Doctrine and Covenants 1 is unusual among the sections in that it does not stand in the order it was received. It was given on November 1, 1831, well after many of the revelations that now follow it — and it is placed first deliberately. When the early elders of the church gathered to decide whether and how to publish the revelations Joseph Smith had received, this section was offered as the Lord’s own preface to that collection. It is, in a real sense, the book speaking about itself.
Read that way, the section’s features make sense. It does not narrate an event or answer a particular question, as many later sections do. It announces. Its opening verses address not a person but “all people” — “the inhabitants of the earth” — and its governing image is a “voice of warning” that, it says, will go out “by the mouths of my disciples.” The section presents the very act of publishing the revelations as itself a warning: a message sent into a world the text describes as drawing toward calamity, so that those willing to hear may prepare.
Several themes thread through it. There is the conviction that the revelations are for everyone, not a private possession. There is candor about the messengers: the section calls them “weak things of the world” and treats their weakness as part of the design rather than an embarrassment. There is an insistence that the words carry the same weight whether spoken directly by God or through His servants — the section’s best-known line, in verse 38, refuses any gap between the two: “whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” And there is a frank acknowledgment that some will reject the message, set beside the claim that the prophecies will be fulfilled regardless.
For a reader meeting the Doctrine and Covenants for the first time, Section 1 does exactly what a preface should. It sets the terms. It tells you what kind of book you are holding — a collection that understands itself as both a warning and an invitation — and it asks to be read in that light.
Historical Context
By late 1831 the church’s center of activity had shifted to Ohio. On November 1, a special conference of elders convened at Hiram, Ohio — the town where Joseph Smith was then living and working on his revision of the Bible — to arrange for the publication of the revelations as a book, the Book of Commandments. Section 1 was received during that conference and designated the preface to the collection.
The publishing effort met with difficulty: the printing of the Book of Commandments in Missouri was cut short in 1833 when a mob destroyed the press. A fuller, revised compilation appeared in 1835 as the Doctrine and Covenants, and Section 1 has served as its preface ever since. The section’s date and setting are recorded in its own heading; the surrounding history is told in the church’s narrative history Saints.