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Richard Brothers
Richard Brothers (25 December 1757 – 25 January 1824) was an early believer and teacher of British Israelism, a theory concerning the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.
Biography
Life
Brothers was born in Port Kirwan, Newfoundland (earlier known as Admiral's Cove). He was educated in Woolwich, England. He entered the Royal Navy and served under Keppel and Rodney. In 1783, he became lieutenant, and was honourably discharged on 28 July 1783, receiving a pension which amounted to half-pay (54 pounds per year). He then travelled on the continent of Europe and later married Elizabeth Hassall in 1786. His marriage was reported as being "unhappy" and so he returned to service in the Royal Navy.[1]
Because he came to believe that military service was not compatible with his new calling to serve Christianity, in 1789 he once again left the Navy. Built upon the principle of individual revelation, Brothers believed that he could not serve the King as head of the Church of England.
In 1791, he began to question the oath he had been required to take for receipt of his military half-pay, and he found himself with little income as a result of his subsequent actions. Brothers then divided his time between the open air and the workhouse, where he developed the idea that he had a special divine commission. Brothers claimed to hear the voice of an attending angel which proclaimed to him the fall of Babylon the Great, which was in fact London. Apparently upon Brothers's plea for mercy, God decided to spare London for a time and the destruction was halted. Around this time, Brothers was also expectant of a heavenly lady who would descend from the clouds showering him with money, love and happiness. In February 1792 Brothers declared himself a healer and claimed he could restore sight to the blind. He drew large crowds, but not due to his healing ability as much as his small gifts of money to those he prayed for.
Works
A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophesies and Times, 1794, the most important work of Richard Brothers
In 1793 Brothers declared himself to be the apostle of a new religion. He began to see himself as possessing a special role in the gathering of the Jews back into Palestine, in particular, the "Jews" who were hidden amongst the population of Great Britain. In similarity to modern British Israelists, Brothers asserted that the "hidden Israel" had no notion of its biological lineage and that part of his role would be to teach them of their true identity and lead them to the land of Canaan. Brothers proclaimed himself to be Prince of the Hebrews, literal descendant of the Biblical House of David, and the Nephew of the Almighty, who would rule over Israel until the return of Jesus Christ. Brothers declared he would achieve all this using a rod he had fashioned from a wild rosebush, with which he would perform miracles, as Moses had done.
All this was declared in the first British Israelist publication in 1794:
A REVEALED KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROPHECIES AND TIMES, Book the First, wrote [sic] under the direction of the LORD GOD and published by His Sacred Command, it being the first sign of Warning for the benefit of All Nations; Containing with other great and remarkable things not revealed to any other Person on Earth, the Restoration of the Hebrews to Jerusalem by the year of 1798 under their revealed Prince and Prophet (i.e., Richard Brothers). London, Printed in the year of Christ 1794.
Brothers began to attract quite a following, but due to his rejection of organisational work, and eccentric nature, he did not develop any sort of social movement. In consequence of prophesying the death of the King and the end of the monarchy, he was arrested for treason in 1795, and imprisoned on the grounds of being criminally insane. His case was, however, brought before Parliament by his ardent disciple, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, an orientalist and a member of the House of Commons. As a result Brothers was removed to a private asylum in Islington.
While he was in the private asylum Brothers wrote a variety of prophetic pamphlets which gained him many believers. Amongst his supporters was William Sharp, the engraver.
William Sharp (29 January 1749 – 25 July 1824), was an English engraver and artist.
Sharp was the son of a reputable gunsmith who lived at Haydon's Yard, Minories in central London. He was apprenticed to the 'bright-cut' engraver and genealogist, Barak Longmate (1738–93), and after marriage to a Frenchwoman, set himself up as a writing engraver in Bartholomew Lane (off Threadneedle Street)...
Sharpe was a republican and a friend of Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke, and became a member of the Society for Constitutional Information. As a result of a legal dispute involving Horne Tooke, Sharp was questioned by the Privy Council on charges relating to treason, but was eventually dismissed without punishment as merely an "enthusiast".
