The Words by the River: Bahá'u'lláh Reveals the Hidden Words

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 1, by Adib Taherzadeh, which describes the circumstances and station of the Hidden Words. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that study and in the authoritative texts of the Faith.

In the decade that Bahá'u'lláh spent in Baghdád after His release from the Síyáh-Chál, the city was the scene of one of the most fruitful outpourings of His pen. Exiled from His native Persia, stripped of His home and estates, surrounded by the small and scattered remnant of a persecuted community, He nonetheless began in those years to reveal the Writings that would, in time, remake the religious life of the world. Among the earliest and best loved of them is a slender book that He named, simply, the Hidden Words.

Adib Taherzadeh recounts the manner of its revelation. Bahá'u'lláh, he writes, was accustomed to walk along the banks of the river Tigris that flowed through Baghdád, and it was during these walks, in about the year 1858, that He revealed the Hidden Words. The book is short — a sequence of brief, polished utterances, some in Arabic and some in Persian, each beginning with an intimate salutation: "O Son of Spirit," "O Son of Being," "O Son of Man," "O My Friends." They are not arguments and not narratives. They are addressed, heart to heart, to the reader; each one is a single jewel of counsel, set by itself.

What gives the little book its towering importance is what Bahá'u'lláh declared it to be. He revealed that these Words are the inner essence of the guidance that God had sent down through all His Messengers in ages past — the kernel of the truth that the Prophets of old had clothed in their differing forms, gathered now and "decked out in the garment of brevity." In an opening passage He explains that this is "that which hath descended from the realm of glory," sent down so that men "may attain unto the Most Great Peace." Taherzadeh draws attention to the astonishing claim folded into so small a compass: that the sum of what the faithful most need to know — about the love of God, the worth of the soul, the danger of the world's allurements, the cost and the joy of true detachment — has here been distilled to its very marrow and entrusted, in plain and memorable Words, to every reader who will take it up.

And the Words ask to be lived, not merely admired. Bahá'u'lláh's charge at the threshold of the book is exact: He calls upon the reader to take fast hold of these counsels, to "make them thy treasure," and to act upon them — for "the essence of My word" is offered so that the reader might "be of them that profit thereby." A single line is enough to feel the weight of them. "O Son of Spirit!" the first Arabic utterance begins, "My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting." Another turns the reader's gaze inward and upward at once: "O Son of Being! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee."

There is a quiet wonder in the setting of all this. The Hidden Words were not proclaimed from a pulpit or a throne. They came, line by line, as a Prisoner and exile paced the bank of a river in a foreign city, with the water moving past and the lamps of Baghdád beginning to show across the stream. Out of that homeless circumstance came a book small enough to be carried in a pocket and vast enough to hold, the Author tells us, the marrow of everything the Manifestations of God have ever taught.

Generations since have proved the promise. The believers committed the Hidden Words to memory, recited them at dawn, and measured their lives against them. They are among the first of Bahá'u'lláh's Writings that a new soul is given, and among the last that the dying ask to hear. A short book of luminous utterances, revealed by a river in exile, became one of the most treasured possessions of a worldwide community — proof, if proof were wanted, that the transforming power of the Cause of God resides not in the circumstances of its revelation but in the Word itself.

This is why the Hidden Words belong so naturally to a Feast of Words. They are, in the most literal sense, the Words: the revealed Word of God, reduced to its purest essence and addressed, with unmistakable directness, to the reader's own heart. To open them is to be spoken to.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 1, by Adib Taherzadeh; and for the text itself, The Hidden Words of Bahá'u'lláh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 1 — Baghdád 1853-63)*. George Ronald.