The Wheat and the Tares

A revelation names a parable, assigns its terms one by one, and then changes the parable’s order of harvest — the wheat is gathered first here, and the tares first there.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 86 is eleven verses. The speaker is identified inside the verse text — “thus saith the Lord unto you my servants” (D&C 86:1) — and the recipients are described but not named: “you, with whom the priesthood hath continued through the lineage of your fathers” (D&C 86:8). This page names no recipient, because the verse text does not. The occasion, date and place of the revelation are outside this wiki’s source text.

Standing disclosure — KJV-overlap material. This page reports verbal correspondence with the King James text as textual fact, including where the correspondence follows the KJV’s English translation. What that correspondence implies about the origin of the Doctrine and Covenants text — in any direction — is an external question outside this wiki’s scope.

Account

The section names its subject

Unlike most of the sections in this cluster, this one says at the outset what it is about: “Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you my servants, concerning the parable of the wheat and of the tares” (D&C 86:1). The naming is of a parable, not of a chapter or a book, and this page treats it accordingly — the records drawn to the parable were minted asserted_by: "source" at the 2026-08-10 editorial review, under its named-parable ruling.

The assignments

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:2: “Behold, verily I say, the field was the world, and the apostles were the sowers of the seed;” - Matthew 13:38: “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;”

Four words, and the divergence is the verb’s tense: the parable’s explanation reads “is” and the revelation reads “was”. The exact strings sort the two carriers cleanly — “the field was the world” stands at exactly one distinct frozen verse in the corpus, D&C 86:2, and “the field is the world” at exactly one, Matthew 13:38. A second divergence is the identification that follows: the parable’s explanation names the sower as the Son of man and the good seed as the children of the kingdom (Matthew 13:37–38); the revelation names the sowers as “the apostles” (D&C 86:2), a term the parable’s explanation does not use anywhere.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:7: “Therefore, let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest is fully ripe; then ye shall first gather out the wheat from among the tares, and after the gathering of the wheat, behold and lo, the tares are bound in bundles, and the field remaineth to be burned.” - Matthew 13:30: “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.”

This is the record where the two texts part company on something more than a word. The parable reaps in one order — the tares are gathered first, then the wheat into the barn (Matthew 13:30). The revelation reaps in the other — the wheat is gathered first, and the tares afterward (D&C 86:7). What burns also differs: in the parable the bundled tares are burned, and in the revelation “the field remaineth to be burned” (D&C 86:7). Both are stated here as textual facts of their own verses; this page does not harmonise them, and the reversal is the section’s most reportable feature. Distribution: “bound in bundles” stands at three distinct frozen verses in the corpus, all three in the Doctrine and Covenants — D&C 86:7, 88:94, 101:66 — while the parable’s form, “bind them in bundles”, stands at exactly one, Matthew 13:30.

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 86:6: “But the Lord saith unto them, pluck not up the tares while the blade is yet tender (for verily your faith is weak), lest you destroy the wheat also.” - Matthew 13:29: “But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.”

Both refuse the same request with the same reason, and neither shares more than the conjunction and the object with the other. Two things belong to the revelation alone: a timing condition — the blade being yet tender (D&C 86:6) — and a parenthetical assessment of the askers, “(for verily your faith is weak)”, which has no counterpart of any kind in the parable. In the parable the askers are servants (Matthew 13:28); in the revelation they are angels who “are crying unto the Lord day and night” (D&C 86:5). The parable’s own explanation does name the reapers as angels (Matthew 13:39) but does not put the request in their mouths.

The material the parable does not contain

Four verses of the section have no counterpart in the parable at all, and three of them carry language from elsewhere.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:3: “the great persecutor of the church, the apostate, the whore, even Babylon, that maketh all nations to drink of her cup, in whose hearts the enemy, even Satan, sitteth to reign” - Revelation 17:2: “and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”

The figure is shared and the wording is not: the vision’s nations drink the wine of her fornication, the revelation’s drink of her cup. A closer verbal carrier stands elsewhere in the same vision — “because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication” (Revelation 14:8) — and is disclosed here rather than made the record’s second endpoint, because Revelation 14:8 is already carrying register weight in this corpus at D&C 88:105. The lead may prefer that pairing; the choice is flagged rather than taken.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:3: “wherefore, the tares choke the wheat and drive the church into the wilderness.” - Revelation 12:6: “And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God”

Both put a persecuted body into the wilderness, and the grammar of the two is opposite: the vision’s woman flees, the revelation’s church is driven. The vision names a duration and a prepared place; the revelation names neither. Whether the vision’s woman and the revelation’s church are the same referent is not stated by either text and is not settled here.

