Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 13 - Adam Clarke

by Dirk Anderson

Adam Clarke (c. 1762–1832) was a British Methodist theologian, biblical scholar, and linguist, best known for compiling a monumental, eight-volume commentary on the Bible, published between 1810 and 1826. A close associate of Methodism's founder, John Wesley, Clarke spent over forty years writing his commentary single-handedly. Celebrated for its mastery of ancient languages, his commentary became a standard reference work across the nineteenth-century Protestant world and was listed in the inventory of Ellen White's library.

Parallels to Clarke

1. Reuben's Forfeited Birthright

Genesis 49:3–4 records Jacob's words to Reuben but says nothing about what became of his tribe in later history. Clarke supplies that history — quoting from the Targum to explain that Reuben forfeited three distinct privileges, which passed to three other sons, and then following the biblical threads showing that the tribe consequently sank into obscurity. Ellen White reproduces both his three-fold division and his verdict on the tribe.

Genesis stops with Jacob's pronouncement: "thou shalt not excel." Clarke follows the story into Israel's later history, explaining how Reuben's forfeited privileges were divided among Levi, Judah, and Joseph. White adopts the same framework, then concludes with Clarke's historical verdict that Reuben's tribe never attained prominence.

2. Simeon and Levi: The Forty-Eight Cities

The next parallel comes from a single note in which Clarke traces the later fortunes of both Simeon and Levi. Genesis 49:7 says only that the two would be “divided” and “scattered” in Israel. Clarke explains how the scattering played out for each tribe. White compresses his entire note — keeping his distinctive details and even his phrasing.

The two examples above are not merely instances in which Ellen White happened to agree with Adam Clarke. In both cases, Clarke supplies historical information that Genesis itself does not contain. He follows the biblical text beyond Jacob's words, traces the later history of the tribes, explains how Reuben's forfeited privileges were distributed, and describes the peculiar settlement of Simeon and Levi. White incorporates the same information into her narrative, including details sufficiently distinctive to make the literary dependence difficult to dismiss.

Conclusion — Where are the Citations?

There is an important question here that goes beyond these particular parallels: why is none of this acknowledged? When White's narrative moves beyond what Genesis says and begins supplying historical details already worked out in Clarke's commentary, the reader is given no indication that the material has come from another writer.

By the time Patriarchs and Prophets appeared in 1890, Ellen White and those working with her had already learned that this was a dangerous practice. Their earlier painful experience with The Life of Paul had exposed the problem dramatically. That book had incorporated material from other published works, and the resulting controversy forced White and her associates to confront uncomfortable questions about literary borrowing and attribution. The controversy surrounding the expanded Great Controversy in the late 1880s brought the issue to the public's attention. In March of 1889, in Ellen White's home town of Healdsburg, California, Canright published an embarrassing article in the local newspaper showing Ellen White's plagiarism of material in the 1888 Great Controversy.⁵

One might therefore expect the next major historical work to be especially careful. If previously published material was being incorporated into a book that carried Ellen White's prophetic authority, readers should have been told where that material came from. If a commentator supplied the historical information, cite the commentator. If a historian supplied the detail, identify the historian. If an earlier writer supplied the interpretation, acknowledge the writer.

Instead, Patriarchs and Prophets appeared with no attribution whatsoever. The 21 chapters examined in this study are strikingly free of any citations identifying the literary sources behind their distinctive additions. The reader encounters Clarke's historical conclusions as part of Ellen White's narrative, but Clarke's name disappears. Readers are left with the impression that the book contains only the writings of a prophetess.

The issue is not that Ellen White used books. No serious reader should object to an author consulting commentaries, histories, or other sources. The issue is how the resulting material was presented. A writer may borrow information honestly and identify the source. A historian may synthesize the work of earlier scholars and acknowledge them. But when distinctive information from a commentator's pages is incorporated into a narrative presented as the product of divine illumination, the absence of attribution becomes much more significant.

The problem becomes even sharper when we remember what the reader was being told about the book. Patriarchs and Prophets was not presented merely as Ellen White's retelling of Genesis. Its distinctive details were understood by her readers as the product of special revelation—information God had shown her about events that Scripture did not record. White fostered this view, telling her followers that the contents did not come from any "human mind" but that the Lord "traced" the words on her heart.

The cognitive dissonance is disturbing: while claiming no human mind authored the book, she was quietly incorporating the ideas of a dozen or more authors into it.