Beth Sarim: The House Built for the Resurrected Dead
Near La Jolla, California
Tucked into a quiet San Diego residential neighborhood is one of the strangest houses in American religious history. This is Beth Sarim, which is Hebrew for House of the Princes, a ten-room Spanish Colonial mansion built in nineteen twenty-nine and deeded in trust to accommodate the imminent bodily resurrection of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and Samuel, among other Old Testament patriarchs.
The man behind this idea was Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the second president of the Watch Tower Society and the dominant figure in what would become the Jehovah's Witnesses. Rutherford had spent time in federal prison in nineteen eighteen on charges related to obstructing the First World War draft, convictions that were later overturned. After his release, doctors told him his one remaining healthy lung required warm, dry winters, and he began spending time in San Diego.
Rutherford's theology in the nineteen twenties held that the resurrection of the ancient princes was not merely possible but imminent. Watch Tower publications predicted that Abraham and the patriarchs would return in bodily form around nineteen twenty-five to help govern the earth in the last days before Armageddon. When nineteen twenty-five came and went without incident, the date was revised, but the doctrine survived.
In nineteen twenty-nine the Watch Tower Society purchased property in the Kensington neighborhood and built the mansion. Rutherford stayed there each winter, working from what was effectively the winter executive office of the organization. The deed specified that the house was held in trust for the use of the returning princes whenever they arrived. Rutherford died in the house in January of nineteen forty-two.
The Watch Tower Society quietly sold Beth Sarim in nineteen forty-eight. The official teaching on the princes' resurrection was revised in nineteen fifty and postponed to a date after Armageddon. The house still stands as a private residence, its Spanish arches and symbolic watchtower above the entrance the only hints of its peculiar theological purpose.