He became a convert to the teachings of Mesmer and Swedenborg and came under the religious influence of would-be visionary Jacob Bryan (who worked for Sharp as a printer for a time), and millennialist prophet Richard Brothers, engraving the latter as "Prince of the Hebrews". After Brothers' incarceration in an insane asylum in Islington, Sharp became an adherent of prophetess Joanna Southcott, whom he brought from Exeter to London and kept at his own expense for a considerable time; he made a portrait drawing of her which he engraved. Despite her apparently premature death, he never lost faith in her divine mission or the possibility that she would reappear, and wrote a book in her defence: "An answer to the world etc." (London, 1806).
-- William Sharp (engraver), by Wikipedia
Some of his political predictions (such as the violent death of Louis XVI) seemed to be proof that he was inspired. But when Brothers predicted that, on 19 November 1795 he would be revealed as Prince of the Hebrews and Ruler of the world, and the date passed without any such manifestation, Sharp deserted him to become a religious follower of Joanna Southcott. His followers tended to drift away either disillusioned or embarrassed.
Death
Brothers spent the last 30 years of his life designing the flags, uniforms, and palaces of the New Jerusalem. John Finlayson finally secured his release from the private asylum in 1806, and Brothers moved into his London home, where he died a lonely figure on 25 January 1824. Finlayson then began a financial campaign against the Government, seeking payment of an enormous claim for his maintenance of Richard Brothers prior to his death.[1]
References
1. Chisholm 1911.
Attribution
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Brothers, Richard" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
• Kossy, Donna. "The Anglo-Israelites" in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001 (2nd ed. exp. from 1994). (ISBN 978-0-922915-67-5)
External links
• A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophesies and Times Text and commentary.
• Richard Brothers and the Anglo-Israelites at the Kooks Museum
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Richard Brothers (1757-1824)
by olivercowdery.com
Early Years of Richard Brothers
Lieutenant Richard Brothers came to London from Canada (as a semi-retired naval officer during a lull) in the Continental wars. His life in the British Navy had not been a pleasant one, and he came away from that experience with an abiding repugnance for wars and blasphemy, especially for Christian prayers for military success and mandatory sacred oaths for military allegiance. At some point in his career (perhaps about 1789) Brotehrs became convinced that God was speaking to him personally, through divine revelation, and that he had been called as a latter day prophet and eventual messiah.
Born in Newfoundland, on 25 Dec. 1757, to an English soldier garrisoned there, Richard Brother's citizenship was British, but his origin technically Canadian. He is often cited as being the first Canadian to establish a new religious sect. As a child he was sent to England for his education, and apparently remained there, becoming a midshipman in the Royal Navy at age thirteen. The budding prophet retired from the Navy as a half-pay officer (potentially available for recall to service) in 1784. His activities and whereabouts for the next five years remain a mystery, be he reportedly served on merchant ships, traveling in the Mediterranean to ports in France, Italy and Spain.
Around 1789-90 Brothers found himself back in England, in the region of London. Here it was that he became convinced that he was a modern prophet and a favorite of the Judeo-Christian God. At one point, following unusually severe thunderstorms in 1791, he fled London, believing that God was about to destroy that city for its wickedness. When London was not, in fact, destroyed, Brothers attributed its temporary salvation to his own intercession with God for its deliverance.
The "Nephew of The Almighty"
At about this same time Brothers became convinced that he was a chosen Israelite of the House of David, impowered to call the Jews and other Israelites out from their dispersion among the nations and lead them back to Jerusalem in Turkish Palestine. Claiming a pedigree from King David via the same lineage as that of Jesus Christ, Brothers felt he was descended from Jesus' Brother James the Righteous -- and thus a "Prince of The Hebrews" and rightful latter day King of Judah. Brothers extended his hopeful claims to being something of a messiah -- or, at least the destined ruler of all Israel, reigning in a restored royal city of Jerusalem. After making these claims, the new prophet was sometime called the "Nephew of the Almighty," apparently by his growing band of followers as well as by those who branded him a religious fanatic and a madman.
Brothers' revelations (accompanied by his own commentary on selected biblical texts) began to appear in print at the beginning of the 1790s and some were compiled into a booklet for public sale in London as early as 1794. This volume, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies... was reprinted in Albany, New York that same year, introducing the American Colonials to Brothers' strange pronouncements and dire predictions. However, in the course of proclaiming himself God's chosen one, Brothers managed to offend the British King George III (having prophesied that the Royal family would have to step down from that dignity at the imminent coming of the "King of Heaven and Earth") and soon received an unprophesied punishment. Escaping a sentence of treason, he lost his Lieutenancy he was committed as a lunatic to an asylum in Canonbury Tower. This was in May 1795, by the King's Privy Council -- for teaching seditious nonsense and claiming that God command England refrain from military action against Republican France. The "Nephew of God" cooled his heels in the English asylum for eleven years. He was finally released in 1806, when his keepers decided he was no longer a menace to society.
