Baha'u'llah revealed the Hidden Words around 1858, in the middle years of the Baghdad exile that followed his imprisonment in Tehran, a period that also produced the Seven Valleys and, in 1861, the Kitab-i-Iqan. The community's memory, transmitted through Abdu'l-Baha and the early chronicles, pictures portions of the text composed as Baha'u'llah paced the banks of the Tigris in meditation. An earlier designation for the collection was the Hidden Book of Fatimih, linking it to a Shia tradition of a book of consolation revealed to Fatima after the death of her father, a promised book whose appearance would mark the promised age; by adopting and transforming the motif, the work quietly signalled a messianic claim years before Baha'u'llah's open declaration in 1863. The bilingual structure serves two audiences of the original milieu, the Arabic terse and lapidary, the Persian warmer and more lyrical, and the two parts are treated as one book with two registers rather than an original and a translation.
In the Bahai canon the Hidden Words is classed among the ethical and mystical writings rather than the legal ones, yet Shoghi Effendi called it a treasury of divine mysteries and counted his own translation, begun in 1923 and refined through 1954, among his most careful works. It is often the first Bahai scripture given to inquirers, and remains the most widely translated of Baha'u'llah's writings.