Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 8 - Matthew Henry

by Dirk Anderson

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) was an English Nonconformist minister and preacher best known for his monumental work, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (commonly called Matthew Henry’s Commentary). Published in six volumes between 1708 and 1710, it became the most widely read, influential, and quoted devotional commentary in the English-speaking Protestant world throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Early Adventist authors, including James White, quoted from Henry in articles in the Review. It was a staple on the bookshelves of virtually every Protestant preacher, evangelist, and religious writer—including Ellen White—for generations.

Parallels to Matthew Henry

Following are several examples where Ellen White copied from Henry.

1. Tower of Babel as a Flood Shelter

Genesis 11:4 gives the builders two motives for constructing the tower: "let us make us a name," and "lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." Nothing is said about the purpose being to escape another flood.

The flood-escape theory is not in the Bible at all. The oldest surviving version appears in Josephus. This is not a revelation. This is an ancient legend. Josephus reported that Nimrod incited the builders and vowed that “he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach.”¹ The idea passed down through the centuries into the commentaries — where, by Matthew Henry's day, it was mentioned but rejected.

Watch how Henry handles it:

Henry is careful. "Some think..." He is not reporting history; he is passing along an old conjecture — the very one Josephus had recorded — and he then proceeds to refute it. If the builders truly feared another Flood, he argues, they would have built on a mountain rather than on the plain of Shinar. Their choice of location undermines the theory.

Ellen White removes every trace of uncertainty. What Josephus offered as legend and Henry passed along as another man's speculation becomes, in her account, the builders' actual motive. They disbelieved God's covenant. They built the tower to survive another deluge — and, following the ancient logic exactly, they built it higher than the floodwaters had reached. The legend of Josephus has become revelation.

This creates a serious problem for the SDA defense that the Holy Spirit guided Ellen White to reliable commentators. She did not merely borrow the commentators' information—she adopted the nonsensical legend that careful commentators were rejecting. Henry questioned it. Other Bible commentators of White's era also flatly rejected it (Poole, Gill, Pulpit, and Ellicott who called it the "silly stories of Josephus.") If White had been guided by God in selecting materials, she too would have rejected it. However, she did the exact opposite: elevating a legend into revealed history.

2. Not of His Head, Nor of His Feet

Genesis tells us where Eve came from. It does not tell us what the rib symbolizes. That application belongs to Matthew Henry, and it became one of the most celebrated paragraphs in his commentary.

White follows Henry point for point: not the head, not the feet, the side, equality, protection, and love. Even Henry's rhetorical framework remains intact: not this, nor that, but this.

Nothing in Genesis suggests that the rib signifies equality, protection, or love. Those are theological applications. Henry made them famous. White repeats them as though they were revealed to her.

3. God Rested, Not as One Weary

Here the plagiarism is scarcely disguised. Genesis says only that God rested on the Sabbath. The denial that the rest implied fatigue, the substitution of satisfaction for exhaustion, and the closing phrase about the manifestations of his glory are all Henry's, not a revelation.

4. Noah's Small Stock of Cattle

Genesis 8:20 says Noah built an altar and offered of every clean beast and fowl. It offers no commentary on the cost.

Small stock, great expense, and generosity notwithstanding — the same three-part observation, in the same order, about a verse that supplies none of it.

5. Charity Versus Gain

Genesis 14 gives us the facts: Lot is captured, Abram hears of it, arms 318 of his servants, pursues the enemy, and rescues his nephew. But Genesis never tells us why Abram went to war. It also says nothing about any lingering resentment between the two men. In Genesis 13, Abram had generously allowed Lot to choose the land he wanted, and the two simply went their separate ways. Henry and White both supply a backstory not in Genesis:

According to Henry and White, Abram's rescue was not motivated by ambition or gain, but by charity. Also, before the rescue, there was supposedly a grievance between Abram and Lot — Lot had quarreled with him, separated from him, and acted ungratefully. Yet Abram had forgiven and forgotten the offense.

None of this is in Genesis 14. The chapter never says that Abram rescued Lot to prove his charity, never says he was concerned about being perceived as seeking financial gain, and never calls Lot ungrateful. Henry creates the backstory and the motive; White reproduces both. Henry says it was “all forgiven and forgotten.” White says Abram had “cherished no unkind memory.” Henry says the rescue was driven by charity rather than gain; White says Abram wanted no one to think he fought for gain.

Henry supplies internal motives and moral interpretation to a story that never supplies either. Once again, the commentator's extra-biblical interpretation appears in Patriarchs and Prophets as though it were revealed history.

6. The Ladder Is Christ, and the Only Way Back

Genesis 28:12–15 describes Jacob's dream: a ladder reaching between earth and heaven, angels ascending and descending, and God speaking from above it. Genesis never identifies the ladder as Christ, nor does it explain the ladder as the restored channel of communication between fallen humanity and heaven.

The identification of the ladder with Christ is not, by itself, remarkable. Jesus himself connects the imagery of Jacob's ladder with the Son of man in John 1:51, and Henry explicitly makes that connection. The more interesting parallel is what both writers do with the idea afterward.

