“Sometimes, when you’re living through things, you can’t see the woods for the trees,” David said. “But slowly I came to realize that all these events, good and bad, were part of a plan, the fulfillment of a vision I had in Jerusalem.”
David’s essential message derived from his vision that the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, was an integrated, coded narrative describing humanity’s spiritual history. He claimed he’d been given the key to unlocking this coded story, thereby making the events prophesied in Scripture about the end of human history actually happen.
“I’ve been sent to explain and do the Scriptures,” he said.
David believed he was the incarnation of the sacrificed Lamb spoken of in Revelation—the Lamb that was slain to receive power—who took the mysterious book from God’s hand and proceeded to unlock the Seven Seals described in Revelation, one by one. He made it clear that he was not a resurrected Jesus but an “anointed one,” a Hebrew term referring to the biblical ceremony in which oil is poured over the head of a priest or king.
David said he followed Jesus and his predecessor, Melchizedek, a priest who was a contemporary of Abraham, made like unto the Son of God. David argued that, since the messianic Melchizedek had lived 2,000 years before Jesus, another prophet could appear 2,000 years after.
Being totally ignorant of the Book of Revelation, I was amazed by the progression of images and metaphors as David unfolded them for me. The opening of the First Seal, the biblical narrative recounted, was accompanied by a clap of thunder heralding a conqueror riding a white horse. The Second Seal spoke of a red horse whose armed rider spread death and war. The Third Seal’s horse was black, carrying a man holding a pair of balances, and the Fourth Seal’s ashen horse carried Death, a pale rider followed by Hell, given the power to kill and spread hunger over a large part of the earth.
These Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ruled the world while, in the Fifth Seal, the souls of the dead huddled under the altar crying out for justice. They were told to rest for a “little season” before their fate was fulfilled. Things turn truly black in the Sixth Seal, when the earth is shaken by quakes, the sun turns black, the moon is an eye of blood, stars fall to the ground, and the temporal rulers tremble from heaven’s rage. Angels appear, holding the winds in their power, pleading with God not to destroy the world until his faithful ones, numbering 144,000, 12,000 for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, are marked with a special sign for salvation. The Lamb who unlocked the Seals offers them protection and promises them relief from suffering.
The Seventh Seal is heralded by a silence, followed by seven angels blowing trumpets in turn. One apocalyptic catastrophe after another follows each trumpet blast, and the angels pour out seven bowls of wrath upon the earth. The world’s time ends forever, giving way, after a cosmic war between good and evil, Jerusalem and Babylon, to a dimension of eternity ruled by twenty-four elders seated at God’s feet. A victorious Jerusalem, the Bride of Heaven, gathers all splendor into her arms.
The text of Revelation is filled with amazing figures out of some biblical Star Wars epic. There are seven-headed beasts, winged creatures with the faces of lions, calves, eagles, and human beings, a false horned prophet, Satan in the form of a dragon, a harlot on beast-back, one woman drunk with the blood of saints, another covered in a garment of stars. Frogs come out of the dragon’s mouth and angels hurl millstones big enough to destroy a mighty city.
What kind of mind could dream up such an incredible scenario? I wondered. Either a genius or a loony. And what kind of man must David be if he could claim to have the key to unraveling these magnificent obscurities?
Either inspired or nuts.…
David’s study sessions, held before a large crowd under the airless chapel’s open-raftered ceiling, often ran on for twelve hours at a stretch.
As a teacher, David’s style was all his own. He was not charismatic in the manner of a Jim Jones or some television preachers. Neither was he formal or dignified, like a robed priest or a rabbi in his prayer shawl. In fact, his whole style was a kind of debunking of such expectations. He spoke fluently but he was never preachy, which for me would’ve been an instant turnoff.
