Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Alma Text with Kimberly Matheson

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies podcast. I'm Rosalynde Welch and I am here with Kim Matheson who is my colleague at the Maxwell Institute. She is the Laura F. Willes Research Fellow. She specializes in Book of Mormon Theology and she is here with us today to talk about the first half of the Book of Alma. The Book of Alma is the longest book in the Book of Mormon. So we decided to break it in half so that we could get a little closer and zoom in a little bit on these wonderful chapters here in Alma 1-29. Kim, what is it that we should know in terms of context as we get started reading this book?

Kim Matheson: Well, a lot, unfortunately. I don't believe in mincing words, so I think we dive right in. And most of the context that I have to share with listeners on the first half of Alma is just heavily political. We open the book of Alma on the heels of a lot of political change and a lot of important, kind of, subtle details from late in the Book of Mosiah, and it comes thick and fast. So, apologies, but it's useful and it's necessary I think, really, to understand the first half of the Book of Alma. And I think where I would, the deep end in which I'm going to toss listeners has to do with a little group among the Nephites known as the Mulekites. We meet them in Mosiah 25, well we don't meet them in Mosiah 25 but we learn a detail about them there. We learned in Mosiah 25 that despite the Nephites having a lot of political and cultural power in Zarahemla, their capital, they are not actually in the majority. The Nephites have been a minority group population-wise ever since they showed up in this region, and the majority demographic are the Mulekites, these original settlers who Mosiah's grandfather ran into when he moved into the area. And what we're seeing as we head into the first half of Alma is that simple disparity, that difference in population, is creating a lot of social tension. And we have clues that this fault line runs pretty deep, that there's strong Mulekite resentment against Nephite culture, Nephite religion, Nephite governance. And one of our main clues is that Mosiah has to do something at the end of the Book of Mosiah. So Alma opens on the heels of King Mosiah having just switched from a monarchy to a system of judges. Adding to all the complexity, to make matters worse, there are now a bunch of new Nephites in the land. Limhi's people have now joined with Mosiah's people in Zarahemla. Alma, his father, formed a church that lived in the wilderness for a while. Now they're also in Zarahemla. So actually, when the book of Alma opens, the land of Zarahemla is just hopping with rival claimants to the throne, rival religious traditions, rival cultures. Part of Mosiah's solution was to redistribute power a little bit. So he's going to safeguard the law and give more people a voice by replacing the monarchy with a system of judges. The problem is that while that was a very popular move and Mosiah died with his approval rating at an all-time high, it didn't seem to be enough to settle down all the social upheaval. And the Book of Alma is where we watch that upheaval happen for the next 30 or 40 years. Because even though the Nephites now have a system of judges, it's clear that Mosiah hoped to give some extra privilege to Nephite religion and Nephite governance because his very first chief judge that he chooses is a Nephite, it's Alma, and Alma also happens to be the high priest of the Nephite church. And so when the book opens, there's a fairly large constituency who feel like this is unfair favoritism of Nephite religion. And so one of the big questions that's going to motivate this book going forward is, what happens with all of these competing cultural strands? How do they put pressure on the Nephite church? How do they put pressure on the nation? And what is Alma going to have to do about it?

Welch: Yeah, that is so helpful. And it helps to explain, kind of, the tremendous instability that we see throughout the Book of Alma, this kind of just social swinging from pole to pole. At any given moment, you have no idea what might be happening. There just seems to be tremendous division, tremendous instability among the Nephite population writ large. And part of that, as you say, is a result of freedom, right? That there is a kind of, Mosiah has distributed power among the judges so it's not all concentrated in the monarchy. And there's also a kind of, a sort of religious pluralism, right? There's a kind of freedom of conscience. And this is great, this is wonderful, but what we see is that it can lead to social instability. And I think that's the real background for, sometimes the bewildering swings that we can see happening here in the book of Alma.

Matheson: Yeah, agreed.

