D&C 103: Five Hundred Men, Then Three, Then a Hundred

Verse 31 came up at breakfast this morning, and Melissa has now heard about it twice.

It sits in the middle of a long run of orders about recruiting. Parley Pratt and Lyman Wight are told to go out and raise men for the march to Missouri, and partway through the arithmetic, with no change of tone at all, the Lord says this:

Behold this is my will; ask and ye shall receive; but men do not always do my will.

D&C 103:31

Then he goes right back to the numbers.

I didn't expect a revelation about raising an army to stop and admit ahead of time how the recruiting would go. The date is February 24, 1834, at Kirtland. The Saints had been driven out of Jackson County the autumn before, and the first verse calls them "scattered on the land of Zion."

What does the Lord promise before he starts counting?

A great deal, and in a hurry, starting with verse 5, which says he has "decreed a decree," and verse 6 says his people "shall, for I have decreed it, begin to prevail against mine enemies from this very hour." Verse 7 carries it to the point where the kingdoms of the world are subdued. If you stopped reading there you'd think the outcome was already settled.

You can't stop there, though, because verse 8 turns it around in one sentence: "But inasmuch as they keep not my commandments, and hearken not to observe all my words, the kingdoms of the world shall prevail against them." Verse 4 had already said why the Saints were scattered. They "did not hearken altogether unto the precepts and commandments." So the chapter opens with a promise and a condition attached to it, and the condition is the same word in verse 5, verse 7 and verse 8: hearken.

I notice verse 19 as well, which is easy to hurry through. "I say not unto you as I said unto your fathers: Mine angel shall go up before you, but not my presence." Verse 20 gives the other version: "Mine angels shall go up before you, and also my presence." The people hearing this were being sent on a long walk toward a county that had thrown them out, and what they were given is a comparison with Israel in the wilderness in which they come out ahead. I'd have wanted to hear that. I'd also have wanted to know what to make of verse 8 an hour later.

Why does D&C 103 give three different numbers?

Read verses 30 through 34 in order and the numbers shrink. Five hundred "of the strength of my house" is the first figure, to be gathered by tens or twenties or fifties or a hundred at a time (v. 30). If that can't be done, try for three hundred, with the word "peradventure" (v. 32). If three hundred can't be done, try for one hundred, with the word "peradventure" again (v. 33). Verse 34 changes the wording.

But verily I say unto you, a commandment I give unto you, that ye shall not go up unto the land of Zion until you have obtained a hundred of the strength of my house, to go up with you unto the land of Zion.

D&C 103:34

Only the smallest number is a commandment, and the five hundred is called his will in verse 30 while the three hundred is something to seek diligently, but the hundred is the line you don't cross. Verse 31 sits between the five hundred and the hundred, which is where I'd put it if I were the one planning. The chapter doesn't say that's why, so take it as my reading.

Verse 35 goes one step further than I expected, because the recruiters are told to ask and to "pray earnestly that peradventure my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., may go with you." That's the third "peradventure" in four verses, and this time it's attached to Joseph himself. Even the man the whole march is built around is something they're told to pray for and not something they're promised. Verse 36 then says "All victory and glory is brought to pass unto you through your diligence, faithfulness, and prayers of faith," which is a lot to hang on a number nobody knew yet.

What does a minimum look like on the ground?

Hal Brandt ran the roofing day when I was quorum president in our old ward. It was a widow's roof on a Saturday in June, the tear-off and the felt and as many shingles as we could get down before the heat, with rain forecast for Sunday afternoon. Hal made his own sign-up sheet and put thirty at the top of it. At the end of a Tuesday meeting he told me he'd call the whole thing off if he had fewer than twelve, because under twelve you couldn't get the old shingles off and the felt down in one day, and he wasn't going to leave her house open to the sky overnight.

