Waco: How not to negotiate with believers.

The Branch Davidians belonged to the religious tradition that sees Christ’s return to earth and the establishment of a divine Kingdom as imminent. They were millennialists. Millennial movements believe that within the pages of the Bible are specific clues about when and how the Second Coming will arrive. They also rely on what the Biblical scholar James Tabor calls “inspired interpreters,” prophets equipped with the divine insight to interpret those clues and prepare their followers to be among God’s chosen.

.. He showed that all of the prophets in the Bible were writing more for our day than for their own time.”

.. Koresh’s answer to the puzzle was simple: he was the Lamb. That’s why he was so good at making sense of the Seven Seals.

.. “I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.”

.. This was why the Davidians wouldn’t leave. They had been through the first round of violence, with the initial A.T.F. raid. Now they were doing as they believed the Bible compelled them to do—waiting. “We were fascinated by the way in which the literal words of this text dominated the entire situation,” Tabor writes. But they also saw the peril ahead—the promised second round of bloodshed. “Might they not provoke a violent end to things simply because they felt it was the predetermined will of God, moving things along to the sixth seal, which was the great Judgment Day of God?” Tabor asks.

Koresh needed another way to make sense of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, so that a violent end was not preordained. Tabor and Arnold made a tape—a long, technical discussion of an alternative reading of Revelation—aired it on the radio, and sent it to Koresh.  Koresh listened and was persuaded.