Come, Follow Me June 24-30: Alma 13-16
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
What Should We Do with Terrifying Scripture?
By Rosalynde F. Welch
“In this book, my task is to tell sad stories as I hear them. Indeed, they are tales of terror with women as victims.” These are the opening words of a difficult and important book, Texts of Terror, by the biblical scholar Phyllis Trible.[1] Trible is a believer who honors the Bible as scripture, the source of the sacred stories that guide her life. She describes how she began to notice and confront passages in the Bible that describe violence against women--passages like the stories of Tamar and of Jephthah’s daughter, which she called “terror texts.” Precisely because she loves the Bible, Trible was unwilling simply to discard these passages as uninspired or worse. But how was she to make sense of them?
Alma 14 presents the grim story of the massacre of the believing women and children of Ammonihah, the most disturbing of the terror texts in the Book of Mormon. Here’s how the passage reads in full:
And [the Nehorites of Ammonihah] brought th[e] wives and children [of all those who had believed] together, and whosoever believed or had been taught to believe in the word of God they caused that they should be cast into the fire; and they also brought forth their records which contained the holy scriptures, and cast them into the fire also, that they might be burned and destroyed by fire. And it came to pass that they took Alma and Amulek, and carried them forth to the place of martyrdom, that they might witness the destruction of those who were consumed by fire. And when Amulek saw the pains of the women and children who were consuming in the fire, he also was pained; and he said unto Alma: How can we witness this awful scene? (Alma 14:8-10).
One of the features of terror texts noted by Trible is how quickly the victimized women drop out of the story once the violence has been perpetrated. In this passage, too, the focus quickly turns to the emotional state of Alma and Amulek. And so I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider this experience from the point of view of the women themselves, to acknowledge and grieve their suffering.
If women were the keepers of the hearth and home in Nephite culture, as they have been in so many cultures around the world, then fire would have been for them an everyday tool for cooking, an indispensable aid to nourish their families. Accurately or not, the Nephites believed that Lamanites consumed raw meat; cooking their meat with fire seems to have been a marker of group identity for the Nephites (see Enos 1:20). Perhaps as Nephite women cooked, they repeated the ancestral tales of their foremothers who were reduced to eating raw meat and yet were strengthened by the Lord to nurse their babies and bear up under the strains of the journey (see 1 Nephi 17:2).
Fire had other, more distant and dangerous, meanings. Maybe they had heard of the long-ago martyrdom of Abinadi and the gruesome end of King Noah--but these must have seemed like tales from the province of men, prophets, and kings who made history. And they had just been listening to preachers compare the misery of sinners to a lake of fire belching plumes of flame (see Alma 12:17)--but this was metaphor! The idea that they and their children could die in a conflagration must have seemed a remote fear.
Until a hot wind kissed their cheeks and their voices drowned in the inferno’s roar. You can see why Alma, or Mormon, turned quickly away from the women and children, back to the experience of the observers. It’s too awful to imagine their martyrdom in detail. The only reason not to turn away, perhaps, is the reason that Trible offers: “to retell such stories on behalf of the victims could itself be redemptive.”[2] To try, tentatively, to reconstruct something of their experience can both memorialize their lives and draw from their suffering something good: our compassionate awareness of the innocents who still suffer.
To think carefully about the meaning of these women’s and children’s deaths is a way to honor how they lived. Last summer, several friends and I sat around a table and discussed this terrible episode.[3] The believing men had already been expelled from Ammonihah and stoned. What was the significance of targeting the women, the children, and the religious records in this way? It’s clear that, at least in part, the point was to punish Alma and Amulek by twisting, literalizing, and projecting their words about the punishment of sinners onto the agony of their innocent friends and family (see Alma 14:14).
But it seems likely that there was a strategic purpose, as well. The Nehorites of Ammonihah wanted to eradicate this new messianic religion, and so they had to destroy both its seeds and its sowers. The religious records contained the word of God that would take root and grow in an open heart. And the women were the primary sowers of that word, the caregivers who guided the children’s earliest spiritual formation. Women not only give birth to the next generation, they also reproduce culture in their teaching and socialization of children. To eradicate the next generation of believers, then, it was necessary to destroy the records, the women, and the children.
When the Nehorite men looked at the religious records, they saw only spiritually illegible, socially dangerous nonsense. The religious women were likewise illegible to them, harboring spiritual and social wisdom that could never be extracted. And so the flames were kindled.
“We live by stories,” Phyllis Trible writes.[4] The stories that we tell with the conviction of scripture grow up into faith. This is precisely why the women and the records were destroyed in Ammonihah. And this is why we must handle the “texts of terror” in our own scriptures with the greatest caution. I don’t believe in tossing them out or condemning them as misogyny. I agree with Trible that it is redemptive to keep and care for these stories. They can awaken us to ongoing instances of violence and victimization. They can speak personally to those who have suffered abuse themselves. When the Spirit is present, to hear one’s own story in scripture can be the beginning of healing.
Jacob, the prophet most attuned to the evils of abuse and the suffering of the oppressed, issued this galvanizing invitation: “Remember that ye are free to act for yourselves -- to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life” (2 Nephi 10:23). This challenge places responsibility upon us, the keepers and interpreters of the sacred text. We must choose. One way we meet Jacob’s challenge to choose life is to confront the violence in our scripture with faithfulness and mourning.
[1] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (40th Anniversary Edition): Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Fortress Press, 2022), p. 1.
[2] Phyllis Trible, “Foreword: Biblical Terrors Then and Now,” in Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence, eds. Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon and Robyn J. Whitaker (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2021), p. x.
[3] My friend Sharon Harris, professor of English at BYU, deserves the credit for this insight.
[4] Trible, “Biblical Terrors Then and Now,” ix.