Come, Follow Me May 27-June 2: Mosiah 25-28
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.
Generational Ruptures and Reconciliations in the Book of Mosiah
By Rosalynde F. Welch
The chapters at the end of the book of Mosiah see an important change in the shape of the story we’ve been following (or trying to follow, at any rate). From the time of the first King Mosiah, peoples and records have divided and re-divided into ever-narrower strands of story: Zeniff’s colony splits from the Zarahemla-based group; then Alma’s people depart into the wilderness; then Noah and his cronies leave their families, and their group fractures into multiple sub-factions. But beginning in chapter 22, when Limhi’s people return to Zarahemla, these separate strands start to consolidate. By chapter 25, all the peoples have been accounted for, and a grand reunion occurs when “king Mosiah caused that all the people should be gathered together” (Mosiah 25:1). Not all the Nephites have returned to Zarahemla, it should be noted: the Amulonites, former priests of Noah who abandoned their families, abducted Lamanite women, and then married them, have defected to the Lamanites and remain in the land of Nephi.
Tucked inside this period of reunion and reconsolidation, however, a new kind of division can be detected. Now that the people are back in the same place, the source of division shifts from geographic distance to generational divides. The first of several generational fractures in this period occurs in chapter 25, when King Mosiah reads the wilderness record of Alma to the assembled crowd. The children of the Amulonites--who, recall, were abandoned by their fathers and eventually returned to Zarahemla with the body of Limhi’s people--hear, perhaps for the first time, of the cruelty their fathers inflicted on the people of Alma. These children of Amulon react with revulsion: they “were displeased with the conduct of their fathers, and they would no longer be called by the names of their fathers, therefore they took upon themselves the name of Nephi, that they might be called the children of Nephi” (Mosiah 25:12). To disown their fathers entirely and instead claim new lineage through Nephi is an extreme and definitive, if understandable, generational schism.
In the chapters that follow, several additional--if less dramatic--generational breaks occur. Chapter 26 sees the rise of a group of young unbelievers, the children of the older generation who had experienced a dramatic communal conversion under King Benjamin. These young people, however, were “little children at the time [Benjamin] spake unto his people; and they did not believe the tradition of their fathers” (Mosiah 26:1). The young unbelievers reject the religion of their parents and consequently become “a separate people as to their faith, and remained so ever after” (Mosiah 26:4). The rising generation’s religious repudiation becomes a full-blown social schism that will prove highly consequential in coming years, especially in prompting Mosiah’s legal reform permitting freedom of conscience.
Several of the especially highly placed young unbelievers are, famously, converted to Christ and drawn back into the religious fold of their fathers, where they become the religious and political leaders of the next generation. Yet after the sons of Mosiah return to faith, they initiate yet another generational rupture when, to a man, they decline to accept the Nephite throne from their father, choosing instead to go among the Lamanites to preach the gospel (see Mosiah 28:10). In response, Mosiah ends the Nephite monarchy--an institution that has endured almost five centuries but ends when the rising generation comes of age. In this case, the rupture is not a matter of sin and rebellion but a case of the next generation choosing different values and emphases within the gospel framework.
Each of these generational ruptures carries a slightly different value in the moral landscape of the Book of Mormon. In broad schematic terms, we might compare the “wickedness” or “righteousness” of each set of parents and children involved in these different schisms. (In reality, of course, an entire generation can never be starkly classified as good or bad.) If we were to create a matrix of the different configurations, it might look something like this.
| Wicked Parents | Righteous Parents |
Wicked Children |
| Young Unbelievers |
Righteous Children | Children of the Amulonites | Sons of Mosiah |
What of that upper left spot? Is there an instance in these chapters of wicked children rebelling from wicked parents? Perhaps there is. In Mosiah 28, we’re told that King Mosiah translates the Jaredite record. It appears that his people are made aware of at least some of that history--perhaps in a public reading similar to the one described in chapter 25--because we’re told that “this account did cause the people of Mosiah to mourn exceedingly” (Mosiah 28:18). Depending on how much detail was shared, it’s possible that the people heard the cautionary story of the emergence of secret combinations among the Jaredites, the sordid tale of Jared, his daughter, and the murderer Akish recounted in Ether 8-9. This would certainly fit the bill for a wicked younger generation rebelling and dethroning a wicked older generation.
Of these four different instances of generational rupture, it’s the children of the Amulonites who strike me as particularly poignant and particularly interesting. It’s not hard to imagine the excruciating psychological pressure of confronting the fact that their parents did something horrifyingly cruel and wrong--not only victimizing their own families but other people as well. It’s likely they experienced shattered trust, rage, self-blame, isolation, and a devastating loss of identity. So, it’s not hard to sympathize with their desire to sever their filial relationship and choose new spiritual affiliations and models.
Still, it’s rarely the case that any individual or group is entirely bad. In fact, the Amulonites, for all the ways they betrayed trust, also did something that, certainly unintentionally, turned out to be very good: after their defection, they taught the Lamanites how to speak and write the Nephite language and how to keep records. This new technology caused the Lamanites “to increase in riches, and … to trade one with another and wax great” (Mosiah 24:6)--and undoubtedly prepared them to understand and receive the sons of Mosiah when they arrived with the good news of the gospel.
In the end, I wonder if it would have been psychologically healthier for the children of the Amulonites to have acknowledged and disclaimed their fathers’ grave wrongdoing but also to have recognized that their fathers did some good. Would it have been more healing to transform rather than repudiate the legacy of their fathers? Later, in the story of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies, we see what it looks like when a generation of Lamanites breaks from the traditions of their fathers, without repudiating their heritage but instead vowing to transform it. Is it possible that the children of the Amulonites might have changed their fathers’ hearts through faithful witness like Lamoni did his father’s (see Alma 20)? We don’t know, and I would never condemn the children of the Amulonites. But the Book of Mormon does offer us a kind of counterfactual scenario that should make us think.
The difficulty of passing on religious commitments and values to the next generation is a perpetual preoccupation of the Book of Mormon. In fact, it can be argued that the writers of the small plates saw the primary purpose of their project as repairing the original failure at the heart of Lehi’s dream when Lehi is unable to persuade Laman and Lemuel to approach the shining tree. These are evergreen heartaches in human society. The Book of Mormon speaks powerfully then and now.