In his teaching mode, David Koresh was a Texas good ol’ boy transformed by the spirit. He shuffled up to the podium in jeans and T-shirt, wearing sneakers, sometimes still sweaty from jogging or biking, other times with mechanic’s grease on his fingers or streaking his cheeks, hurrying in from the auto shop where he loved to tinker. Much of the time he hadn’t even bothered to shave, signaling to us that studying the Scripture was just part of everyday life, not something removed from the mundane but woven into its texture.
When he began to speak his voice was low, casual, almost chatty. One of his favorite similes was comparing the puzzle of Scripture to the workings of a car engine. “To fire it up, get the wheels moving, you have to have the plugs, pistons, gears, transmission, and all operating in sync, otherwise all you have is a junker. Our souls are junkers, stuck in neutral, until we get our spirits in sync.”
Holding the Bible pressed to his brow, he said: “I have these pictures in my head. Most people see this book as two pieces of leather with pages in between. I hold the book to my head and see it instantaneously, panoramically, all the events happening now. The written Word of God and the Mind of God are harmonized in my brain, and all I can do is show it to you.” This notion that he was living in a movie that had begun thousands of years ago, way back in the origins of the human imagination, caught my fancy. If it were true, what an experience it must be!
David spoke of being “in the message” or “coming into the message.” When he read Scripture it was as if he were actually there taking part in the events, striding back and forth, gesturing expressively. If God was cursing his flock, David’s voice would rise dramatically. As he warmed up he took fire, his wiry, six-foot frame twisting with the intensity of his deliverance, his glasses smudged with the heat of his feelings, his words stuttering as his larynx struggled to keep pace with his racing brain. But he was no hellfire Pentecostal minister. When he spoke of the grace of God his voice was loving and compassionate. Altogether, his stamina was amazing; he could talk for up to twenty or thirty hours at a stretch, barely pausing to sip a glass of water while his listeners took notes and the kids played at their parents’ feet.
At times, though, his metaphors could be downright disgusting, like his comparison of sin with a sticky booger hanging on your finger. “You’re pickin’ away, and it gets on your other finger, even when you’re goin’ fifty down the road and you’re tryin’ to flick it off.” We chuckled at these images, sometimes with embarrassment, but they caught our attention.
He disarmed doubters by jokingly dismissing the Bible as “just a game the Jews made up.” Scripture, he told us, was a way to escape “the guy in the mirror. We want to go from here to a place of freedom where we’re no longer in bondage to the flesh, our stupidity, our vanity.” He likened the prophets to a bunch of journalists “giving you a hot scoop on the future.” He compared the biblical texts he quoted to a series of movie previews, “fast, action-packed pictures to grab your eye.” Other times, describing God’s harsh judgments, he commented: “The Lord is beating some butt, right?” He was always honest with us about the consequences of his theology. “It ain’t going to be pretty,” he warned.
There were moments when David seemed exhausted by his own intensities. “I’m tired of giving Bible studies to you guys,” he’d say wearily. “Leave me be.” Occasionally he dozed off from exhaustion in the middle of a study. When that happened, people just sat and waited, often for an hour or more, for him to wake and pick up the thread of his discourse exactly where he’d left off.
Sometimes he’d deliberately provoke us, to jar us out of a trance. “You know, I hate black people,” he said once, out of the blue. I cringed reflexively. The crowd, which was around one-third black, was shocked. You could cut the hush with an axe. “And I hate yellow peo
ple,” David went on after a pause. “And I hate white people. The people I value are people of light.”
Suddenly, the audience let out a huge sigh of collective relief. “Are you people of light?” David challenged harshly, and the brief moment of complacency evaporated.
Listening to him, I ran through a whole catalogue of emotions, from fascination to frustration. Sometimes the study really took off like a good jam session, David and the crowd right there in the groove, flying on the wings of his words. Then there seemed to be a powerful energy in the room, everyone attuned to the same soul rhythms. David was inspired, feeding off the power of the response, like I would when the riffs were rolling. On other occasions, exhausted by his energy, I fell asleep or left the room to stretch my legs, so choked by all the talk I just had to go outside and kick the dirt for the hell of it.
