On the Mountain of God: The Revelation of the Tablet of Carmel

In *The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh,* Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the Tablet of Carmel — the Tablet revealed by Bahá’u’lláh on one of His four visits to the slopes of Mount Carmel in the closing years of His life.

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By 1890 Bahá’u’lláh’s confinement had been substantially relaxed. The strict imprisonment within the walls of the ‘Akká fortress had given way, by the late 1870s, to residence at Mazra‘ih and then at the larger mansion of Bahjí, north of the city. From these residences He was free to make short journeys. Four such journeys took Him across the bay to Haifa and onto the slopes of the mountain that the Hebrew prophets had named the *Vineyard of God.*

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The most consequential of these visits, Taherzadeh recounts, was the visit during which the Tablet of Carmel was revealed. Bahá’u’lláh had ascended the mountain. He paused at a particular spot where, He indicated, the future shrine of the Báb would in due course be raised. The opening verses of the Tablet were chanted by Him on the spot.

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The chapter preserves the central image of the Tablet. It is addressed not to a human recipient but to the mountain itself. Mount Carmel is invited, in the opening verses, to *hasten in longing adoration* to the court of the Manifestation. From the mountain comes the cry that is the central declaration of the Tablet:

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> The promise of all ages is now fulfilled!

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The Tablet, Taherzadeh notes, must be read on two levels. On the literal level it is a Tablet revealed in a particular hour on a particular mountain side. On the prophetic level it is the charter of the institutional life that would, in subsequent generations, take its centre at the spot where the Tablet was revealed.

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In 1909 the remains of the Báb — borne from Persia by the agency of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá — would be interred at the precise spot on the mountain that Bahá’u’lláh had indicated. The shrine that rose over the interment would, by the mid-twentieth century, be capped by the gilded dome that is now the characteristic feature of the Haifa skyline.

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Around the shrine, on the slopes the Tablet had addressed, would in time rise the buildings of the Bahá’í World Centre: the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the International Archives Building, the Centre for the Study of the Texts, the International Teaching Centre. The terraces by which the shrine is approached from the city below were completed at the close of the twentieth century.

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None of these institutions existed when the Tablet of Carmel was revealed. The Tablet had spoken them into being a generation in advance.

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Taherzadeh observes, in concluding his chapter, that the Tablet of Carmel is one of the supreme examples in the Bahá’í corpus of a Tablet whose meaning has had to be unfolded by the work of subsequent generations. The believers who heard Bahá’u’lláh chant it on the mountain side could not have anticipated the institutions it would charter. Those institutions, when they at length arose, did so on the foundation the Tablet had already laid.

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*Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 4 — Mazra'ih and Bahjí 1877-92 (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1987); see original for full text.*

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