to come to pass in the future breaks the established pattern that each new kingdom immediately follows the old kingdom, and is actually the cause of it's final loss of dominion through military action.  A 2000 year gap between kingdoms is not in the given pattern – and there is no scriptural reason to suggest there is a gap.

 

The feet and toes must therefore be identified as The New DWP, sequentially after Rome.  They must also be identified as the kingdom which caused the fall of Rome through military action.  This is the only solution which follows the pattern God gave in the vision.   A brief inquiry into the history of the Fall of the Roman Empire records a long process, but the final blow - the event that caused the final demise of the Roman Empire as The DWP and it's replacement by The New DWP, according to the manor of the vision's previous transitions of power, occurred around 568 AD.

 

In 180 AD Commodus became the new Emperor, but was very weak and marked the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire.   In 330 AD Emperor Constintine re-reorganizes the Empire and begins to rule from Constantinople, on the border of Europe and Asia.  In 378 AD  The Visigoths (Germanic Tribes from the north) defeated a Roman Army at the Battle of Adrianople.  The Emperor Theodosius makes peace but he is the  last emperor to control a united Roman empire.  In 410 AD the Visigoths along with their allies of other Germanic  tribes sack the city of Rome, and then conquer Southern Gaul, Spain, and the North of Africa, taking control of the Mediterranean.   In 476 AD , the leader of the united German tribes, Odovacar, assumes the title of king of Rome. After this time there are no Roman Emperors occupying the West.  This is the date historians generally give for the end of the Western Roman Empire.  However this date does not fit the pattern given in Daniel, and so is not the one God is concerned about.  The Eastern Roman Empire was still a major world power, and still considered to be The DWP of the period.  There had been no transition of power yet,  the Germanic leader Theodoric the Great assumes control over Italy but tries to preserve the Roman civilization, culture, and system of government.  In the 500's Clovis, founder of the Frankish state, conquers most of France and Belgium, thus taking control of the outlying areas of the Roman Empire  In 527 AD Justinian becomes the Roman Emperor in the East, and the Eastern Roman Empire reasserts itself.  In a series of wars which lasted until his death in 565 AD, Justinian broke the Visigoth control of the Western Empire and reestablished Roman control of all the Mediterranean by retaking the 3 key areas of Italy, northwest Africa, and coastal Spain.  Three years later however in 568 AD, another Germanic Tribe called the Lombards invade the Western Empire.  In the following years, they broke the strength of  the Eastern Empire and retook much of Italy.  This war is the final series of attacks which finally breaks the dominion of Rome. Although, much of the coast remained under Byzantine rule, Northern and Central Italy was controlled by the Lomabards, and the city of Rome was kept by the papacy.  This is the time when the status of being The DWP changes from being the Roman Empire to being the European Barbarian tribes and the Western Catholic Church.   These battles are the cause of the rise of Medieval Europe as The Dominate World Power.

 

One interesting way in which the history validates the vision is the mixture of iron and clay in the feet.  The New DWP was not a single country or power but was a mix of the power of the European kings and the power of the Church.  From this point in history  they dominated the world scene together for over 1000 years.  They also divided into many kingdoms, as the toes divide off from the foot, and many commentators list just what they think these 10 European nations are.

 

So we see that the pattern that God gave us to interpret the vision can be maintained by a simple application of the major events of world history.

 

The stone cut out of the mountain

 

That is the end of the image.  There are no more sections of the image to dissect and figure out.  As Daniel begins to tell us about the stone he has progressed the history of the world into the rise of Medieval Europe.  This gives us a minimum starting date for the formation of the stone of around 568 AD.   But that does not mean that it was formed at this time.  Since the vision gives us a sequential history of the Kingdoms of the world, the image also gives us an upper limit in time.  Daniel only says that in "the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom".   Since there are no more parts of the statue discussed by Daniel, we must conclude that this Kingdom of God must be set up before the European kings cease being The DWP, otherwise the image would have to show The Next Sequential DWP.   The stone is set up between the time that the the European kings become The DWP and the time they ceased being The DWP.   So when are the days of these kings?

 

There are still kings of Europe today in several of the countries so the vision could mean anytime over the last 1434 years.  Now the truth is that although these kings still exist, all of them have effectively lost governmental power.  The kings of Europe lost the status of being The DWP in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  So it could be argued that this is an upper limit for the stone to have been created.

 

However it is not a very good argument, for several reasons.  The pattern of being supplanted by a new Dominate World Power through invasion and warfare does not fit for most cases. Often the kings lost power to their own people through democratic reforms, and the kingdom itself still retains its original power, and is still considered the same nation, and Europe remained The DWP.   Since Daniel figuratively referred to a "king" as representing a kingdom, whether or not the leader is actually a king or not,  the loss of the European Royalty's power can not seen as an upper limit.

 

Europe held its dominate position for a very long time, but today Europe is not The DWP.  When did Europe loose its status as The DWP?  As in all historical events, it was of course progressive, but most historians agree that at the close of World War II, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic emerged as The DWP's, Super-Powers in fact.  They achieved this through a dominance in warfare and an invasion of The Old DWP, just like all the other New DWP's did.  There is a minor difference in the fact that some of the European nations were with the Allies, and some were against them, but this also fulfills the nature of the feet and toes which Daniel described saying "the kingdom shall be divided" and "they shall not cleave one to another".  Another interesting thought presents itself however, Rome lost its DWP status to the Germanic tribes when they invaded and took over Italy.   It was the invasion of The DWP countries of Italy and Germany by the US and USSR (and allies) that brought about their loss of The DWP status.

 

It could be argued that Russia is part of Europe and the US was an offshoot of Europe so they were actually still part of the European Kingdoms.  But, the USSR had completely separated itself from the rest of the European countries and set itself up a completely separate kingdom in all ways but actual location.  The roots of the US were from England, Spain, and to a smaller degree France, however they had developed over the previous century into their own nation and kingdom.   Likewise it can be said that the Etruscans were descendants of the Babylonians and Greeks.  Rome was certainly heavily influenced by Greek Culture, but it was still a separate kingdom and grew on it's own to challenge the supremacy of Greece, just as the US challenged European supremacy.

 

The point of this being that the US and USSR are not represented in the image. This means that the stone had to be set up, at the very latest, before 1945. Otherwise the vision is incomplete, inaccurate, and again breaks the pattern God gave.  Also since the vision clearly shows that the stone was set up after the fall of Rome and the emergence of the European nations and before the rise of the US and USSR, anyone who insists that the toes are some later event or some future kingdom (such as the EEC or some power to come from it)  must have some very strong scriptural reasons why the clear pattern shown in the first 4 kingdoms breaks down completely just when it's convenient for their particular interpretation.

 

In summary the stone must start between the years 568 and 1945 AD.