Welch: As I was preparing for this, I read something that made a lot of sense to me. Here, the Book of Alma is the longest book in the Book of Mormon, as I mentioned, but it only covers 35 years. So it's this major swooping zoom-in to look at a very granular level. For whatever reason, Mormon has chosen to give us a close-up look at this period of Nephite history. And why might that be the case? He doesn't tell us directly, but we can speculate. There's a new urgency, I sense, especially in Alma, to the preaching of the coming of Christ. There's a sense that Christ is coming soon. Alma says again and again, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It's almost here, people. And so there's a kind of race going on. There's a race between the passage of time when the savior will come and the decline of Nephite civilization. Will the Nephites be able to hang on long enough to meet their savior or will they just catastrophically implode before then? So there's a lot of tension, I think, and maybe that's one of the reasons why Alma, I'm sorry, Mormon zooms in here, is to give us a look at these, kind of, competing trajectories and who's gonna win out. We're in the final stretches leading up to the arrival of the Savior and the stakes are very high.

Matheson: That makes a lot of sense to me. I'm glad you said that, because I think you're right about the kind of increased intensity with which Alma is preaching about Christ. I think it's also got to be important that now there is, at this point in Nephite history, there is a church institution to hold that Christian teaching. It's very clear that for Alma, preaching the coming of Christ, that's a big part of what he takes as his priesthood duty as a member of the holy order. And so he's going city to city to tell them that Christ is coming. And I wonder if there's something about not just the nearness of Christ's arrival, but also that there's now an institutional home for that teaching. And then of course that institutional home is so troubled by all of these social political pressures that, there's something about that nexus of a Christian teaching in an institutional home at a politically turbulent time that Mormon thinks is important for us.

Welch: Yeah. And then he gives us the comparison, of course, of the Lamanite church, which also is founded during the span of these chapters, and we'll talk about that more, I'm sure. But so let's talk about, as a whole, tell us about the structure of this first half of the Book of Alma. What do we see when we zoom out to the large scale?

Matheson: Yeah, I'm always torn about how to talk about a textual structure in an audio format. I feel like I need a whiteboard or a PowerPoint and a room full of students. From where I'm sitting, the best structural reader of the Book of Mormon that we have in this field is Dr. Joseph Spencer. And he has published what I think is a knockout, inarguable structure to the Book of Alma. I think he shows really convincingly that the whole book of Alma is broken into two halves and that Mormon is writing these two halves in parallel to one another. So I'll walk through these kind of at a broad scale and refer people to the article if they want to know more. It's very clear that both halves of Alma open with some sort of anti-Christ figure who comes among the Nephites. So in Alma chapter 1 that's Nihor and then he's paralleled in Alma chapter 30 by Korahor. These two antichrists who gain some group of followers, and then those followers dissent from the Nephites and start a war. Nehor's followers take the shape of the Amlicites in Alma 2 and 3. Korahor seems to have some influence among the Zoramites in Alma 31 and the following chapters. Immediately after both of those stories we get a series of three sermons from Alma. In the first half of the book it's three sermons to the cities of Zarahemla and Gideon and Ammonihah. In the second half it's sermons to his three sons, and there's a bunch of interesting parallels there. Then we get some interrupted journeys, and in the second half of both halves, so after Alma 17 in the one hand and after Alma 45 in the other, we turn to stories about Nephites and their brothers in a Lamanite court. So in the first half of the book this is Ammon. He goes over among Lamoni's family and converts them. The second half of the book has a similar story about a man named Amalikiah. So both of these Nephites who seek out a Lamanite king, in both cases the Lamanite king ends up dead or apparently dead. It looks a little dicey in Ammon's case. Ammon of course turns out to be innocent in the first half of the book. Amalikiah is a guilty Nephite. He's actually responsible for the death of the king, but both characters then interact with a Lamanite queen. Ammon, his intervention leads to converts who bury their weapons of war. Amalikiah does the opposite. He stirs up the Lamanites to take up weapons of war and then that launches the war chapters. And the turning point of both of those stories ends up being a very important parent-child relationship among the Lamanites. So we're told in Alma 19 that Abish is converted because of a vision of her father. So there's a father-daughter relationship. And then the war chapters, very famously, we have the stripling warriors faithful because they were taught by their mothers. So a mother-son relationship. There's stuff like this all through the Book of Alma, but very, very clear that Mormon is being quite deliberate in how he structures and tells this period of Nephite history. So the first cool thing about that parallel structure, I think, is that Mormon has thought long and hard about how to present this material and he's hammering it into a specific shape to teach us specific lessons. The second thing that I think is cool about it is that it's just a really great gift to anyone who is bored in their scripture study of the Book of Alma. You never have to be bored in Alma again. You just pick up the parallel chapters and see what you can tease out between them. There's a lot of fun scripture nuggets there for people.

