Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 4 - The Columbian Family Bible

by Dirk Anderson

Ellen White owned a copy of the Columbian Family and Pulpit Bible (1822). It was much more than a Bible. Beneath the biblical text ran commentary compiled from Poole, Brown, Coke, Scott, Doddridge, and Adam Clarke, along with notes from other respected commentators (see photo at right).¹

In other words, Ellen White did not have to visit a theological library to find these ideas. They were literally printed beneath the verses she was reading. Open Genesis, and there sat the opinions, explanations, and speculations of some of the best-known Bible commentators of her day.

Unlike Ellen White, these men usually admitted when they were guessing. Again and again they wrote, "perhaps," "some think," "it is probable," "the Jews were generally of opinion," or "it is thought." They distinguished between what Scripture actually says and what they believed Scripture might imply.

Ellen White removed the question marks. She routinely turned their possibilities into certainties and presented them as facts revealed to her by God.

Four Things a Vision Cannot Do

The Columbian Bible provides four examples that stand out as being unattributable to a "vision." These involve material that a vision simply cannot produce.

1. The Same Sentence

In this example, Pharaoh has summoned Joseph from prison to interpret his dreams. Genesis records Joseph's humble reply: "It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." The biblical text stops there. Ellen White does not. Neither does the commentary beneath the text in her Columbian Family Bible.

The same sentence, preceded by the same observation that Joseph modestly disclaims the honor. That is not what Genesis says. It is what the commentary says.

A vision cannot explain why a nineteenth-century sentence written by a commentator appears inside a book whose author insisted it was "not the product of any human mind." The vision did not produce that sentence. The commentary did.

2. Gopher Wood: Solving an Unsolved Hebrew Word

The Hebrew word gopher appears exactly once in the entire Old Testament. No one knows with certainty what kind of wood it was. Bible translators and commentators have debated it for centuries, and even the King James translators declined to guess. They simply transliterated the Hebrew word as gopher.

The commentary in Ellen White's Columbian Family Bible, however, was willing to venture an opinion:

Notice what happened. The commentator openly admits there is disagreement. Some say pine. Many say cedar. Others say cypress. He then sides with one view because cypress is exceptionally durable.

Ellen White reaches exactly the same conclusion. She identifies the wood as cypress and immediately emphasizes the identical reason—its extraordinary resistance to decay.

This is not the sort of detail someone "sees" in a vision. A vision may reveal an ark made of wood. It does not identify the durability qualities of the wood employed.

3. Seth: She Reproduces the Method, Not Just the Answer

In the case of the cypress wood, SDA apologists may argue that Ellen White simply shared the same view as other commentators. This example goes much further. She does not merely arrive at the same conclusion. She reaches it by following the same line of reasoning.

The commentary beneath Genesis 5:3 asks an obvious question: If Seth was a godly man, why does Scripture say Adam "begat a son in his own likeness"? The answer is found by comparing Genesis 5:1 with Genesis 5:3.

This is not plagiarism of words. It is White copying the exact same multi-step argument used by the commentator in her Bible:

• Seth resembles Adam more than his brothers.
• He is a "worthy" man.
• He inherited the same fallen nature as Cain.
• The difference is divine grace.
• Most importantly, both writers build the entire argument by comparing Genesis 5:1 with Genesis 5:3.

That comparison is not found in Genesis. It is the commentator's method of explaining Genesis. Ellen White follows the same path to the same conclusion.

It gets worse. White not only follows the commentator's reasoning — she assembles the paragraph from multiple sources. The argument above came from her Columbian Bible. The wording in the rest of the paragraph was plagiarized from Alfred Edersheim.

That single paragraph in Patriarchs and Prophets is a composite. The observations that Seth "resembled Adam more closely than did his other sons," was "a worthy character," inherited "no more natural goodness than did Cain," and was changed only "by divine grace" come from the commentary in her Columbian Bible. Edersheim contributes the explanation of Seth's name, Eve's statement that "God hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel," and much of the wording White uses to compare Genesis 5:1 with Genesis 5:3. The comparison itself appears in both sources, but White combined them into a single seamless paragraph.

This is not what a person does after receiving a vision. It is what a writer does with two reference books open on the desk—taking an argument from one, a sentence from another, and weaving them together into a seamless narrative.

