Timothy White on Bob Marley:

For a man like Bob Marley, life and Jah were one and the same.  Marley saw Jah as being the gift of existence; that is, he believed that he, Bob Marley, was in some way eternal, and that he would never be duplicated.  He believed that the singularity of every man and woman is Jah's gift.  What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah.  He believed the process of that struggle becomes, in time, the truth.

Historically certain figures sometimes emerge from stagnant, despairing and/or disintegrating cultures to reinterpret old symbols and beliefs and invest them with new meaning.  An individual's decision to play such a role may be purely unconscious, but it can sometimes evolve into an acute awareness that he may indeed have the gift/burden of prophecy.  This realization may be followed by the public declaration on the part of such a person that he is merely an instrument of a new source of knowledge, a new direction and a new order.

For Jamaicans, and ultimately for much of the Third World, Bob Marley was such a messianic figure.  He maintained that spectral emissaries invaded his sleep to enlist him as a seer.  He was frightened by the responsibility, he said, but he had decided to assume it.   "By and by," he explained, "Jah show every mon him hand, and Jah has shown I mine."

A man who looked like a skinny lion, moved like a spider and lived like a ghost, Bob Marley died trying to control the duppies [ghosts] within himself.