Welch: Fascinating. So you could take the two, you know, the analogous portions from the first half and the second half of the Book of Alma, read them side by side, see how they're the same, see how they're different, and try to see if you can infer what Mormon might be saying here. Maybe he's making some kind of a comment on Nephite history or on what it means to be faithful or wicked or something like that.

Matheson: Yeah, exactly.

Welch: That’s fascinating. That is actually brilliant, and it's really gonna change the way that I read the second half of the Book of Alma coming up. It might be worth noting as well that these chapters have a very interesting temporal structure. They have a big flashback right in the middle of them. We have the missionary journeys of the Sons of Mosiah from Alma 17 to 27 are a flashback. And then we have a flashback within a flashback, the story of Aaron, who goes to preach in the Lamanite cities of Jerusalem and Middoni in Alma 21. So there's this extremely complex time structure in these chapters. Sometimes it can be a little confusing. I'll give a plug here for the Maxwell Institute's Study Edition of the Book of Mormon, edited by Grant Hardy, which does a really wonderful job of making very clear and lucid the time shifts in these chapters so that you can follow along and know where you are. As confusing as it can be, I will say, I'm awed by the literary coherence of the Book of Mormon. It has so many balls in the air at every moment in time, and it shows this very complex interwoven plotting. And it's extremely rare for it to drop one of its balls. Mormon was a genius and was able to keep all of these narrative strands going, keep his records straight. You can see the way in which the narrative voice slightly shifts. Sometimes there may be an embedded record from the first person perspective of Alma, for instance. And you can note that in the text, and that can kind of help us see what a complex task Mormon had in combining all of these records into not only a coherent narrative, but one that is, as you just said, so carefully and precisely structured. It's genuinely a work of literary art, and it's one of the reasons why I stand in awe of Mormon's accomplishment.

Matheson: Yeah, I agree. Could not agree more. And for me, the Book of Alma is the place that it shines especially.

Welch: Yeah, good. Okay, well let's talk about the characters. Just these 29 chapters have an extremely large cast of characters, we probably won't touch on all of them. Who are some of the key characters that readers should be aware of, and what can we know about them that'll help us to read this better?

Matheson: Yeah, so as you say there's so much narrative in Alma. The cast is just overwhelming. We cannot list everyone. So I thought I might list, kind of, four people or categories of people that set up trajectories that are important for the rest of the book. So of course we have Alma the Younger. He's the main source behind Mormon's abridgment here. He's the main sermonic voice in the book, so we get a lot of embedded documents and sermons from him. And I don't think it's a stretch to call him the main protagonist of this period of Nephite history. He is going to be the one that fuels all of the religious and theological interventions throughout the book. So he sets up, kind of, the religious trajectory of the book. The second character who seems to be very important is introduced in the very first chapter is Nehor. We often call him an antichrist. It's interesting to note he doesn't actually say anything about Christ one way or another, but he is a religious figure in the sense that everything he preaches seems to have some kind of religious bend to it. So he shows up preaching what he calls the Word of God. He's described in Alma 1 as bearing down against the Nephite church specifically, and one of his major points of contention on his platform is that he thinks clergy should be paid. So, Nehor is interesting to me because he's clearly not just some Book of Mormon bad guy in general. He is starting a rival religious order, and it's taking aim at Alma's church very directly. And the fact that he is so successful suggests that he's tapping into some pretty strong resentments against Nephite religion. And it's specifically those religious resentments that he taps into that continue to fuel the conflicts of the Book of Alma. So I named him because I think Nehor represents certain sociopolitical resentments among the Nephites that carry forward in the book.

Welch: I think, yeah, I think that's right. Do you think, is it also the case, Kim, that Nehor, so on the one hand, he preaches, right, this kind of priestcraft, right, that priests should be paid and that they should personally benefit and profit from the proclamation of the Word of God. And then kind of related to that is that the “word” that he preaches, word in quotation marks, is a kind of universal salvation, right, that God will save everybody regardless of what you have done. And you can see how that might be an attractive message to people who are enjoying their sinful lifestyle. So he's perfectly tailored his message of a kind of, heedless, crude form of universal salvation to his method, which is he wants to profit and benefit personally from the work from his flattering of the people.

Matheson: Yeah, that seems right. Yeah.

Welch: What else you got?