A vision might show Seth. It would not show a man comparing two verses of Genesis to construct a theological argument. This is editorial work, not revelation at work.

4. Adam's Death: An Entire Argument, Reproduced in Sequence

Genesis 5:5 explains Adam's post-fall life in one brief verse:

And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

That is all that Genesis says.

The Columbian Bible fills the silence with a small essay. The same essay appears in White's book, with the same premises, in the same order, reaching the same conclusion.

While Adam's life span came from the Bible, five extra-biblical correspondences — followed in order — came from the commentator:

1. Grief for his own sin
2. The murder of Abel
3. Witnessing the corruption that led to the Flood
4. The death sentence first appearing terrible
5. The reasoned acceptance that followed

Two people do not independently construct the same five-step case for why a man came to regard his own death sentence as mercy.

Borrowing Their Problems

The previous examples showed Ellen White borrowing the Columbian commentators' conclusions. The next group show her borrowing their problems.

In each case, the biblical text presents no difficulty at all. The problem exists only in the minds of commentators. They notice an apparent inconsistency, ask how it can be explained, and then propose a solution.

Remarkably, Ellen White answers the very same questions — even though the Bible never asks them. She inherits not only the commentators' conclusions, but also the problems that led to those conclusions. That is exactly what you would expect from someone reading annotated commentaries.

1. The Curse on Canaan

Genesis never pauses to defend God's justice in cursing Canaan. The objection comes entirely from the commentator, who worries that the punishment appears unfair. Ellen White then answers that very objection, using essentially the same explanation: Noah was not pronouncing an arbitrary sentence but uttering a prophecy of what Ham's descendants would become.

The coincidence is revealing. She does not merely share the commentator's answer. She shares his question.

• The commentator asks whether God acted unjustly.
• He answers that Noah was giving a prophecy, not an arbitrary curse.
• Ellen White gives the same answer using much of the same vocabulary.

She adopts the commentator's anxiety about this passage — answering an objection the Bible never raises — utilizing similar vocabulary.

2. Defending Abraham

Abraham tells Pharaoh that Sarah is his sister. While the Bible itself does not comment on this, the Columbian commentators devise a six-part defense. What does White do?

Notice what both writers are doing. Genesis simply reports the event. Neither Moses nor the biblical narrator pauses to defend Abraham's conduct. The commentator does, constructing a point-by-point moral defense. Ellen White follows the same path.

Both writers answer the same objection. Abraham was technically telling the truth because Sarah really was his half-sister. He was therefore not guilty of an outright lie, yet he was guilty of deception by concealing the whole truth. That deception placed Sarah in danger, and it exposed a temporary failure to trust God's protection. Even the concluding moral is the same: one of the greatest men of faith was not free from human weakness.

Genesis records the history. The commentary supplies the moral defense. Ellen White reproduces the defense.

3. Was Abraham Cruel to Hagar?

The next three examples follow the same pattern. Genesis simply records the events. The commentators, however, sense that readers may question the conduct of Abraham and Joseph, so they rush to their defense. Ellen White repeatedly joins the defense, offering essentially the same explanations.

Notice the pattern. The commentator begins with the moral objection: Abraham appears harsh and unfeeling. He then argues that Abraham acted reluctantly, sought only to restore peace to his family, and obeyed God's command. Ellen White follows the same line of defense. Abraham is portrayed as deeply distressed, acting only under divine direction, with the restoration of peace in the household as the ultimate objective.

4. Was Joseph a Tale-Bearer?

Again, Genesis offers no defense of Joseph. The commentator worries that Joseph might appear to be an informer who betrayed his brothers. His solution is to portray Joseph's report as an act of loving concern, intended to bring about their reform. Ellen White reaches the same conclusion, explaining that Joseph reported their conduct because he hoped his father's authority would lead them to repentance.

5. Did Joseph Practice Divination?

Genesis never pauses to defend Joseph against the charge of divination. The commentator does. He argues that Joseph never practiced divination at all. Ellen White likewise anticipates the same objection, insisting that Joseph never claimed supernatural powers, but merely allowed his brothers to believe he possessed them. Once again, she answers the same question occupying the commentator rather than one raised by the biblical narrative itself.

