An Ocean of Verses: The Majesty of the Báb's Revelation

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, the classic introduction to the Faith, which describes the Writings of the Báb. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book and in the authoritative histories of the Faith.

When the rulers of Persia decided to silence the Báb, they chose their prisons with care. They did not merely lock Him away; they buried Him at the very edges of the empire, in the most remote and forbidding fortresses they could find. He was sent first to Mákú, a fortress town wedged against the northwestern frontier, among a mountain people who spoke a different tongue and who, the authorities hoped, would have no sympathy for a Persian prisoner. Later He was moved to Chihríq, another lonely stronghold in the mountains, which His followers came to call the "Grievous Mountain." The intention behind these choices was plain: cut the Báb off from His followers, from books, from scholars, from every means by which a teacher spreads a message — and the new Faith would wither for lack of its source.

It is one of the great ironies of that history, and one of its quiet wonders, that in these places of deliberate isolation the revealed Word of the Báb poured forth most abundantly of all. The fortress meant to silence Him became the place where His pen flowed without ceasing.

J. E. Esslemont, in his classic account of the Faith, fixes on a feature of the Báb's Writings that struck believers and even fair-minded observers as extraordinary. The Writings, he records, were "voluminous" — vast beyond what any ordinary author, working in such conditions, could possibly produce. And it was not only their quantity that astonished. It was, Esslemont writes, "the rapidity with which, without study or premeditation, He composed elaborate commentaries, profound expositions or eloquent prayers" — a swiftness that was "regarded as one of the proofs of His divine inspiration."

Each word of that description deserves to be weighed. Without study — for the Báb had no library at hand in those mountain prisons, no shelves of references to consult, none of the apparatus a scholar leans upon. Without premeditation — for the verses came not as the slow fruit of drafting and revision but as an immediate outpouring, set down as swiftly as a scribe could follow. Elaborate commentaries, profound expositions, eloquent prayers — for what flowed was not simple or repetitive, but ranged across the whole field of the spirit: interpretations of Scripture, expositions of the deepest questions of religion, and prayers of a beauty that has nourished hearts ever since. To produce such work at all is the labor of a learned lifetime. To produce it in torrents, in a frontier dungeon, with no resources and no rest, belongs to another order of things altogether.

The Báb Himself directed His followers always to look beyond Him to the One Who was to come. He spoke of His own station, in the most striking image, as that of a single "letter" out of an immense Book, a single "dew-drop" from a limitless ocean — by which He meant that all the splendor of His own Revelation was but a herald and a foretaste of the far greater Revelation soon to follow in the Person of "Him Whom God shall make manifest," Bahá'u'lláh. And here is a deep truth about the nature of true greatness: it does not hoard the gaze upon itself. The Báb's majesty expressed itself precisely in pointing beyond Himself, in spending the whole ocean of His revealed Word to announce One greater than Himself. His remembrance of that Promised One, the histories tell us, was the light of His dark nights in the fortress of Mákú and the consolation of His captivity in the prison of Chihríq. The verses that poured from Him in those lonely places were, at their heart, the celebration of a dawn He knew He would not live to see.

This astonishing fluency was there from the very beginning. On the night the Báb first declared His mission in Shíráz — in the upper chamber of His house, to the first soul who recognized Him — He took up His pen and began, then and there, to reveal His earliest book, a lengthy commentary that flowed from Him with a speed and an assurance that left that first disciple in awe. The torrent did not build up gradually over a long apprenticeship; it was full from the first hour. And it continued, without interruption, through every stage of His brief and crowded ministry: through the months of teaching, through the long journeys under guard, through the examinations before hostile divines, and at last through the years of mountain imprisonment, where it reached its fullest flood.

It is worth standing back to take in the whole picture. The full body of the Báb's Writings, the historians of the Faith record, is enormous — so great that no complete collection has ever been assembled, the works scattered, copied, hidden, and in many cases destroyed by enemies who feared their power. He revealed not one kind of work but many: commentaries that opened the verses of earlier Scripture; expositions of the deepest questions of the Divine Unity; books of laws; letters of guidance to His followers; and prayers and meditations of surpassing tenderness. What survives is only a fraction of what once existed; yet even the fraction is a treasury that has nourished the devotional life of a worldwide community. From the very first night of His mission to the closing days in the Grievous Mountain, the stream never stopped. Persecution did not slow it. Exile did not dam it. The deliberate severing of the Báb from every worldly aid only made it more evident that the source of the torrent lay not in any worldly aid at all.

His adversaries, who held the courts and the dungeons and the armies, could chain His body. They could move Him from prison to prison. They could, in the end, take His life. What they could not do was stem the Word. The more tightly they shut Him away, the more plainly the abundance of His revealed verses testified against their whole project, for here was a power they could neither imprison nor explain. Greatness, they discovered, is not a thing that walls contain.

This is why the Báb's Revelation belongs so fittingly to a Feast of 'Aẓamat — Grandeur. The grandeur here is not the grandeur of a great library slowly accumulated, nor of a famous author honored by his age. It is the grandeur of a fountain that springs up where the world expected only silence — verses without number, flowing without study and without premeditation, from a Prisoner the empire had tried to erase. The fortress of Mákú is a ruin now. The prison of Chihríq is a name on the map of the mountains. But the words that issued from those places are recited, with love, by believers across the earth. The ocean outlasted the dungeon, as it always does.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, and the Selections from the Writings of the Báb in the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241