Matheson: We should mention, as you said, Ammon and the sons of Mosiah. They're hugely important to Nephite history and to the project of the Book of Alma. Their mission to Lamanite territory is really successful, and so that's also a major piece of what's going on in this book. They are responsible for the Book of Mormon's first major installment of Lamanite converts, which is important for representing the book's message of salvation, but also for the political history of the Nephites in this period, so there's a lot happening there. And we should mention too then the Lamanite cast of characters who figure in that conversion story. This is everyone from Lamoni to his wife, to his father, to Abish, to the whole Anti-Nephi-Lehies movement that grows out of it. The Anti-Nephi-Lehies are going to play a major role in Book of Mormon history militarily in the war chapters with their sons, but then also theologically again because they represent, they represent, as we know from the title page, the remnant of Israel, who stand in as the ones for whom this book is tailored and who this book stands to redeem. So they are kind of our antecedents for that symbolic role as well. Who would you add? That's what I've got.

Welch: Yeah, no, that's great. You know, I was really, on this reading through, I felt like I came to know the character of Ammon better. I felt like I've kind of had a bead on Alma the Younger, on who he is, you know, after his experience with the angel on the road and his rebirth and repentance. He is a man on a mission. He is marked in my mind and my reading by urgency and kind of relentlessness. You see him everywhere doing everything all the time. And there's, you can tell as he says over and over again, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And he is just driven to do what he can all the time. And I think it weighs on him. So there's a kind of gravity, I think, to the mind and the spirit of Alma the Younger. This time through reading Ammon, I was just so delighted by his character and his personality. We're told that he's wise, yet harmless. I think he shows great creativity. I think he seems to be a very effervescent and emotional person. He is susceptible. He's one of these who is overcome by the spirit to the point where he falls to the ground. So he's extremely open to the spirit. And that to me speaks of a temperament that is emotional and capable of great joy and great feeling. And so I really came to love Ammon and see him in contrast to Alma. Ammon as kind of effervescent light and open, Alma as grave and urgent and driven. And I really loved feeling like I got to know who Ammon was a little better this time through.

Matheson: Yeah, I wonder too how much of that is due to their different, kind of, institutional positions. Alma gets saddled with this brand new church at a very difficult time, and Ammon, he escapes institutional positions. He was set up to be a prince at an Ifight court, and he doesn't have to be king anymore. He can run off to a mission, which is certainly not all fun and games, but if the alternative is being king. I don't know, it might be nice to blow that off a little bit in a way that's a luxury that Alma does not have.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right there. Yeah, their histories and the expectations on them are very, very different. Great, good, okay. Well, let's talk about, before we jump into some specific passages that we love, let's talk about some of the overall themes. Again, this is just content packed and we could talk for hours about everything that Mormon wants to get in there, everything that Alma wants to say, everything that Ammon wants to say. What are some of the themes that stick out to you as most important in this first half of the Book of Alma?

Matheson: Definitely, I think we have to mention the church in this period of Nephite history because it is new This is something that is less than a generation old at this point and We're watching as Alma the younger has to sort out What even is this church that my father formed in the wilderness? It started out with 250 odd people just doing their own communitarian lifestyle out in the wilderness and then it came to Zarahemla where now it's being folded into a whole political system. And we're watching him sort out what this church even is, how to understand it, how to regulate it, how to help it navigate social and political crises when there are members and converts on the order of thousands. How do you handle that when you're just a tiny fledgling institution? So all through the book of Alma, we watch the church undergo a series of crises and a series of revisions and changes, and we watch this one man have to wrestle with what a church is and how to negotiate an institution under conditions of constant change. They have this core doctrinal message, but the institution itself has to keep shifting. In something like the process of continuing revelation that we know, in our own dispensation the church has undergone a variety of forms and different manuals and different organizational rules and procedures, all to help embody the Christian message, the gospel message, in the form that is appropriate to the time at hand. So I think there's a lot we can learn here as readers about negotiating those institutional changes. So I find that really interesting.

Welch: Yeah.