Prior to his confinement Richard Brothers had prophesied that he would lead all the world's scattered Israelites back to Palestine and there rebuild Jerusalem. He was less specific as to whether he would have the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt once he began his reign of glory there. Evidently Brothers saw his planned restoration of Israel as a preliminary event in the long hoped-for establishment of the Judeo-Christian "Kingdom of God." His theology more or less "promoted" Jesus Christ into being God the Father -- so perhaps Brothers viewed his own paradisical reign and new world order as being a sort of replacement for popular notions regarding an expected millennial rule of Christ on Earth.
Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott
Brothers' lengthy imprisonment, of course, greatly delayed his anticipated restoration of Israel. During his confinement, in 1801, another budding "chosen one" was sought out by some of the prophet's followers. This was Joanna Southcott, already independently something of a prophetess herself among a radical branch of the British Methodists. She inherited a number of Richard Brothers' tenets and was viewed by many followers as being his prophetic successor.
Besides being widely reprinted under his own name, a good deal of Brothers' innovative tenets were further publicized throughout the world in 1795 by their promulgation in a popular rendition of apocalyptic predictions entitled The World's Doom. However, by the first years of the new century, popular faith and interest in Richard Brothers' claims to a divine mission had cooled considerably. Perhaps his envisaging a never-fulfilled earthquake judgment that would level St. Paul's Cathedral and destroy the English Parliament distroyed Brothers' religious reputation among patriotic Englishmen caught up the the fervor brought on by the Napoleonic wars. The "Nephew of God" left what little remained of legacy to the growing Southcott movement. He also no doubt helped influence the thought of later proponents of the "Anglo-Israelite" theories explaining the fate of the Ten "Lost" Tribes of Israel. But, as a would-be prophet in his own right, Richard Brothers' name soon slipped into obscurity and his life into oblivion. He died in England, unremembered, in 1824.
Richard Brothers and Mormon Origins
Given the exstensive (and potentially fruitful) field comprised by Richard Brothers' "prophetic" claims, tenets, and activities, it is rather remarkable that no previous writers on American churchly history have thought to compare and contrast his religion with that of the equally "prophetic" early Mormons. Both Richard Brothers and Joseph Smith, Jr., after all, did claim respectively to speak for God, delivering to their followers timely and exclusive latter day "revelation." Both men asserted that they and/or their coreligionists could discern previously undiscovered signs of "Israelite" descent in persons otherwise counted as "Gentiles." Both men sought to gather and restore a scattered Israel previous to establishing the Kingdom of God in a new world order, ruled over from a holy city of refuge. Both men found reasons to re-write passages of scripture from the Authorized Version of the Bible, to suit their own opinions and needs. Both men made use of many of the same predictive biblical prophecies to support their own religious programs. Both laid claim to a religious or churchly authority superior to that of an "apostate" Roman Catholic Church, etc., etc.
Probably the very short prophetic career of Richard Brothers, conducted on another continent and two decades previous to the rise of Joseph Smith, has escaped the attention of religious historians. If so, it is perhaps a mistake worth correcting by contemporary students of Mormon Origins.
The first writer to mention Richard Brothers and Jospeh Smith in the same breath, figuratively speaking, was Professor Jonathan B. Turner, in his 1842 book, Mormonism in All Ages... In that early study of the Mormons, the writer seeks to compare the Latter Day Saints to the deluded followers of past false prophets and their "absurdities." He says:
In 1792, Joanna Southcote [sic], a servant maid of Exter, England, assumed the character of a prophetess, and pretended that she was the woman of the wilderness, and could give the seal of eternal life to her followers. Like Smith & Co., she uttered dreadful prophetic denunciations upon her opposers and the unbelieving nations, and predicted the speedy approach of her millennium. Of course her thousands of followrers found all her predictions fulfilled. In the last year of
her life she secluded herself from the world, and especially from the society of the other sex, and gave out that she was with child of the Holy Ghost, and that she should give birth to the Shiloh promised to Jacob before the end of the harvest, which would be the second coming of Christ. Harvest, however, came and went, but no Shiloh appeared. She died on the 27th of the following December. Her disciples refused to bury her. They waited four days for her resurrection and the birth of the Shiloh, until she began to rot. They then consented, with much reluctance, to a post-mortem examination, which fully refuted their belief. Her disciples then, with still greater reluctance, buried her body, but not their faith either in her or the promised Shiloh. On the contrary, they continue to flatter themselves that she will yet, in some way, reappear, and that with her will come their long expected Shiloh, and their Mormon gathering and millennium of Mormon glory.
