David Koresh

Drawing depicting David Koresh's life 

After hearing about the Branch Davidians, I not only wanted to know more about it, but I was particularly interested in David Koresh's life before he because leader of them. Koresh liked for people to think of him as a loser and often lied and said he dropped out of sch

ool years before he actually did. David Koresh wasn't actually his real name, rather he was born Vernon Wayne Howell. He was dyslexic but he learned to write and turned out to be an average student but dropped out in the 11th grade.

As a young boy he loved music and going to the Adventist church with his grandmother. By 12 he was already lecturing other boys with long, memorized scripture. As he got older his passion got bigger. Throughout his teens he rambled around, worked on his guitar skills, and even got a preacher's teenage daughter pregnant and left her. In 1981 he moved to Waco to live at Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian compound. In the mid-1980s Howell traveled to Israel, and when he came back he believed that he had the "spirit". 

In 1990 he changed his name to Koresh after King Cyrus, who allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. Koresh claimed to have unlocked Seven Seals within the Book of Revelation. Generally, the Seven Seals are supposed to portend events leading to the apocalypse. 

Koresh followed the teaching of "spiritual weddings" which would take place between him and any female follower that God wanted him to have. This meant that he could marry underage girls and even legally married women. Although some followers observed his actions as a test of their faith, some other followers refused to deal with it and left the convent.