Matheson: I think too, you'd already mentioned this, but the centrality of Christ and His coming as one of the doctrinal messages that sets Alma's church apart from its rivals on the Nephite landscape. We watch Him relentlessly preach Christ as He goes around putting the church in order, and we can watch them kind of in real time as readers how that Christian message impacts people and their society, in addition to giving us a lot of lessons for our own Christian discipleship along the way. There are lessons there for what it looks like to preach Christ and defend Christ at a time when he's not known publicly or not popular publicly. That's in here as well. And I guess the third theme is one I've already mentioned, and that's, it's something about politics and political history and the way that can inevitably complicate and pressure a life of faith. There's so much political history in the background of these pages. I find it very compelling and inspiring actually because of the, it gives real verity to this book. I just, I have, this is where I have a hard time imagining Joseph Smith really being able to come up with this kind of thing. It's, there's so much realism and so much coherence to the political story tucked away in these very, very subtle details, but with such consistency throughout this book. But then as well, there are lessons in it for us in a very politically polarized time for how to negotiate those, how to continue being Christian disciples in the face of political upheaval. That's also a key theme of Alma, I think.

Welch: Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, I really agree that the church, what theologians would call ecclesiology, right, the study of what a church is and how it functions and how it can become, truly, the body of Christ is a really important part of this. And as I see it, you have a kind of contrast. You have, you know, Alma's sincere, but not always successful, attempts to shelter, protect, and nurture along the true church of Christ. And when I say true, I mean true in that it truly embodies the Christian character and the Christian spirit. And it seems like some of the things that are brought out here are that Christ's church shares its property. This idea of equality is very important, both temporal equality. As we know very famously, Nephite society is constantly stratified by socioeconomic class and one of their great sins is towards materialism and greed. By contrast, within the church, there is supposed to be a kind of equity of material resources. And it's also important that there be a kind of spiritual equality. It seems like Alma is trying hard to help people understand that although he is a priest and he has a holy calling, all people are esteemed by the Lord as one. And nobody is spiritually inferior to another person. We distinguish ourselves solely on the basis of our faith and our obedience and our trust in God. So those two kinds of equality, it seems like, are really evident in Alma's vision for what the church should be. And then, contrasting on the flip side, you see these characters who twist and pervert and corrupt these structures. So you have Nehor, of course, who practices priestcraft. The opposite of what the true church should be doing, he is trying to get gain for himself, and he is specifically elevating himself as kind of spiritually superior. And it seems to me in a similar way, you see the lawyers at Ammonihah, who in the same way are trying to manipulate the law, which in itself is kind of an inherently good body of precepts, but they manipulate it for their own gain and to set themselves up against, you know, above the other people around them. So that seems like an important thing that Mormon wants us to see, the equality and the simplicity that should characterize a church that truly embodies the spirit of Christ.

Matheson: Yeah.

Welch: Another thing I noticed is just how often we find references to trees throughout Alma's preaching. And of course, we kind of miss the most famous of Alma's parables of trees, which is in Alma 32, we’ll be there soon. But the tree of life shows up again and again and again in Alma's preaching. This was clearly a central image for him. He knew Lehi's dream, it's evident that he was familiar with those small plates and he was, he himself drew sustenance from the prophetic vision of the shining fruit. And then he weaves that into this beautiful theology of Christ as the good shepherd who is leading us to that nourishing tree. That's a theme that is very powerful to me personally and I loved seeing it show up again and again, in almost every one of Nephi's sermons, sorry, Alma's sermons in these chapters, we see him making reference to that Tree of Life.

Matheson: Yeah, that's beautiful. And of course, quite resonant with how Nephi understands the Tree of Life, that for him the Tree of Life is associated with the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother. Yeah, that's lovely.

Welch: Yes, exactly, right, good. Okay, well, Kim, will you share with us, let's get down to the good part now, which is where we're really in the scriptures, we're reading them, share with us a passage that is powerful to you, that has taught you and moved you as a reader.