6. Potiphar Secretly Believed Joseph

Genesis records a simple sequence of events. Potiphar hears his wife's accusation, and "his wrath was kindled." Nothing suggests he secretly doubted her story.

Now read the verse itself:

And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled (Gen. 39:19).

Notice what happened. The biblical text says Potiphar became angry. The commentator found it problematic that an honorable man would condemn an innocent servant, so he invented an explanation: Potiphar knew Joseph was innocent but imprisoned him anyway to protect his wife's reputation.

Ellen White adopts the same explanation and expands it. Joseph, she says, would have been executed had Potiphar actually believed the accusation.

Furthermore, she had a second book in her library making the same excuse: Lives and Lessons of the Patriarchs by John Cumming — an author she frequently plagiarized. Cumming writes:

Potiphar seems to have had strong impression… that Joseph was falsely accused, that his wife was the guilty one, and privately, perhaps, he conveyed this, his own impression, to the jailer; for the jailer's instructions from his master were, to receive Joseph as a prisoner, that outward appearances might be saved, but to treat him as a friend and innocent servant.²⁴

Her Bible said the concealment protected the wife. Cumming said it protected appearances. Ellen White wrote that it was done “to save the reputation of his master's house.” She took Cumming's point-of-view on this.

A third book on her shelf made the same excuse. Thomas J. Conant, in 1868, could not reconcile the sentence with the charge either:

This fact, in connection with the confidence Joseph had before inspired, strengthened by an ingenuous and truthlike assertion of his innocence, may account for the lenity shown him, which is otherwise unintelligible.²⁵

Notice that last clause. A commentator is conceding that the biblical text does not make sense to him as it stands — and inventing a motive to make it fit. Three books did this. Ellen White took their solution and reported it as history.

This is not an additional detail supplied by revelation. It is an attempt to solve a problem the commentator perceived in Genesis—and one that the biblical text never asks to be solved. The commentary's attempt to soften our view of Potiphar becomes part of her inspired narrative.

By now the pattern is unmistakable. The Bible tells the story. The commentators worry about the story. Ellen White worries about exactly the same things. She repeatedly interrupts the biblical narrative to defend Abraham, Joseph, and Noah at precisely the points where nineteenth-century commentators felt compelled to defend them. That is not the fingerprint of independent revelation. It is the fingerprint of literary dependence.

Guesswork Promoted to Revelation

There is a world of difference between saying "perhaps this happened" and saying "this is what happened." Honest commentators know the difference. They mark the boundary between Scripture and speculation with words like "perhaps," "it is thought," and "some suppose." Ellen White repeatedly strips away those warnings. Their conjectures become her revelations.

1. The Serpent Had Wings

Notice what disappears. The commentator repeatedly admits he is guessing: "seems," "probably," "is thought." Ellen White reports the same reconstruction as though she had seen it. The serpent no longer probably had wings—it had wings. It no longer appeared to resemble an angel of light—it flew through the air in dazzling splendor. Scripture says none of this. White turns the commentator's imagination into fact.

2. Fire Fell on Abel's Altar

Genesis 4:4 simply says, "The LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering." It never explains how Abel knew his sacrifice had been accepted. That silence invited centuries of speculation.

Ellen White had Adam Clarke's commentary in her library. He begins with a frank admission: "we are not informed." Only then does he venture a possibility — "it was probably" by fire from heaven. The Columbian Bible is equally cautious, attributing the idea to Jewish opinion rather than to the biblical text. The Douay hedges, "we may suppose, by some visible token..." The commentators are careful to distinguish between Scripture and speculation.

Ellen White did not own John Calvin's Genesis commentary. Had she consulted it, she would have found one of Christianity's greatest commentators warning that this very story rested on no scriptural evidence and should be rejected as a Jewish fable:

The Hebrews, according to their manner, report to divinations and imagine that the sacrifice of Abel was consumed by celestial fire; but, since we ought not to allow ourselves so great a license as to invent miracles, for which we have no testimony of Scripture, let Jewish fables be dismissed.³²

Ellen White does not merely choose one of the competing opinions. She transforms it into revelation. Every hedge disappears. Probably becomes certainty. Jewish tradition becomes eyewitness history. What careful commentators treated as conjecture, she presents as something the Holy Spirit had shown her.

