Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 16 - Daniel March

by Dirk Anderson

Daniel March (1816–1909) was an American Congregationalist minister, author, and devotional writer whose vivid, narrative-driven books were immense bestsellers across the late nineteenth-century Protestant world. After completing his education at Yale Divinity School, March pastored influential churches in the northeastern United States. He specialized in cinematic, highly emotional, and descriptive retellings of biblical events designed for home reading. His most famous works include Night Scenes in the Bible (1868), Home Life in the Bible (1873), and Walks and Homes of Jesus (1856). All three of these books were in Ellen White's library.

White was well-known to have plagiarized heavily from March in her major books, such as Prophets and Kings. When SDA researcher Fred Veltman examined the plagiarism in some chapters of Desire of Ages, he discovered 129 parallels with March's Night Scenes of the Bible and Walks and Homes of Jesus.¹

Parallels to March

Ellen White's acquaintance with Daniel March’s Night Scenes in the Bible is documented in her own hand. In 1878, she wrote to Mary White: “Is Night Scenes of the Bible there? If so, send it.”² Patriarchs and Prophets was published twelve years later, in 1890. March’s book is a devotional retelling of individual biblical nights, four of which cover the same episodes White would later dramatize: the last night of Sodom, Abraham’s night at Moriah, Jacob’s night at Bethel, and Jacob’s night of wrestling at the Jabbok.

1. The Plain "as the Garden of the Lord"

Genesis 13:10 supplies the phrase “garden of the Lord” itself, and both writers open with it. What Genesis does not supply is everything both writers add to it — flocks on the hills, merchants and caravans, and the same closing turn from natural abundance to moral corruption, ending on the identical phrase, “debases the soul.”

This is one continuous passage in each book, not two writers hitting the same note by coincidence twice. Genesis 19 says nothing about Sodom’s economy, its hillside flocks, or its idle wealth; both authors invent the same scenery, in the same order, and land on the same word to describe what that wealth did to its people.

2. The Evening Before

Genesis 19:1 opens simply with “the two angels came to Sodom at even.” It gives no scene of the city itself in the hours before their arrival. Both writers supply one, and independently reach for the same detail — the coolness of evening drawing an idle population out of doors.

3. One Attentive Man

Genesis records only that Lot saw the two men and invited them in. Neither writer is content with that; both add a wider, indifferent city against which Lot alone stands out, and both specify that he had no idea who his guests actually were.

March draws the same scene out into a warning — that the “angels of the blessing and of deliverance will come and pass by us unawares, and we shall not receive their help” if we are not watchful. White gives the same idea its negative form: “Many a household, in closing its doors against a stranger, has shut out God’s messenger, who would have brought blessing and hope and peace.”⁹

4. Fidelity in Small Duties Opens the Door

5. The hidden Boundary

Genesis 19 gives no verdict on whether the men of Sodom were behaving that final night any worse than on any other, and no image for what finally exhausted divine patience. Both writers supply the same verdict and the same image, down to the mob’s “hooting and jeers” and the same verb — “kindle” — applied to the fires of wrath about to fall.

One detail is worth noting for accuracy: March himself sets off the boundary line with its own line breaks, suggesting he is citing a hymn, sermon, or poem rather than coining the phrase.¹⁴ That does not weaken the case — it strengthens it in a different way. If both writers are quoting a common third source, the parallel still shows White’s prose is built from the devotional literature circulating in her lifetime, rather than arriving whole by vision. Either March is her direct source, or March and White independently drew on the same piece of period writing; neither possibility is compatible with a supernatural origin for the phrase.

6. “God will not always be mocked...”

This is not a scriptural quotation; Galatians 6:7 (“God is not mocked”) reads nothing like it. The sentence, down to its two-clause structure and its precise verbs, appears in both books at the same point in the Sodom narrative — the summary judgment on the scoffers who ignored Lot’s warning.

7. The Sons-in-Law Laughing

Genesis 19:23 states only that “the sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.” It says nothing about what Lot’s sons-in-law were doing that morning. Both writers invent the same scene, including the same epithet for Lot himself.