Matheson: Yeah, you bet. Well, I have two, if you will indulge me, but one is shorter than the other. But I will save the short one. One is just kind of a verse. But I want to start actually in Alma 19. I love Alma 19. Who doesn't? This is the story of the Lamanite queen and the conversion of Lamoni's household. It's significant, just kind of culturally and politically in the Book of Mormon, for being one of our few glimpses into what it's like among the Lamanites, into how they arrange their domestic environment. So that's fascinating on its own terms. For me, I find Alma 19 very meaningful because I find a series of lessons on faith from the women, from the Lamanite queen and from Abish in this story. I think they are two prime examples of faith in the Book of Mormon. And I think, in fact, they are explicitly so. The text suggests that we read the story this way. When early in the chapter, the queen decides to trust Ammon, he issues this almost hyperbolic, over-the-top characterization of her. In verse 10, he says, “Blessed art thou because of thy exceeding faith; I say unto thee, woman, there has not been such great faith among all the people of the Nephites.” Which is part of just the effervescence of Ammon, as you were describing it. But it also suggests that if we want to look for a prime example of faith in the Book of Mormon, we should look here. Ammon here names this woman as the Book of Mormon's paradigm of faith. So I have, I think, three lessons that I draw from these women. The first starts with the queen. And when she first calls Ammon in, in this very politically tense situation, her husband is comatose. That's creating all kinds of drama and tension in the court. She tells Ammon, she kind of lists all of the sources that she's been consulting. In verse four and five she says, the servants of my husband have made it known unto me that thou art a prophet of a holy God, that thou hast power to do many mighty works in his name. And she says, if this is the case, I would that you should go in and see my husband, because he's been laid up in his bed for a couple days. And then, she again, she lists more people who are saying different things about the scenario. Some say that he's not dead, others say that he is dead and that he stinketh, that he ought to be placed in the sepulcher and so on. She just spends two verses listing all of the different groups of people she's talked to. She's been talking to servants, she's been hearing reports, she's been polling people. In short, she has been a really good intellectual steward. She is surveying the opinions and perspectives of others in addition to relying on her own senses and her own reasoning. I think we see here a blend of being open and listening, but also carefully sifting the data. And so the first lesson on faith that I gained from this queen is that there is nothing naive or gullible about this woman. Faith then is not a kind of naive blind trust. It's the kind of thing that is built on very careful attention to data while also keeping an open mind. The thing that I tell my students is that faith is less like believing in Santa Claus and more like the kind of thing that shows up in a hospital room. You talk to doctors and you get second opinions and you take your medications. And when it comes right down to it, by someone's hospital bed, you're open to miracles as well. So I'm really impressed with her intellectual stewardship in addition to her trust. The second lesson, kind of still centered on many of those verses, is that despite being deeply embroiled in the evidence and the data, the queen also recognizes that there comes a moment when you need to stop sifting and make a decision. She is not permanently sifting evidence. At some point, you have to commit. And although we do need to be attuned to the evidence grounded in the pragmatic realities of the world, we need to be aware that on religious questions, the data will never ultimately compel us one way or the other. Faith is conditioned by a situation where you don't know, where you have to commit yourself in a choice at some point. And that's what the queen does. In verse 9, she says, “I've had no witness, save thy word and the word of our servants; nevertheless I believe that it shall be according as thou hast said." She acknowledges in verse 9 that the evidence is not fully compelling one way or the other, but she decides to trust anyway. And I'm just so moved by that. And then my third lesson on faith. This time comes from Abish in verse 17. This is the verse when she's watching everyone around her be overcome with the Spirit. And as soon as people start dropping, I'm just so intrigued that Abish sees that as an opportunity. She's immediately aware that God could be in this. And so from Abish I learned that faith looks a lot like keeping your eyes peeled for the potential and opportunities of a situation. It's a sensitivity to the fact that God could be in anything, that a miracle can always be right around the corner, and that in fact reality is available for sudden miraculous change. If we are people of faith, I think we are committed to the idea that God could break in at any moment. And as a result, then, we need to be attuned to the potentials of a situation. So to make that more concrete, when the church made the shift to two hours on Sundays instead of three-hour meetings, I think Abish-like faith would ask, okay, so what might God be doing in that? What is the potential of two-hour church? How does that change what I can accomplish in my family or my ward? Or all the changes we've seen to the missionary program over the past several years. What might God be doing in that? How does that change how I prepare my children for missions? How does that change how I interact with ward missionaries and so on? I think faith means looking for the divine potential in every situation because if we really believe that God could break in at any moment and perform a miracle, that changes how you show up. And I think Abish was attuned to that kind of potential and she was ready to seize an opportunity that God put in her path because she was looking for it. So, three lessons of faith from Lamanite women.

