The Bible is a sealed book, and the seals are opening now.
Davidian study is not devotional reading. It is the assembly of a sequence — Daniel, Revelation, the prophets — into a timeline, on the assumption that the timeline is running and that the reader is standing somewhere on it.
The Davidian line is best understood as a reading practice rather than a set of beliefs. Adventism itself was born from a failed date and built a rigorous prophetic method afterwards; Houteff pushed that method further and was disfellowshipped for where it led him. What Davidians did with a Bible was assemble: cross-reference Daniel against Revelation, fit the sequence to current events, and locate the present moment inside it. Anyone who has watched a Bible study of this kind knows how absorbing it is, and how completely it explains the world once assembled. The FBI negotiators in 1993 encountered this and had no framework for it; the negotiation tapes record agents repeatedly asking people to stop talking about scripture and come out.
The figure of at least 80 dead is based upon recovered bodies, including six Davidians killed on February 28, 1993, but excluding two unborn children, one of which was near term. The Office of Special Counsel cannot state with certainty the exact number of deaths.
Danforth, Interim Report, 21 July 2000, footnote 1This is why death tolls for 19 April 1993 differ between sources. The figure most often cited elsewhere is 76.
The same ground, other faiths
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