“How long is this going to friggin’ go on?” I cried out one time when I was outside and was startled to hear Steve chuckling behind me. I challenged him: “How do you go through this, sitting still for hours on end, living in this hellhole?” He laughed grimly. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve been through to be here.” There was an edge of resentment in his voice, and he broke off abruptly, afraid of seeming disloyal.
That night I had a surprising dream. In the dream, Michele Jones and I were down by the lake at night. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have this assignation, but the warm black night and the big Texas moon, the crickets and the fireflies, softened my guilt. I was about to kiss Michele when, looking over my shoulder, I saw David watching us, smiling knowingly.
I woke up abruptly. What does that mean? I wondered. Am I already trapped here? Is there no way of getting away from this guy?
Though I was strongly drawn to David and fascinated by his ideas, I often had difficulty believing everything he said. I didn’t doubt that he believed, but my natural skepticism got in the way of my own credulity.
For example, I had a hard time with David’s account of his vision on Mount Zion, received during his second visit to Israel, in 1985. He said that Russian cosmonauts had reported the presence of seven angelic beings flying toward earth with wings the size of jumbo jets!
“Okay, so what happened was, while I was standing on Mount Zion,” he said, “I met up with these angels, these presences made of pure light. They were warriors surrounding the Merkabah, the heavenly throne, riding on fiery horses, armed with flaming swords. They only allow those who can reveal the Seals into the higher realm, into those innumerable worlds that exist alongside our own.
“I was taken up past Orion, to meet God. He spoke to me, and I saw that he was made of unblemished flesh. In a flash I received a complete key to the Scriptures, how the puzzle fitted together. I knew then it was my destiny to unlock the Seals and open the way for our community.”
Clive Doyle told me that David’s visionary experience in Jerusalem was so concentrated and so charged he could barely stutter afterward. “As he described it, the way he saw the Bible was like a video, and at first he couldn’t speak it as fast as he could see it. He told us that he would bring us the Seventh Angel’s message, predicting that the End Time would happen in 1995, ten years after that amazing moment on Mount Zion. He was truly inspired.”
After this, David began to speak of the “Cyrus message.” Cyrus is the anointed king mentioned in Isaiah 45. And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and the hidden riches of secret places. In this view, the people living at Mount Carmel were the “wave sheaf,” the core group leading the way for the 144,000 souls chosen to follow, and David was the Lamb who would open the Seals.
As David’s grasp of his role in the fulfillment of prophecy evolved, he had a further series of revelations. One of the most important and startling of these was his “New Light” experience during the summer of 1989, in which he foresaw the crucial role of sex and procreation in what he called the coming New World Order—a phrase later echoed by President George Bush around the time of the 1991 Gulf War.
The New Light revelation was so radical it shocked some of his people and shook their faith. Simply put, it mandated celibacy for everyone except David. Single men in the community had to give up sex. Married men, such as Steve Schneider and Livingston Fagan, had to separate from their wives and cease making love altogether. Sex was a distraction, David told his people, an untamed power seducing the spirit away from its focus. Only David was given the right to procreate with any of the women, married or single, to generate the inner circle of children who would rule the coming kingdom to be established in Israel.
In David’s spiritual logic, he saw himself assuming the burden of sexuality for the entire community, both male and female. The children David would have with these women, married and single, ranging in ages from fourteen to forty, would represent the most sacred core of the community. “They are our hope and our future,” he said simply.
David’s children were intended to be the twenty-four wise ones or Elders surrounding the divine throne, as described in Revelation 4, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. These Elders would rule the earthly kingdom to be set up in Israel in the last days, as Isaiah predicted. In Psalm 45, the Messiah fathers children meant to be princes under the Lamb. It was a bold, astounding, even incredible notion; but, for David, it was crucial to his entire belief in his calling.
“It was a tough thing to sell,” David admitted. “Some of the guys and some of the women chomped at the bit. But I told them that Jesus himself spoke about becoming celibate for the kingdom’s sake, and most finally accepted the New Light.”
