Come, Follow Me May 13-19: Mosiah 11-17
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.
A Lonely Prophet and a Lost King
By Rosalynde F. Welch
The book of Mosiah is built around a contrast between two kings, the righteous King Benjamin and the wicked King Noah. This pair of kings and their character differences are central to the book’s political theology. But there’s another study in contrast presented in these chapters: the prophet and the king. Where Benjamin combines these roles at the opening of Mosiah, the two archetypes are teased apart in Mosiah 11-17 and pasted onto the opposed figures of Abinadi and Noah.
For those of us raised on the Arnold Friberg Book of Mormon illustrations, a certain contrast between the two men seems obvious: Noah is glowering and corpulent, dressed extravagantly, and heavily guarded (by jaguars, no less). Abinadi is elderly and thin (yet still heavily muscled?) and dressed in rags. While license can be granted for artistic imagination when details are unspecified, it’s worth saying that none of these details appears in the text. It’s silent on Noah’s size, clothing, and animal companions. Nor is Abinadi’s age, stature, or clothing described.
Several very real differences between the prophet and the king do show up in these chapters--most obviously, of course, the contrast between Noah’s wickedness and Abinadi’s faithfulness. But there’s a more subtle difference in the portraits of these two men. Noah seems driven to surround himself with people obligated to love him--or at least to adulate him. (Friberg does get much of that right in his painting.) We’re told that Noah “had many wives and concubines” (Mosiah 11:2). Furthermore, we’re told that he “put down all the priests that had been consecrated by his father, and consecrated new ones in their stead” (Mosiah 11:5). These priests, too, had “wives and concubines” (Mosiah 11:4). Noah deliberately builds a cadre of associates and family who depend on him for status, and whose loyalty is (seemingly) secured.
Abinadi, on the other hand, appears to have no friends. When he shows up calling the people to repentance, he seems to come out of nowhere (Mosiah 11:20). When he disappears for two years, we have no idea where he goes (Mosiah 12:1). When he is arrested, nobody speaks on his behalf. When he is tried, he calls no witness to testify to his innocence, except the words of an ancient prophet (Mosiah 14:1). It’s only when Abinadi is condemned to death that the priest Alma speaks in his defense, though it’s not clear that Abinadi is aware of Alma’s advocacy and in any case Alma is soon expelled (Mosiah 17:2-3). In the end, Abinadi dies as he (apparently) ministered: an isolated figure without social or family attachments (Mosiah 17:20).
It seems likely, though, that behind this apparent difference between Noah’s forced sociality and Abinadi’s studied isolation is a deeper commonality. The two men, I’d wager, are both very lonely.
Noah’s loneliness would hardly be surprising. The isolation of the powerful and their grasping at the illusion of security and intimacy in dependents is a recurring theme from Sophocles to Shakespeare. And the social distance imposed by great wealth--think of the millionaire dying alone in his mansion--is a stock theme from Ebenezer Scrooge to Jay Gatsby. King Noah, despite the sycophants that fill his opulent buildings, is alone.
The isolation of the prophet is a prominent theme of scripture. Abraham Heschel might have described Abinadi when he wrote, “The prophet is a lonely man. He alienates the wicked as well as the pious, the cynics as well as the believers, the priests and the princes, the judges and the false prophets.” [1] Heschel points to the prophet Jeremiah, who lamented that “I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand: for thou hast filled me with indignation” (Jeremiah 15:17). Abinadi likewise “sits alone” and friendless under the heavy burden of a divine call that leaves him a pariah in the community.
If both men are fundamentally lonely, they bear the same burden differently: Noah seeks relief by surrounding himself with fine things and flattering people. It’s hard not to see his immodest building program, his incontinent sexuality, and his immoderate drinking as a sad and lonely run on the hedonic treadmill. He’s left, in the end, less satisfied and more isolated. We might say that his defining trait, excess, is itself a symptom of his loneliness. Indeed, the entire colony is likely laboring under a malaise of loneliness, cut off from the body of the Nephites. They seek distraction in all the wrong ways because they don’t know the way home (or the way Home). Perhaps they think they are already home (or Home [2] ) but can’t shake their emptiness. They are stranded, lost, lonely-- and in numb (or intoxicated) denial.
But Abinadi overcomes his loneliness or accepts it. He recognizes the fundamental gap between prophet and people and between person and person, and he makes peace with it. He understands that, after Eden, the mortal condition is inherently a state of spiritual lostness, an existential separation from one another and from God that has only one cure and one healer. “Thus all mankind were lost,” he says, “and behold, they would have been endlessly lost were it not that God redeemed his people from their lost and fallen state” (Mosiah 16:4). It’s futile to deny our isolation and fill our emptiness with acquisition or achievement or pleasure. Instead, Abinadi seeks and finds true accompaniment with his God, who is himself a man of loneliness, “despised and rejected of men” (Mosiah 14:3). Christ, Abinadi points out, “suffereth himself to be mocked, and scourged, and cast out, and disowned by his people” (Mosiah 15:5). It’s right that a Lord who asks his servants the prophets to shoulder crushing isolation has himself borne the same load.
A final contrast underscores this brief character study of Noah and Abinadi: their reaction to death, which comes to both men in the horror of immolation. Famously, Abinadi accepts martyrdom rather than deny the message he has been called to deliver: “I will not recall the words which I have spoken unto you concerning this people, for they are true; and that ye may know of their surety I have suffered myself that I have fallen into your hands” (Mosiah 17:9). Like the Savior, he approaches his own death with a sorrowful courage, his “flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the [prophet] being swallowed up in the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:7).
Noah, on the contrary, runs from his death--literally. First, he begs his life from Gideon when cornered on his tower (see Mosiah 19:8). Later, he commands his men to abandon their wives and children to flee Lamanite forces (see Mosiah 19:11). When he cravenly forbids his conscience-stricken followers from risking discovery to seek their families, they “were angry with the king, and caused that he should suffer, even unto death by fire” (Mosiah 19:20). He dies, as he lived, surrounded by people, but lost and spiritually isolated.
Each man’s response to loneliness, whether meek acceptance or distraction and avoidance, is echoed in his response to death. This is no surprise. The loneliness inherent in the human condition is an important training ground for the central task of Christian discipleship: learning to lose our life for Christ’s sake (Matthew 16:25). In this respect, the contrast between Noah and Abinadi has something important to teach us.
[1]Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (United Kingdom, Harper & Row, 1969), 22.
[2] Joseph Spencer makes the compelling argument that the Zeniffite colony has adopted a political theology holding that they are already living in the messianic age prophesied by Isaiah. See chapter 2 of Spencer’s A Word in Season: Isaiah’s Reception in the Book of Mormon.