In the same year, 1792, Richard Brothers published a book of prophecies and visions, and an account of his daily intercourse with God in London. Among his followers was a member of the British parliament, a profound scholar, and one of the most learned men of his time. He made a speech in the house of Commons declaring his full belief in one of the greatest absurdities ever presented to the British populace. (pp. 94-95)
Other early writers would echo Turner's opinions regarding Joanna Southcott, but practically all subsequent reports on the Mormons made no mention of her precursor, Richard Brothers. In later years, Brothers' name seems to have been linked to that of Smith only in very obscure articles, like the one on "Impostors" which has appeared in verious editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Under this heading we may notice a certain number of objectionable characters who, while not of sufficient importance to claim separate treatment, have at various epochs so far achieved notoriety...
Passing over a certain number of religious enthusiasts who may in various degrees have been self-convinced and who range from the crazy hallucinations of Joanna Southcott (died 1814), who believed she was to bring forth the Messiah, or of Richard Brothers, the Divinely crowned descendant of King David and ruler of the world (c. 1792), to the miracle-working claims of Anna Lee (died. 1784), the foundress of the American Shakers, we will pause only to say a word of Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the first apostle of Mormonism. It cannot be doubted that this man, who after a dissolute youth professed to have visions of a golden book, consisting of metal plates inscribed with strange characters, which he dug for and found, was a deliberate impostor. Smith pretended to decipher and translate these mystic writings, after which the "Book of Mormon" was taken back to heaven by an angel...
The first modern scholar of Mormon Origins to connect Richard Brothers with the phenomenon of Mormonism was D. Michael Quinn, in his 1987 Early Mormonism and the Magic World View.
...Richard Brothers published his visions, prophecies, and revealed expansions of biblical texts in multiple during the 1790s in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts during the 1790s. He claimed that in 1791, "I was in a vision, and being carried up to heaven, the Lord God spoke to me from the middle of a large white cloud." His publication reached such hinterland towns as Hanover, New Hampshire, where Hyrum Smith attended school near the Joseph Smith family residence (Richard Brothers A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times. 2 vols. in 1 -- West Springfield, MA: Edward Gray, 1797, 1:49; National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints 78:366; Catalog of Books, for Sale at the Bookstore... on the road leading to Lebanon -- Hanover, NH, n.p., 1799, 6; Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches... 1853, 59-60...). Brothers was an English sectarian, yet such testimonies of theophany were even more common among early American evangelicals....
(p. 14, rev. 2nd. ed., 1998)
While Quinn's report was a welcome addition to the sparse knowledge available concerning Richard Brothers' impact on the northeastern US at the end of the 18th century, Quinn missed making the obvious connection between the availbility of A Revealed Knowledge... in Hanover, New Hampshire and an outbreak of Brothers-like religious frenzy in adjacent central Vermont at nearly the exact same time (1799-1800) -- the infamous "Wood Scrape."
Although Quinn writes knowledgeably in his book about the Nathaniel Wood "New Israelite" sect of Middletown, Vermont, he apparently does not discern the evident parallels that outbreak of religious fanaticism in New Emgland with the nearly simultaneous religious performance by Richard Brothers in "Mother" England.
One scholar who has made the Brothers-Wood Scrape connection is John L. Brooke. In his 1994 The Refiner's Fire, Brooke relates that "The Masonic-millenarian connotations in Brothers' tracts... circulating in New England in the 1790s... Masonic millenarianism also seems to have shaped the hermeticism and restorationism of the New Israelite cult of Middletown, led by the Wood family..." Indirectly Brooke lays the ground-work for his readers' realization that Nathaniel Wood and his followers in Middletown, Vermont in 1799-1800 would have had ready access to the Richard Brothers book in nearby Hanover, New Hampshire. In fact, Brothers' book was circulating throughout New England during this period and the Wood group members probably would not have needed to travel even so far as Hanover's bookshops (which grew up in the shadow of that town's Dartmouth College) to obtain A Revealed Knowledge...