3. Lamech Was Boasting

Genesis 4:23–24 is one of the most difficult passages in the entire book of Genesis. The meaning of Lamech's speech has puzzled interpreters for centuries, and the commentator beneath the text readily admits it.

Notice the commentator's candor. "Much ingenuity has been exercised." His proposed solution depends on repunctuating the Hebrew as a question — "What should I fear?" — and even then he cautiously concludes only that "no better sense has been found." It is offered as the least unsatisfactory explanation of an exceptionally obscure text.

Ellen White treats the question very differently. The grammatical uncertainty disappears. The least unsatisfactory reading receives her prophetic approval. Lamech is no longer a figure whose obscure words might be understood as defiant; he becomes a man who is "boastfully defiant."

Once again, a commentator's tentative solution becomes prophetic certainty. Genesis never attributes any motive to Lamech. The commentator guesses. Ellen White presents his guess as revealed history.

4. The Balance Sheet of Temptation

When Potiphar's wife makes her advance, Genesis records Joseph's refusal in a single sentence. The Columbian Bible calculates what was at stake on either side. So does she — using the same terms.

“Perhaps death” — verbatim — and the whole formula: concealment and rewards on one side, disgrace and death on the other.

5. The Butler Forgot

The King James text reads, “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him.” He thought no more of is not Scripture's phrase. It is the commentator's invention.

6. Rebekah's "Stratagem"

7. Jacob's Vow Came from a Grateful Heart

8. Why Did Jacob Send Messengers

Genesis tells us that Jacob sent messengers to Esau, but it does not tell us why. The text simply records the action: “Then Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother” (Gen. 32:3). The motive has to be inferred from the surrounding circumstances.

The Columbian Family Bible supplies that inference. Jacob was using “every prudential method” available to ensure his safety and to “soften the resentment” Esau might still have felt. Then, after doing “every thing that human prudence could suggest,” Jacob turns to God for protection.

That interpretation appears almost intact in Patriarchs and Prophets. Jacob had “something to do to secure his own safety,” so he sent Esau a conciliatory greeting. After doing “all in his power” to avert the danger, he pleaded for divine protection.

Patriarchs and Prophets does not merely reproduce an event recorded in Genesis. It reproduces the commentator’s explanation of Jacob's motive which Genesis leaves unexplained.

Fraud Alert: According to Uriah Smith's introduction to Ellen White's book, this is the precise value that she added — revealing the "springs of action" behind the biblical narrative. People paid money to purchase a prophet's divine insight into the motives of biblical characters. Little did they realize those motives were coming from a Bible commentary.

9. The Garment of Light

This is more than a shared belief that Adam and Eve were clothed with light. It is the same literary contrast, expressed with the same unusual adjective. The commentator notes that the artificial robes theory was merely an opinion. Ellen White adopts the commentator's language as though it was a fact.

10. “After the Manner of Men”

The parallel here is deeper than a shared phrase. Genesis contains two passages that seem to attribute human limitations to God. In one, He "remembers" His covenant. In the other, He "comes down" to investigate Sodom. The commentator recognizes the theological difficulty and resolves both passages with the same interpretive principle. Ellen White does exactly the same thing.

Notice the pattern. On Genesis 9 the commentator explains that God does not literally remember because He had forgotten. On Genesis 18 he explains that God does not literally descend because He lacks information. In both cases the language is an accommodation to human understanding. Ellen White follows the same reasoning at the same two passages, even preserving the commentator's characteristic expression, "after the manner of men."

This is not a shared story or even a shared doctrine. It is a shared method of interpretation. Faced with the same two anthropomorphisms, both writers apply the same theological solution in the same places. The commentator explains difficult verses. White reproduces his explanations as though it was revealed to her.

And More...

Here are further instances from Genesis 1 to 50 where Ellen White adopts the extra-biblical ideas of the Columbian Bible commentators and occasionally even their very words:

The White Estate advertises Patriarchs and Prophets as being written by an author with "unusual insights."¹⁴¹ This chapter demonstrates that many of the distinctive ideas of Patriarchs and Prophets did not descend from heaven. They ascended from the pages of her Columbian Bible.