Title: The Camp of Israel Tagline: A revelation that organizes a migration — companies, captains, and a covenant — and then spends its second half on how the travellers are to behave toward each other.

Breadcrumbs / Related: The Gathering to Zion, Zion, Consecration and Stewardship, Bondage and Deliverance, The Twelve and the Seventy

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 136 opens by naming its own genre inside the verse text — “The Word and Will of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their journeyings to the West” (D&C 136:1) — and then speaks in the first person as the Lord from D&C 136:12 onward, with an intervening stretch in the first person plural of a covenant, “And this shall be our covenant—that we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord” (D&C 136:4). Names of servants are given only as the verse text gives them; no date, place, or occasion is imported from the excluded headnotes. This is the last dated-by-content section in this wave’s cluster and the only one whose subject is a journey.

Account

§ The organization

The instruction is administrative and specific: companies “with a covenant and promise to keep all the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God” (D&C 136:2), each provided with “all the teams, wagons, provisions, clothing, and other necessaries for the journey” (D&C 136:5), and each required to carry a proportional share of those who cannot carry themselves: “Let each company bear an equal proportion, according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the widows, the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone into the army” (D&C 136:8). Six men are named as organizers of companies across three verses (D&C 136:12–14).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () — D&C 136:3: “Let the companies be organized with captains of hundreds, captains of fifties, and captains of tens” — Deuteronomy 1:15: “and made them heads over you, captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, and captains over fifties, and captains over tens, and officers among your tribes.”

The same descending triad of hundreds, fifties, and tens, with the same noun. “captains of fifties” stands at exactly one distinct frozen verse in the corpus — this one — because the older passages read “captains over fifties” (Deuteronomy 1:15) or “rulers of fifties” (Exodus 18:21, Exodus 18:25). Two divergences: the preposition, “of” for “over”, and the top of the scale — the older passage begins at thousands, this one at hundreds, and puts a president with two counselors above the captains instead (D&C 136:3).

§ The conduct rules

From D&C 136:20 the section changes subject from logistics to manners, and the rules are domestic in scale: “keep all your pledges one with another; and covet not that which is thy brother’s” (D&C 136:20); “Cease to contend one with another; cease to speak evil one of another” (D&C 136:23); “Cease drunkenness; and let your words tend to edifying one another” (D&C 136:24); borrowing is to be repaid, and if it cannot be, said so plainly — “go straightway and tell thy neighbor, lest he condemn thee” (D&C 136:25); found property is to be searched out and returned (D&C 136:26).

Two verses give the emotional register the same treatment as the property rules, in matched conditionals: “If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving” (D&C 136:28); “If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful” (D&C 136:29).

§ What the section says about the trial itself, and about the death

The section states a purpose for the hardship in the first person: “My people must be tried in all things, that they may be prepared to receive the glory that I have for them, even the glory of Zion; and he that will not bear chastisement is not worthy of my kingdom” (D&C 136:31). It then places the present moment in a stated succession — “from the days of Adam to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Jesus and his apostles, and from Jesus and his apostles to Joseph Smith” (D&C 136:37) — and speaks directly to the death announced in the preceding section: “Many have marveled because of his death; but it was needful that he should seal his testimony with his blood, that he might be honored and the wicked might be condemned” (D&C 136:39). That is the divine voice of this section stating a reason; whether the reason is the whole reason is not something the section discusses, and this page does not extend it.

Significance

Two things about this section are worth stating plainly because they are easy to miss in a book of doctrine. The first is that the migration is organized around who cannot manage it alone: the proportional-share rule at D&C 136:8 names the poor, the widows, the fatherless, and soldiers’ families before it names anyone else, and the companies are told to build for those staying behind before they leave (D&C 136:9). The second is the section’s proportions. Roughly the first third is logistics; the middle is a code of manners about borrowing, returning, drunkenness, speech, and mood; and only the last quarter turns to prophecy and judgment. A reader expecting a revelation about a journey to be about the destination will find instead a document mostly concerned with how a large group of people should treat each other while travelling — which is, on the text’s own terms, the covenant it opens with: “that we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord” (D&C 136:4).

Key references

• D&C 136:1–11 — the companies, the captains, the covenant, the poor
• D&C 136:12–19 — the named organizers; Zion redeemed in due time
• D&C 136:20–30 — the conduct rules; merriment and sorrow
• D&C 136:31–40 — the trial; the succession named; the death addressed
• D&C 136:41–42 — the close

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants section 136 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-reference quoted from Deuteronomy 1. Exodus 18 is cited inside a disclosure rather than registered.

One connection record is registered here, [textual], asserted_by: wiki. This is a deliberately thin page: the section is largely without verbal overlap with the older corpus, and no [interpretive] material met the evidence bar. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.