The pertinent passages penned by Brooke on these matters are as follows:
... attracting several English Swedenborgian millenarians who a few years later became followers of the prophet Richard Brothers. In the midst of threats of war in 1794, Brothers, a former naval officer living in London, pronounced himself the "Prince and Prophet of the Hebrews" and predicted the coming of the kingdom of God and the return of visible and "invisible" Hebrews to a New Jerusalem to be rebuilt in the Holy Land. Confined as insane, Brothers would lose some of his followers to Joanna Southcott, "the woman clothed with the sun," who carried the renewed English tradition of the restoration of the Kingdom of God, dormant since the 1650s, into the nineteenth century (Clark Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England -- Baltimore, 1975, 97-120, 171-223; John F. C. Harrison. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850, -- New Brunswick, 1978, 57-85; Schuchard, Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuities of Occult Traditions, 402-17)
(p. 97)
Other, more ephemeral writings drawing upon Masonic and millennial themes appealed to a much broader audience. The rise of revolutionary France, its dramatic confrontation with the British-led alliance, and its ramifications in American politics inspired a wave of militantly pro-French sentiment and shaped an audience eager for premillennial predictions and prophicies Among these, the prophecies of London's "Prince and Prophet of the Hebrews," Richard Brothers, were widely read in at least eleven American editions published from 1795 to 1797 in Philadelphia, New London, Worcester, West Springfield, and Albany, where it was put out by a Freemason, Thomas Webb. In Connecticut, the Reverend David Austin translated visions and a growing mental instability into a series of published sermons and treatises on millennial and Masonic themes during the 1790s, literally obsessed with the notion that the "Millennial Door" was opening. (In general, for these themes, see Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 -- New York, 1985, 150-68; David Austin, Masonry in Its Glory, or Solomon's Temple Illuminated (East Windsor, Conn., 1799)
Many of these prophecies focused on legendary artifacts. Brothers' followers from the Masonic Avignon Society had accepted him as a true prophet, based on prophecies popularly ascribed to Christopher Love, an English Presbyterian executed for conspiring against Cromwell in 1651. Love's "Prophecies," which included references to an engraved pillar of brass erected by patriarch Seth and the prophet Enoch...
(p. 99)
... Asel [Smith] drew language from Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel: "I believe that the stone is now cut out of the mountain without hands, spoken of by Daniel, and has smitten the image upon his feet." This language had once been deployed by radical English sectarians, and was soon to be taken up agains in his grandson's Church of Latter-day Saints; in the 1790s it could be found in the English prophet Richard Brothers' "Revealed Knowledge," where the stone signified the restored Kingdom of God, soon to destroy all other kingdoms, as Asael hoped the stone would destroy "all monarchical and ecclesiastical tyranny." (Asael Smith's letter to Jacob Towne, Jan. 14, 1795, in Anderson, Joseph Smith's New England Heritage, 119; Richard Brothers, Revealed Knowledge... -- Philadelphia, 1795, 51)
The Masonic-millenarian connotations in Brothers' tracts, along with those of Christopher Love's writings and the anonymous "Remarkable Prophecy." all circulating in New England in the 1790s, could well have shaped Asael's writing, complementing the alchemical connotations that this passage would have had for a family still in communication with the Townes, once owners of the Topsfield copper lots. ("Brothers' Prophecies" was one item listed in a Catalogue of Books, for Sale at the Bookstore in Hanover... -- Hanover, NH, 1799)
The Masonic millenarianism also seems to have shaped the hermeticism and restorationism of the New Israelite cult of Middletown, led by the Wood family, recently moved from Norwich, Connecticut. One nineteenth century account places Joseph Smith Sr. himself among the New Israelites. If true, it would have taken him about fifty miles from his young family in Tunbridge. In any event, Joseph would boast in the 1830s in Ohio that his divining career had begun decades before in Vermont. (Quinn, Early Mormonism, 22, 31-2; Hill, Joseph Smith, 67; Ronald W. Walker. "The Persisting Idea of American Treasure Hunting," BYU Studies 24, 1984, 444; Stephen Green, "The Money-Diggers," Vermont Life 24 (1969), 48; Hemenway, ed., Vermont Historical Gazetteer, 3:1089.)