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 86:9: “For ye are lawful heirs, according to the flesh, and have been hid from the world with Christ in God—” - Colossians 3:3: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

“hid with Christ in God” stands at exactly one distinct frozen verse in the corpus, Colossians 3:3 — the revelation’s own wording interposes “from the world” and so does not carry the run intact. Divergences: what is hidden differs, a life in the letter and persons in the revelation; and the letter’s premise, that its hearers are dead, has no counterpart in the revelation’s verse, which grounds the same clause in lineage instead — “lawful heirs, according to the flesh” (D&C 86:9).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:10: “until the restoration of all things spoken by the mouths of all the holy prophets since the world began.” - Acts 3:21: “until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.”

Six consecutive words match at the end of both clauses, as printed and under every fold — “holy prophets since the world began.” (D&C 86:10, Acts 3:21). Divergences: the sermon’s “restitution” reads “restoration” in the revelation; the sermon’s “mouth” singular reads “mouths” plural; and the sermon’s “his holy prophets” reads “the holy prophets”. “since the world began” stands at twelve distinct frozen verses in the corpus: Acts 3:21, John 9:32, Luke 1:70, Romans 16:25, 1 Nephi 3:20, Mosiah 13:33, Mosiah 15:13, Mosiah 15:26, Alma 7:25, Alma 26:35, D&C 27:6, and D&C 86:10.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 86:11: “Therefore, blessed are ye if ye continue in my goodness, a light unto the Gentiles, and through this priesthood, a savior unto my people Israel.” - Isaiah 49:6: “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.”

The revelation’s preposition differs from every other carrier’s, and the difference is countable. “a light unto the Gentiles” stands at exactly one distinct frozen verse in the corpus, D&C 86:11; “a light to the Gentiles” stands at exactly two, Isaiah 49:6 and its rendering in the record, 1 Nephi 21:6. The larger divergence is what the light is for: the prophecy’s servant is a light and salvation to the end of the earth, and the revelation’s hearers are a light to the Gentiles and a savior to Israel — the two beneficiaries are named separately and given different roles.

Significance

Two features of this section deserve to be set down plainly, because both are easy to read past.

The first is the reversal. A reader who knows the parable will supply the parable’s order — tares gathered first — and the section says the opposite, twice over, in the same verse: the wheat is gathered out first, and the tares are bound afterward (D&C 86:7). The reversal is not commented on anywhere in the section. It is stated and left. This page records it as a textual difference between two verses and does not decide whether one text is correcting, updating, or simply telling a different story than the other; the section gives no account of the relation, and the wiki does not supply one.

The second is the section’s second half. Verses 8 to 11 leave the parable behind entirely and speak about lineage, priesthood and a preserved line. Nothing in the parable or its explanation prepares that turn. The section joins the two halves with a single word — “Therefore” (D&C 86:8) — and supplies no further bridge. That the two halves stand in one revelation is a fact about the text; what connects them is not stated in it.

Key references

D&C 86:1–3 — the parable named; the field, the sowers, the sower of tares
D&C 86:4–7 — the angels’ request refused; the reversed order of the harvest
D&C 86:8–11 — the lineage, the priesthood, the light and the savior
Matthew 13:24–30, Matthew 13:36–43 — the parable and its explanation
Colossians 3:3, Acts 3:21, Isaiah 49:6 — the other passages the section’s language tracks

Two Churches · The Day of the Lord · The Two Priesthoods · The Signs of the Coming · Covenant of Israel · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants section 86 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from Matthew 13, Colossians 3, Acts 3, Isaiah 49, Revelation 12, and Revelation 17. Revelation 14:8, 1 Nephi 21:6, D&C 88:94 and D&C 101:66, and the eleven further carriers of “since the world began” (Acts 3:21 among them), are cited inside disclosures and censuses rather than registered as connections of this page.

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. Eight connection records are registered here, all [textual]; the three drawn to the parable carry asserted_by: "source", minted at the 2026-08-10 editorial review under its named-parable ruling, since the section names the parable in its first verse, and the rest carry asserted_by: wiki. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.