Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 11 - The Book of Jasher

by Dirk Anderson

Amazing Facts — a ministry operated by SDAs — markets Ellen White's Patriarchs and Prophets as a book with "unusual insights."¹ In their January 1998 newsletter, SDA minister Doug Batchelor quotes a statement made by Ellen White in Patriarchs and Prophets that could certainly be considered "unusual":

The builders [of the Tower of Babel] were wholly unable to account for the strange misunderstandings among them, and in their rage and disappointment they reproached one another. Their confederacy ended in strife and bloodshed. Lightnings from heaven, as an evidence of God's displeasure, broke off the upper portion of the tower and cast it to the ground.²

How unusual indeed! The Bible says nothing about strife and bloodshed at Babel. Kitto's Cyclopedia — a reference work in White's library — teaches that the confusion of tongues “produced discord and separation” among the builders.³ But discord is not bloodshed. No respected commentary in Ellen White's day carried the story that far. For that, we must turn to a very different kind of book.

In 1625, Jewish scholars in Venice printed the Book of Jasher (or Sefer ha-Yashar) in Hebrew.⁴ An English translation, marketed to the uneducated as an authentic ancient record, was published in New York in 1840 and quickly gained popularity in nineteenth-century America as an intriguing — and no doubt unusual — commentary on Old Testament history.

The book is not the ancient record its title claims. Nearly all scholars agree it was most likely composed in Spain around the twelfth century A.D. Goodspeed and other scholars believe its author compiled genuinely old Jewish traditions, called Midrash, some dating back to around the time of Christ, and supplemented them with fabrications of his own.⁵

Ellen White was not the only nineteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet misled by it: Joseph Smith also appears to have drawn on the Book of Jasher, defending it as a source that had “not been disproved as a bad author.”⁶

When one opens Jasher and turns to the story of Babel, the passage sounds hauntingly familiar to White's unusual account:

33. And from that day following, they forgot each man his neighbor's tongue, and they could not understand to speak in one tongue, and when the builder took from the hands of his neighbor lime or stone which he did not order, the builder would cast it away and throw it upon his neighbor, that he would die.

34. And they did so many days, and they killed many of them in this manner.

38. And as to the tower which the sons of men built...a fire also descended from heaven and burned another third...

39. And many of the sons of men died in that tower, a people without number.⁷

Jasher said the strife turned into bloodshed. White said the strife turned to bloodshed. Jasher said fire descended from heaven upon the tower. White said lightning struck the tower. That is an unusual coincidence.

Jasher: An Unusual Book

The Book of Jasher is filled with colorful expansions of the Genesis narrative that appear in almost no other book available to Ellen White. Where an extra-biblical detail appears in Jasher and in Patriarchs and Prophets, but not in Genesis and not in the standard commentaries, the parallel deserves attention.

There is another reason Jasher is significant. Unlike the respected commentaries examined earlier, this book carried no recognized historical authority. Its claim to be the ancient "Book of Jasher" mentioned in Scripture was widely disputed, and many scholars regarded it as little more than a collection of fables — not without reason. The book has Noah's generation watching snow fall before the Flood, a wolf holding a conversation with Jacob, fifteen plagues on Egypt instead of ten, Rachel speaking to Joseph from beyond the grave, and a man slaying a creature that was half man and half beast.⁸ Unusual insights, indeed!

While this book does not appear in any known inventory of Ellen White’s libraries, early Adventists — including James White — cited it repeatedly during the 1850s as though it were a legitimate historical source.⁹ If the book was merely a collection of legends, one might expect God’s prophetess to have warned early Adventists against using it. She never did. Even though she repeatedly denounced works of fiction, Ellen White remained silent while Adventist leaders treated the book as a credible source of biblical history. If James had access to it, cited it, and regarded it as reliable, there is little doubt that Ellen also encountered the book. Especially when so many of the unusual details that later appeared in her writings were already found in its pages.

Parallels to Jasher

A caution belongs at the outset. Unlike the Geikie parallels, these are not verbal borrowings. They are shared ideas — the same extra-biblical traditions expressed in different words. Most already appear in Spiritual Gifts (1864) and are simply carried into Patriarchs and Prophets. The force of the evidence is therefore cumulative: one unusual legend may prove little; a succession of distinctive legends pointing toward the same unusual source is another matter.

1. Fire From Heaven Consumed Abel's Sacrifice

Genesis 4:4 says only that “the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering.” It gives no visible sign of that acceptance at all — no fire, no flame, nothing an onlooker could have seen.

2. Enoch's Angelic Visitation, Withdrawal, and the Awe Upon His Face

Genesis says only that Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him (Genesis 5:24). Twelve words. From this, both Jasher and Ellen White construct the same elaborate portrait: a man who first received his extraordinary knowledge through an angelic visitor, then alternated between solitude and public teaching on a fixed rhythm, and whose face shone with a radiance so awe-inspiring that people were afraid to approach him.