8. A Vision of the Night

Genesis 22 gives no mode for how the command to slay Isaac arrived, and does not place Abraham at Beersheba when he received it (he returns there only afterward, 22:19). Both writers supply the same setting and the same mode of revelation, and both add the same detail Genesis withholds — that the fire of Abraham’s youth had already gone out of him.

9. The Household at Beersheba

In the same breath, both writers pause to catalogue Abraham’s wealth in nearly identical terms — not merely that he was rich, which Genesis says in passing elsewhere, but the specific picture of flocks covering the plains and a household of servants numbered in the hundreds.

10. Not by Ordinary Death

Genesis moves directly from the command to sacrifice Isaac to Abraham’s obedience, with no reflection on what made this trial different from an ordinary loss. Both writers supply the same contrast — that even losing Isaac to sickness or accident would have been a lighter grief than being required to kill him.

11. Doubt about the Voice

Genesis shows no hesitation in Abraham at all in obeying God — he simply rises early and goes (22:3). Both writers, independently of the text, give him a moment of doubting whether the command came from God or from an evil source impersonating God, and both then have him look up at the stars and recall the promise given fifty years before.

White adds the Exodus prohibition (“Thou shalt not kill”) as Abraham’s reasoning, an anachronism since the giving of the law at Sinai has not yet occurred in the narrative’s own chronology — her own embellishment layered onto the shared invented doubt-scene.²⁷

12. Watching Isaac Sleep

This entire domestic scene is absent from Genesis, which moves directly from the command to Abraham rising “early in the morning” (22:3). Both writers insert a night beforehand in which the father looks at his sleeping son and weighs, and rejects, telling the mother.

13. The Two Young Men

Genesis 22:3 gives Abraham “two young men” as companions, nothing more. Both writers add the same two beats Genesis withholds: that Abraham kept his purpose from them, and that he spent the journey hoping some word would come releasing him from it.

14. Isaac Could Have Overpowered His Father

15. Angels Present

Both writers extend the Akedah into a typology of Calvary, and both reach for the same superlative — that no trial could have been greater, no test could have caused deeper anguish — before adding the identical invented detail that angels stood by and were forbidden to act.

16. The Second Night Out

Turning to Jacob’s night at Bethel, based on Genesis 28:11–22.

Genesis specifies neither the day nor any inner state of despair; both writers add an emotional interior Genesis withholds. White’s version is markedly more specific than March’s recovered wording.

17. The Gorge

Turning to Jacob’s night of wrestling at the Jabbok: Genesis 32 says only that Jacob was left “alone.” Nothing in the text characterizes the place as dangerous. Both writers populate it independently with the same two threats.

18. A Sudden Hand in the Dark

Genesis 32:24 reads only, “there wrestled a man with him.” The grasping-hand-in-darkness image, and Jacob’s assumption that his life is under attack, appear in both writers in strikingly close wording — one of the closest single-sentence matches in the entire comparison.

19. Two Angel Hosts

Genesis 32:1–2 is a single verse: Jacob meets “God’s host” and names the place Mahanaim, “two camps.” Both writers expand this one verse into the same scene — angels front and behind, and Jacob’s mind going back specifically to the vision at Bethel twenty years earlier.

This is a fuller and closer match than a single shared verse can account for: the same two-hosts image, the same explicit recollection of Bethel, a long interval, and the same angels who watched over him at his departure would be there for his return. Genesis supplies none of this.

20. Further Wrestling Parallels

Conclusion

Taken across all four episodes, the pattern is consistent with what the December 1878 letter already suggests: this was not a book White glanced at once. Scenes, gestures, and turns of phrase recur across a dozen years and four separate nights of the patriarchal narrative — the sleeping son not to be disturbed, the hand seized in darkness and mistaken for an enemy’s, the gorge stocked with beasts and robbers, the sons-in-law still laughing as the fire falls. None of these is in Genesis. All of them are in a book from a "human mind" — a book she asked Mary White to send her.