Emma Smith

One revelation in the frozen corpus is addressed to a woman by name. This page reports what that revelation says to her, and nothing beyond it.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. Everything here comes from the verse text of one section. This wiki’s source text for the Doctrine and Covenants is verse text only, so the revelation’s date, place, and historical occasion are not available and are not stated. Nothing is supplied about her life outside these sixteen verses.

Account

The address

D&C 25 is the only section in the frozen corpus whose named addressee is a woman. (Emma Smith is also NAMED at D&C 132:51, 132:52, and 132:54 — “mine handmaid, Emma Smith” — and spoken of as “mine handmaid” through 132:56, but that section speaks of her in the third person to another addressee; the addressee claim here is about who a section speaks TO, and it is derived from the sections’ own address formulas.) The naming is explicit and stands in the opening verse: D&C 25:1: “Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God, while I speak unto you, Emma Smith, my daughter; for verily I say unto you, all those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my kingdom.” The same verse widens the address before it narrows: the daughter-language is applied first to her and then, in the same breath, to everyone who receives the gospel. The section closes by widening again — D&C 25:16: “And verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my voice unto all. Amen.”

A second frozen work names her, under her name before the marriage: “it was there I first saw my wife (his daughter), Emma Hale” (Joseph Smith—History 1:57), with the marriage dated in the verse text. That verse and the revelation’s “thy husband” (D&C 25:5) are the corpus’s only two statements of the relationship; nothing further about the marriage is supplied here.

Her surname is in the text; so is her husband’s full name, at D&C 25:5: “And the office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant, Joseph Smith, Jun., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness.” This is unusual in the cluster of personal calls surrounding it: most recipients in sections 23–108 are addressed by a first name alone. See Servants Named in the Calls for that pattern.

What the revelation assigns her

Six assignments stand in the verse text, and they are worth listing because the section is short enough that the list is the whole of it.

Comfort and consolation to her husband — D&C 25:5, quoted above.
Scribe — D&C 25:6: “And thou shalt go with him at the time of his going, and be unto him for a scribe, while there is no one to be a scribe for him, that I may send my servant, Oliver Cowdery, whithersoever I will.” The scribal assignment is conditional in the text itself, held only “while there is no one to be a scribe for him” (D&C 25:6), and the stated purpose of the arrangement is to free Oliver Cowdery for sending.
Ordination to expound and exhort — D&C 25:7: “And thou shalt be ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church, according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit.” (The office language here is treated with the church-order material; this page reports the assignment, not the office.)
Writing and learning — D&C 25:8: “For he shall lay his hands upon thee, and thou shalt receive the Holy Ghost, and thy time shall be given to writing, and to learning much.”
A selection of hymns — D&C 25:11: “And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns, as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church.” The reason follows immediately: D&C 25:12: “For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.”
A charge about her own bearing — D&C 25:14: “Continue in the spirit of meekness, and beware of pride.” The pairing of meekness with a warning against pride is not unique to her: the run “beware of pride” stands at exactly three frozen verses (counting rule: distinct frozen verses in the corpus, case-insensitive, punctuation-normalized, word-bounded) — D&C 23:1, this verse, and D&C 38:39. The first of those is addressed to a man named Oliver in the same run of personal calls.

What is withheld

Two verses report a withholding rather than a grant. D&C 25:4: “Murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the world, which is wisdom in me in a time to come.” The text does not say what was not seen. It says only that the withholding extends to the world as well, and that it is temporary. A second, conditional clause closes the promise of a crown: D&C 25:15: “Keep my commandments continually, and a crown of righteousness thou shalt receive. And except thou do this, where I am you cannot come.”

Two phrases worth checking against the corpus

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () The title given at her forgiveness stands at exactly two frozen verses in the whole corpus. - D&C 25:3: “Behold, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady, whom I have called.” - 2 John 1:1: “The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth; and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth;”

Divergences reported: the epistle’s is a salutation in the third person to an addressee the letter never otherwise names (2 John 1:1); the revelation’s is a second-person predicate attached to a named woman (D&C 25:3), and the indefinite article replaces the definite. The wiki reports the verbal correspondence and makes no identification between the two figures — the texts make none.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () The promised crown: - D&C 25:15: “Keep my commandments continually, and a crown of righteousness thou shalt receive. And except thou do this, where I am you cannot come.” - 2 Timothy 4:8: “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”

The three-word run stands at exactly three frozen verses — these two and D&C 29:13, where the crown is received by the dead coming forth. Divergences: the epistle’s crown is laid up for a speaker who describes his own case and then extends it; the revelation’s is conditional on a commandment kept, and the condition is restated negatively in the same verse (D&C 25:15).

Significance

The section is sixteen verses long and does two things at once. It addresses one woman by name — the only such address in the frozen corpus — and it repeatedly refuses to stay narrow: the first verse extends the daughter-language to everyone who receives the gospel, and the last verse says outright that the voice is “unto all” (D&C 25:16). A reader looking for a personal revelation finds one; a reader looking for a general one is told by the text itself that it is that too.

What the wiki cannot do is fill in the rest of her life. The source text here is verse text, and the verse text supplies a name, a marriage, a set of assignments, a withholding, and a conditional promise. Anything further — what hymns were selected, what she had not seen, what became of any of it — is outside this wiki’s source and outside its scope.

Key references

D&C 25:1 — the named address, and its immediate widening
D&C 25:3–4 — the elect-lady title; the withholding
D&C 25:5–8 — comfort, scribe, ordination to expound and exhort, writing and learning
D&C 25:11–12 — the selection of sacred hymns; the song of the heart
D&C 25:14–16 — meekness and pride; the conditional crown; the closing widening

Joseph Smith · Oliver Cowdery · Servants Named in the Calls · The Call to the Labor · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants section 25 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from 2 John 1 and 2 Timothy 4; D&C 23, D&C 29, and D&C 38 are cited, not quoted, inside distribution disclosures.

Every quote is verbatim from the frozen source text, cited to its exact reference and checked character-for-character; no quote crosses a verse boundary. Two connection records are registered here, both [textual] and both asserted_by: wiki — this section names no source for either phrase. Phrase distributions are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing. The recipient is given exactly as the verse text gives her; no date, place, or occasion is supplied, and no identification is made between the elect lady of this section and the addressee of the epistle.