“You mean—?” I began, slowly grasping the implications of this notion.
“Yes,” David cut in bluntly. “If you join us, you’ll have to be celibate. Can you cut it, a randy guy like you?”
“No way,” I retorted instantly. Then, considering it, I modified this reaction. “I’d have to think about it, you know? I mean, if it’s part of the deal, if I understand its purpose in the whole scheme.…”
“It’s a toughie,” David conceded, “but I hope you will come to understand its purpose. Some of the people didn’t, like Marc Breault, the man who was then closest to my heart. He’d just married this girl, Elizabeth, and couldn’t give her up. They left us.”
In Marc Breault, David had his Judas—a favorite disciple who abandoned and betrayed him. Whenever he spoke of Breault, a veil of baffled sadness fell over his face.
David met Marc in early 1986 through Perry Jones, who’d struck up a conversation with him in a bookstore in Southern California. Again the common bond was music, and Marc joined the band, playing the keyboards. Born in Hawaii, he was a computer whiz and had a master’s degree in religious studies from a Seventh-day Adventist college.
“He was bright as a penny, like a brother to me,” David said. “I trusted him with my life.”
Along with Steve Schneider, whom Marc had recruited, he was David’s most loyal and articulate ally. But he broke away a year or so before I first met up with David. As an apostate, he became David’s bitter and vindictive enemy. Hiding out in Australia, he hired a detective to investigate Mount Carmel and “expose” the community. Later, Marc played a diabolical role in provoking the government’s assault on Mount Carmel.
One of the appealing things about David was that when he wasn’t giving a study period he became just one of the guys. He liked to hang out with other musicians when he was relaxing, and after a particularly intense Bible session he’d come down off the podium and invite a bunch of us to go into town, “kick back, swallow some suds, play some tunes.” On these occasions David, Jaime, Mike Schroeder, and I piled into the Camaro and headed for town, to the Chelsea Street Pub, a popular West Waco eatery. While downing a few beers, we mingled with the crowd and chatted to the band playing in the din.
During our expeditions among the Wacoans, David was like a chameleon. He had many different modes, telling strangers what he sensed they needed to hear. His manner was easy, his
twang broader, and people opened up to him. When he was around there was a quiet energy in the room. But it was clear that those who decided to hate David really loathed him. Within minutes of walking into a bar or after talking to him for a short while, some men and women became his immediate adversaries. When that happened, he’d simply walk away, deflecting confrontation. Or he’d buy the person a beer and say, “Well, let’s just be best enemies, okay?”
Once or twice during these bar busts we took over the stage to bang out a couple of songs, me on the drums, David singing and plucking a borrowed guitar. We did hard rock, no religion, just the music I grew up with, like Peter Frampton and Ted Nugent. In a way that maybe only fellow musicians can truly understand, by performing together I recognized that David had an intuitive understanding of where I was at and what I yearned to be.
Despite his easy ways, I couldn’t avoid the slow realization that there appeared to be a very dark side to David’s “truth.” It seemed that he expected to be destroyed, along with anyone who followed him. The possibility that the forces loose in the world would reject and kill him was always on David’s mind; and if the world rejected his message, his death was inevitable and terrible. For wherever the carcass is, there eagles will be gathered together, he quoted. “I am the one whose body will be mutilated and left to rot in the open field.” As he explained it, the opening of the Fifth Seal includes the prediction that the community will suffer a violent death. I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, Revelation writes, portraying a terrible confrontation between the temporal powers and the Lamb, between “Babylon” and the “Peculiar People,” like the Mount Carmel community. In the pivotal events of the Sixth Seal, Mount Carmel and society at large would be hit by terrifying natural disasters. “I knew then that we had to live through the ‘little season’ spoken of in Revelation Five, before being killed,” David said. “It’s a hard fate, but inevitable, and somehow magnificent.”
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