Patriarchs and Profits
Chapter 15 - John Kitto
by Dirk Anderson
John Kitto (1804–1854) was an English biblical scholar and author. Totally deafened at age twelve after a fall from a roof, he overcame severe poverty to teach himself multiple languages and train as a printer. He later traveled extensively across the Middle East as a missionary and researcher. Leveraging his firsthand observations of Middle Eastern geography, customs, and culture, Kitto authored a widely popular, highly detailed reference work named The Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature (1845). This book found its way into Ellen White's library.
Parallels to Kitto
The details examined below were not visionary secrets. They were found in Kitto's three-volume Cyclopedia.1 The point here is not that White consulted a Cyclopedia, but that she did so without accreditation and while telling others her book came from no human mind.
1. The Ark’s “Rest”: Becalmed, not Grounded
Genesis 8:4 says plainly that “the ark rested…upon the mountains of Ararat.” The obvious reading — and the one carried by centuries of sermon and hymn — is that the vessel grounded on a mountain peak. Kitto’s Cyclopedia argues, against that popular view, for something quite different: that the ark reached a state of calm — “a measure of comparative repose” — while still afloat among the mountains as the waters began to fall.
| Kitto, Cyclopedia2 | Patriarchs and Prophets3 |
|---|---|
| “…it may merely imply that after it had been driven and tossed to and fro on the waste of waters, it at length settled, i.e. attained a measure of comparative repose, and became more stationary over…the mountains of Ararat, when the waters began to subside… A vessel enjoys more real rest when becalmed, than when she grounds on the top of a submarine mountain in a troubled sea…the ark did not touch the earth until the waters were abated…” | “As the waters began to subside, the Lord caused the ark to drift into a spot protected by a group of mountains that had been preserved by his power. These mountains were but a little distance apart, and the ark moved about in this quiet haven, and was no longer driven upon the boundless ocean. This gave great relief to the weary, tempest-tossed voyagers.” |
The wording differs — Kitto is parsing a Hebrew verb; White is painting a scene — but the idea is the same and it is a distinctive idea: the ark comes to rest not by beaching on a summit but by reaching calm water while still floating amid the mountains. This is not the plain sense of Genesis, and it is not the common tradition. It is the minority reading Kitto defends against “the common belief that it lay on a mountain peak.” That Patriarchs and Prophets adopts Kitto's minority position is difficult to explain as coincidence. Notably, White keeps the image while discarding the argument Kitto built.
2. Further Parallels
The remaining parallels are individually lighter — each turns on a piece of natural-history or antiquarian detail that was available in more than one nineteenth-century source, Kitto’s among them. What makes them worth listing is their character and their clustering: they are precisely the sort of incidental, extra-biblical facts a writer picks up from a reference book, dropped into the narrative as divine knowledge. No one of them proves borrowing. Together they show that the material was available in the books of the day.
| Detail & source | Kitto, Cyclopedia | Patriarchs and Prophets | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gopher wood identified as cypress, prized for resisting decay | “…by the gopher wood, we are to understand the cypress… the wood of the cypress, being almost incorruptible, was likely to be preferred…”4 | “The material employed in the construction of the ark was the cypress, or gopher wood, which would be untouched by decay for hundreds of years.”5 | Kitto notes that the cypress identification is common the view of “the greatest number of writers.” The pairing with incorruptibility is what echoes Kitto. |
| The raven’s keen scent | “…the raven…is naturally observant and solitary; lives in pairs; has a most acute scent; and flies to a great height.”6 | “They sent out a raven, a bird of quick scent, to discover whether the earth had become dry.”7 | Genesis gives no reason for choosing a raven. White supplies the same reason that Kitto lists — keen scent. |
Conclusion
Ellen White's unusual insight into the landing of the ark is astonishingly similar to Kitto's speculation. That is precisely the kind of detail that should make one cautious about claims of supernatural knowledge. The question is not whether Ellen White could have received the image in vision. The question is why a distinctive interpretation already sitting in her library later appears in her prophetic narrative.
The other examples are less decisive individually. They do not prove that Kitto was the source of every incidental detail. But they demonstrate something important: the literary environment in her personal library was filled with "human minds" with ready-made explanations of the biblical world — geography, customs, natural history, and ancient practices — that were woven into White's narrative whenever Scripture left a gap.
Kitto did the research. White supplied the revelation.
References and Notes
- John Kitto, ed., A Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, 3 vols. (New York: Ivison & Phinney, 1858). The 1858 version was not available for this research, so the following versions were used: Volume 1: 1880. Volume 2: 1864. Volume 3: 1876. Presumably, the text quoted was substantially the same as the 1858 version.
- Kitto, “Ararat,” Cyclopedia, vol. 1, 200. The article rejects the common assumption that Genesis 8:4 requires the ark to have grounded on a mountain summit, arguing instead that the Hebrew verb rendered “rested” may denote only that the vessel “attained a measure of comparative repose” while still afloat over the mountains of Ararat as the waters subsided.
- Ellen White, Patriarchs and Prophets, 105.
- Kitto, “Gopher Wood,” Cyclopedia, vol. 1, 785. Kitto reports the cypress identification as that of “the greatest number of writers” (citing Fuller, Bochart, and Celsius) and notes the argument that cypress “being almost incorruptible, was likely to be preferred.” The identification itself is thus commonplace and cannot, on its own, establish dependence; it is the conjunction of cypress with decay-resistance, asserted as fact, that parallels Patriarchs and Prophets. Kitto’s own conclusion is markedly more tentative than White’s: “the whole of these suggestions amount only to conjectures.”
- Ellen White, Patriarchs and Prophets, 92.
- Kitto, “Raven,” Cyclopedia, vol. 3, 372.
- Ellen White, Patriarchs and Prophets, 105.