He'd worked it out on the back of the sheet and showed me, and I didn't follow it. Eleven of us were in the driveway by seven, and Hal stood there and counted us twice, the second time with his lips moving, and said "eleven" to nobody in particular. Then he walked to his truck and came back with a coil of rope and a roofing bracket under one arm. He was sixty-three and had planned to run the whole thing from the ground with a clipboard. He went up the ladder behind me and was the twelfth person on that roof until a quarter past four, when the felt was down.

The rain came Sunday a little after three.

When I got to verse 34 I thought about Hal, who knew his minimum before anyone signed up and said it out loud at a meeting, so everyone knew where the line was. Verse 34 does the same thing in one sentence after three verses of hoping, and it names the hundred without a "peradventure" anywhere near it.

How many men actually went with Zion's Camp?

The figure usually given is around two hundred, well over the floor and well short of five hundred. They left Ohio that spring and cholera hit the camp in June. Nobody fought anybody, and the company dispersed without taking back the land. Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball were both on the march.

Section 105, given on June 22 as the camp reached Missouri, reads to me like a long answer to verse 31. It says the Lord had told Joseph to call "the strength of my house, even my warriors, my young men, and middle-aged" and then it gives one plain sentence about the response: "But the strength of mine house have not hearkened unto my words" (D&C 105:16-17). Two verses later it says the ones who came had been "brought thus far for a trial of their faith" (D&C 105:19). Earlier in that section the Lord reports what the churches abroad were saying about Zion, which was "otherwise we will not go up unto Zion, and will keep our moneys" (D&C 105:8).

That last one lines up with something in our chapter. Verse 23 says "let all the churches send up wise men with their moneys, and purchase lands even as I have commanded them." The men and the money were two separate asks, and section 105 treats both as having come up short. Section 101, about ten weeks before this one, had already told the churches to gather their moneys, so by February the instruction was a repeat.

Which verses in D&C 103 are hard to read?

Verses 24 through 26 are the ones, and they say that if enemies come against the Saints they are to curse them, that whomever they curse will be cursed, and that they "shall avenge me of mine enemies" (v. 25), with the presence of the Lord promised "even in avenging me of mine enemies" (v. 26). I dislike those verses, and I've stopped trying to find a gentler way to read them.

Section 105 doesn't remove them, and it says "I do not require at their hands to fight the battles of Zion" (D&C 105:14), and sixteen verses later it repeats the language about avenging enemies "unto the third and fourth generation," but only after the land is bought and the army has become very great and sanctified. Near the end it says "sue for peace, not only to the people that have smitten you, but also to all people" (D&C 105:38). Neither section gives ground to the other. Both stand. The men who marched had the first in hand, and the second reached them in June.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was D&C 103 given?

It was February 24, 1834, at Kirtland, Ohio, and the march came that spring and early summer, so it was nearly four months between the revelation and the camp reaching Missouri.

Why are the leaders sent in pairs in verses 37 to 40?

Parley Pratt goes with Joseph Smith, Lyman Wight with Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith with Frederick G. Williams and Orson Hyde with Orson Pratt. That's four pairs and eight men, and I don't have a clever reason for it. In Luke 10 Jesus sends out the seventy in twos. The pattern is old, and verse 40 ends the list by saying to "leave the residue in my hands."

Does D&C 103:27-28 mean I have to be willing to die for the Church?

The verses were said to men about to march from Ohio to Missouri toward people who didn't want them there, and I think they were written for those men first. Verse 28 is blunt: "whoso is not willing to lay down his life for my sake is not my disciple." It says "for my sake," and I'd keep it where the verse puts it.

Did Zion's Camp fail?

If you measure it against the hope of retaking Jackson County, it didn't do that. Section 105 doesn't stop there, though, and neither would I. It says the men who came were brought along for a trial of their faith, and that the elders were to wait for an endowment in the temple at Kirtland, which is a different kind of result than the one the march was started for.

It's nearly two thirty, and the garage fridge is down to one Diet Coke. Someone put the empty cans back on the shelf instead of in the bin, and I've left them where they are.

— D.