Henry says that Christ is the ladder through whom all intercourse between heaven and earth, since the Fall takes place. He calls Christ the only way to heaven and describes the ladder as the appointed connection between the two realms. Patriarchs and Prophets develops the same idea: Christ is the appointed medium of communication, and without His merits to bridge the gulf that sin had made, fallen humanity could have no communion with the angels.

Genesis says none of this. It gives Jacob a dream and a promise. John 1:51 supplies the Christian connection to Christ. But the elaborate explanation of the ladder as the divinely appointed bridge between heaven and fallen humanity comes from the commentator. Patriarchs and Prophets presents the same theological architecture as revealed truth.

The ladder comes from Genesis. The Christian interpretation comes from John. The explanation of what that ladder does for fallen humanity comes from Matthew Henry. White rearranged the wording.

7. The Anatomy of “The Literal Week”

Patriarchs and Prophets devotes an entire chapter, “The Literal Week,” to defending a literal six-day creation against two challenges: geology's evidence for an ancient earth and the newer claim that nature operates according to its own “fixed laws,” requiring no continuing divine activity. The opening defense against geology is carried forward almost unchanged from White's 1864 Spiritual Gifts, volume 3. It appears to draw heavily on arguments already circulating in Adventist periodicals during the 1850s and early 1860s.¹⁴

But the chapter did not simply preserve White's earlier material. Two passages added later, both absent from the 1864 account, point toward two very different literary sources. The first leads backward more than a century to Matthew Henry. The second leads forward to a contemporary debate over Darwinism and materialism.

The first addition is revealing because of the exact combination of biblical texts used to make the argument. Where the 1864 book strings together several passages about the inscrutability of God, Patriarchs and Prophets introduces Deuteronomy 29:29 and pairs it with Job 11:7–9—the same two passages Matthew Henry had already brought together for essentially the same point:¹⁵

The significance is not simply that both writers quote Scripture. It is that they select the same two passages and use them to construct the same argument about the limits of human understanding. Out of the many biblical texts available on God's incomprehensibility, the same two appear together in the same conceptual sequence.

On April 19, 1882, Charles Darwin died, and the American religious press spent the following weeks reacting. The Advent Christian writer D. T. Taylor compiled excerpts from multiple Protestant sources into a single column. Signs of the Times reprinted it on August 3, 1882. Read as a whole, the column makes a cumulative argument: Darwinism gives matter its own inherent energy, removes God's continuing activity from nature, reduces creation to a mechanism God merely started, and ultimately leaves no place for God within the workings of the universe.

Eighteen months later, Ellen White dived into the controversy with her own Signs of the Times article, “Science and the Bible in Education,” published March 20, 1884. Her answer follows the same argument in the same sequence — and answers it point by point. That 1884 article was later carried into Patriarchs and Prophets with only light revision.

Taylor makes a single cumulative argument: matter has its own inherent energy; that energy does the work once attributed to God's superintending care; the result is a world God merely started and then left—a piece of hard mechanism with no room for Him inside it. White's answer follows the same sequence and reverses each point: matter's supposed vital power is rejected; breath and pulse become evidence of God's continuing care; creation is finished but God's energy is still exerted; and nature is declared the servant of its Creator rather than a self-acting machine.

The vocabulary is strikingly specific: inherent energy, mechanism, present or active energy, God's superintending care, and the question of whether God remains inside or outside nature. These are not concepts supplied by Genesis. They belong to a very specific nineteenth-century dialogue over Darwinism, materialism, and divine providence.

The significance is not that White merely addressed the same subject as other writers. Her 1884 response follows an argument already laid out in Signs of the Times in strikingly similar language and sequence. The material then moved into Patriarchs and Prophets.

That gives us a glimpse of how the supposedly revealed chapter was actually constructed. New material was added from different sources at different times: Matthew Henry supplied one layer; the contemporary Signs of the Times controversy supplied another. What finally appeared as a single chapter in Patriarchs and Prophets was, in fact, a composite built over time from earlier writings and existing arguments.

Whatever one ultimately believes about Ellen White's prophetic claims, the documentary evidence shows that the chapter evolved from earlier material.

Conclusion

Seven parallels are difficult to dismiss, especially because they are not merely shared biblical facts. Henry supplies interpretations that Genesis does not: Noah’s small stock and great expense, the meaning of Adam’s rib, Lot’s forgiven resentment, the nature of God’s rest, and the function of Jacob’s ladder. Patriarchs and Prophets gives those same interpretations in remarkably similar form.

The Babel example stands out as the one that should give us pause. Henry says “some think” the builders feared another flood, then rejects the idea. White removes the hedge and presents the same legend as fact. Henry questioned it; White revealed it.

Matthew Henry was not claiming visions. He was reading, comparing, reasoning, and occasionally admitting that he did not know. That is what a commentator does. Material that Henry had already reasoned through appears in Patriarchs and Prophets as revealed history — uncredited.