(p. 133)
William Cowdery was deeply involved in the New Israelite movement... There were other elements to this complex tangle of Freemasonry and millenarism in the New Israelite towns. In 1823 Ethan Smith, the Anti-masonic Congregational minister in Poultney, published a text entitled "View of the Hebrews, or the Tribes of Israel in America." As had Richard Brothers, the English Prophet of the 1790s, Ethan Smith emphasized that the millennium and the restoration of the Kingdom of God depended on the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. In particular, the fulfillment of ancient prophecy required the return of the Ten Lost Tribes to Israel. On the basis of a report of a parchment book found in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (William Miller's birthplace), and stories of metal artifacts and plates recovered from Indian burial mounds in western New York and Ohio, Ethan Smith was concinced that the American Indian peoples were the Lost Tribes... (Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon, esp. 5-8; ...)
(p. 142)
... the Mormon message also resonated with a centuries-old radical religious culture. British converts to Mormonism were in great measure already committed to millenarian, primitivist, and even magical religious sensibilities that had been circulating through orbits of radical religion ever since the seventeenth century. Revitalized in the decades following the 1790s by prophets such as Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, millenarianism and restorationism had persisted in odd corners of post-Restoration England, entangled with the hermetic pietism of Jacob Boehm, the Philadelphian Society, and Emmanuel Swedenborg... (J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming --New Brunswick, 1979; Clark Garrett, Respectable Folly -- Baltimore, 1974; W. H. G. Armytage, Heaven Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960 -- London, 1961, 32-73, 259-71; William H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy from the 1790s to the 1840s -- Aukland, 1978...) (p. 238)
British Cartoon depicting Richard Brothers as a Mad Moses
Richard Brothers and the American Zion
The important point that Brooke seems to have missed here is that the leaders of the Nathaniel Wood cult formed their own Yankee-Israelite theology in the midst of much the same kind of tense, pre-millennialistic expectations as did Richard Brothers. There were biblical prophecies regarding the restoration of Isreal which must be fulfilled prior to the coming of a paradisical Kingdom of God on Earth -- and, since the Jews in 1800 were not "restoring" Israel, it was up to Gentiles of forgotten Israelite descent to take up that awesome end-times task.
Like Richard Brothers in England, leaders of the Wood group were pronouncing Israelite lineage upon their disciples.Like Richard Brothers in England, leaders of the Wood group were also applying apocalyptic biblical predictions to their own neighborhood -- far from the Holy Land. Nathaniel Wood quite likely borrowed his European-Israelite ideas from Richard Brothers' book or from Richard Brothers news reports printed in New England newspapers. The Wood group made use of divining rods to confirm that European-descended Vermonters were indeed "Israelites" unaware of their origin and destiny. But it appears that Nathaniel was also claiming to receive direct revelation from God, just as Richard Brothers was doing at roughly the same time in England. If so, Wood could have dispensed of his witch hazel stick and pronounced Israelite genealogies, commands to gather, and directions to build a New Jerusalem directly from his own mouth -- just as Prophet Brothers was doing.
One of Richard Brothers' great innovations was to bring biblical predictions home to his own land and people. While other would-be prophets no doubt did much the same in ages past, Brothers' immoderate interpretation of ancient scripture and claims of divine revelation struck a religious response both in England and in far off New England. If Brothers could claim revelations from God predicting an impending all-destructive earthquake on his home ground, 'why could not Nathaniel Wood, In Middletown, Vermont not do the same? If Brothers could call for a pre-millennial gathering of the chosen of God at his end of the Atlantic, why could not Yankee religious extremists do the same at their end of the Ocean?
The Nathaniel Wood group may have not copied Richard Brothers line for line and precept for precept, but he is a likely source for several of their own innovations in Middletown at the end of the 18th century. The one compelling element they added to this heady mix was the notion that a gathering of Israel could be carried out on American soil -- without the need of a migration all the way back to restore the old Jerusalem. In fact, a NEW Jerusalem could be built in America, populated by newly minted Yankee Israelites. All that was missing from the Wood group's doctrine was the belief that American Indians were also Israelites, equally entitled to gather with their white brethren to a New World Zion. Twenty years later that missing tenet would be supplied by Mordecai M. Noah -- completing the foundation for the later Mormon doctrine of an Israelite gathering and latter day temple-building "on the borders of the Lamanites."