Genesis nowhere identifies how Enoch came by his knowledge of coming judgment. Jasher supplies an angel as the messenger:

And it was at the expiration of many years, whilst he was serving the Lord, and praying before him in his house, that an angel of the Lord called to him from Heaven, and he said, Here am I.¹²

Patriarchs and Prophets supplies the identical mechanism, and the identical content revealed through it:

Through holy angels God revealed to Enoch His purpose to destroy the world by a flood, and He also opened more fully to him the plan of redemption.¹³

From there, both texts move to the same withdrawal-and-radiance portrait:

Three distinct non-biblical ideas appear together, and in the same sequence, in both accounts: an angel as the medium of revelation, the periodic alternation between seclusion and public teaching, and the awe-inspiring radiance on Enoch's face that made people afraid to come near him. None of the three is in Genesis. None is found in this combined form in any of the standard commentaries examined for this study.

3. The Multitude Stormed the Ark and Begged to Enter

Genesis records only that the Lord shut him in (Genesis 7:16). There is no crowd. There are no pleas. Yet both Jasher and Ellen White stage the same dramatic scene: a desperate multitude besieging the ark, begging Noah for entry, and met with divine silence.

The scene is entirely extra-biblical: the crowd at the door, the plea for entrance, and the pointed detail that God would not hear their cry. No other book examined in this study portrays this confrontation.

4. More of the Same Pattern

The remaining parallels contain shared ideas that also surface, in some form, in other sources. Regardless of the actual source she used, in each case White picks up concepts and ideas that are absent from the Genesis text itself.

None of these details are in Genesis. Each appears in Jasher and in White's telling. They demonstrate a consistent pattern of copying legendary material into her inspired pre-Flood narrative.

5. Amalgamation of Man and Beast

Not every borrowed idea survived. Some proved too costly to keep. The clearest example is the doctrine of amalgamation — the claim that before the Flood, the races of men and beasts had mixed and produced amalgamated offspring.

In a legend from the Book of Jasher, the antediluvian's practice of amalgamation is spelled out:

The sons of men in those days took from the cattle of the earth, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and taught the mixture of animals of one species with the other.³⁰

Little known to Ellen White, ancient people could not cross-breed completely different kinds of animals. The biological barriers between different species make such breeding impossible, and viable offspring cannot be produced. With only a third-grade education, White could not have known this. And, apparently, the spirit guides helping her write the book missed this one as well.

In Spiritual Gifts (1864), Ellen White picked up the concept and stated it twice, and without hedging. It was, she wrote, the chief reason the Flood was sent:

But if there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast which defaced the image of God, and caused confusion everywhere.³¹

She even extended it past the Flood, to explain the variety of living things — and, notoriously, “certain races of men”:

Since the flood there has been amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endless varieties of species of animals, and in certain races of men.³²

The statement caused immediate difficulty. It appeared to be teaching that some human beings were the offspring of humans and animals, and the sect was forced to defend it. Uriah Smith devoted an entire article in the Review to the task, arguing that the “confused species” referred not to the Black race — as was taught by some scientists of that era — but to "the wild Bushmen of Africa, some tribes of the Hottentots, and perhaps the Digger Indians of our own country, &c."³³ His answer raised as many questions as it settled.

The statements were carried into her 1870 book, Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 1, but twenty years later, when the same material was expanded and rewritten as Patriarchs and Prophets, the entire subject of amalgamation was removed from the book. Instead of amalgamation of man and beast defacing the image of God and bringing judgment upon the antediluvian world, she wrote that "polygamy" was one of the sins "that brought the wrath of God upon the antediluvian world" and defaced "the image of God in man."³⁴

Amalgamation was stated as revealed truth in 1864. This is exactly why people bought her books. They wanted freshly revealed truth. They wanted a behind the scenes view of biblical events. They wanted answers to their questions. They wanted to know what triggered God to send the deluge and what caused the different races of men. Ellen White had the answers — revealed to her in dreams and visions, or so they had been led to believe. However, those answers were wrong. They were not revealed by God. They were revealed by Jasher.

The amalgamation statements proved to be an embarrassment for the sect and they quietly vanished from Patriarchs and Prophets. Not all SDAs were pleased with the removal of what they thought to be inspired words. They pressed the Whites for an explanation. After all, what prophet of God has to delete their words? W.C. White responded to the complaints in full damage-control mode:

Regarding the two paragraphs which are to be found in Spiritual Gifts and also in The Spirit of Prophecy regarding amalgamation and the reason why they were left out of the later books... They were left out by Ellen G. White. ...she had many times direct instruction from the angel of the Lord regarding what should be omitted and what should be added in new editions.³⁵

Willie takes his mother's terrible blunder — an obvious false statement derived from a legend — and spins its removal as a miracle! An angel of the Lord directed her to remove it. Willie never explained why it took twenty-six years for the angel to get around to telling her to remove it.

Conclusion

There can be no doubt that Ellen White had “unusual insight” into Old Testament events. The question is where her unconventional insight came from. The evidence suggests that some of her most unusual additions were taken from the Book of Jasher — a spurious work masquerading as ancient history and filled with legendary embellishments. Thus, fiction — which she so routinely condemned — became a permanent fixture in the book she claimed was "truth...barricaded by a 'thus saith the Lord.'"