Welch: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, those are fantastic. You think about the loneliness, the loneliness that Abish must have experienced over all those years. She had been converted for many years, we're told, but without apparently anybody to share that faith with. She had kind of a church of one, just a private religious experience there among the Lamanites. And here, as you say, at this moment, she sees the opportunity to begin to build the body of Christ among her own people and among the Lamanites. And she's going to jump at every opportunity to make that happen. As you say, it seems like the eagerness and the readiness that she shows to respond to the possibility that God is in this moment is really striking. I love— You know, I think it's really, really significant, what you read. This is in Alma 19, verse 16. Is it? I don't have my glasses on. No, verse 10, sorry. Blessed art thou because of thy exceeding faith, I say unto thee, woman, there has not been such great faith among all the people of the Nephites. So in one sense, this is the beginning of the great ironic shift that we're seeing here in… between the Nephites and the Lamanites, this great reversal in which the Nephites, who have been the elites, they have been the stewards of the prophecies, the stewards of the brass plates, they've been given every spiritual advantage, are going to squander it. And the Lamanites instead, who have been deprived of the brass plates and led astray by kind of the errors of the founders of their people, they are gonna show that they are receptive to the word of Christ, and not only receptive, but when they receive it, we're told on several occasions, they are firm in the faith. Whereas Nephite faith is constantly wavering and falling away, Lamanite faith is firm. So this theme of reversal is one that runs throughout the whole Book of Mormon, right? We see it on the small scale here in this very chapter, that beautiful moment where the queen is lying on the ground, slain in the spirit, overcome by the spirit, and Abish stands over her, and she extends her hand and raises the queen. So there's a reversal of status on the micro scale between the queen and her servant that's playing out on the macro scale in the reversal of spiritual position between the Nephites and the Lamanites that we're seeing the very beginnings of right here. And this is all a part of the gospel of Christ, right? This is all a part of the Christian message that the last will be first and the first will be last. That to save our life, we have to give it away and give it up. The gospel of Christ is for the poor in spirit, not for the rich in spirit. And so in order to receive it, we have to voluntarily

put ourself in that position. We have to relinquish any privileges that we may be holding that stand as a barrier between us and the Spirit, us and the Word of God. So I love how on both the macro and micro scale, we see kind of the reversal that Nephi had foreseen way at the very beginning, right? From the beginning of the Book of Mormon, as we read it today, we've known that this was going to happen. And we've seen that the records of the of the first will become last and the records of the last will become first. And here we're seeing it become real and it's really exciting.

Matheson: Yeah, beautiful.

Welch: Can I share one more theme that really struck me this time around, reading these chapters? And it's something I had never really noticed before. One thing we haven't touched on much is that there's a lot of violence in these chapters. We start off at the very, very beginning with this horrendous battle between the Nephites and the Amlicites. And we see Alma slay Amlici in hand-to-hand combat and we're told that the River Sidon is choked with the bodies of the dead and it's this horrific scene. Of course in Ammonihah we have this horrific traumatic scene of the believing women and children being martyred and burned, and Alma and Amulek being forced to stand on and watch this happen. And we see the pathos in Amulek wanting to stop it and Alma realizing that they can't. And then here at the very end of these chapters, it's funny, like you can just kind of pass over these things and not really even notice them, but we're told that the greatest slaughter that had ever yet occurred among the Nephites happens right here at the end of these chapters. I think in Alma 28, a tremendous battle. So this really challenges me. Of course, I think we are meant to respond to these moments of death with horror and with grief ourselves. But the reality is that for, and Alma articulates this, for ancient peoples and for Book of Mormon peoples, death wasn't the worst thing that could happen. Death was a part of life and it was something to be mourned, but it really wasn't the worst thing, and especially if you die with a hope in Christ. And Alma says this specifically, yes, of the women and children who are being burned, he says, yes, they're dying, but they're dying with faith in Christ, and we know that they're going to a better place. I think sometimes for us modern readers that can hit us the wrong way, it can hit me the wrong way sometimes. I guess I can see how easily, maybe, that idea could be exploited or could be used for ill purposes. Nevertheless, as you have said before, Kim, we don't come to the scriptures just to have our own sensibilities confirmed. If we do, what's the point? Why come to them at all? We should come to the scriptures ready to listen to what the prophets want to say and what they have, what they have to say, what they've been given to say. So this is a particular point on which I am challenged by the message of the prophets in the Book of Mormon. And for me, it's an ongoing process of coming to terms with Alma's message here, that death is not the worst thing. Yet at the same time, I was so moved here in chapter 28, just at the end of chapter 28, about the mourning, that, the description of the mourning of the widows and husbands, this is in chapter 28 verse five. “Yea, the cry of widows mourning for their husbands, and also of fathers mourning for their sons, and the daughter for the brother, yea, the brother for the father; and thus the cry of mourning was heard among all of them, mourning for their kindred who had been slain. And now surely this was a sorrowful day; yea, a time of solemnity, and a time of much fasting and prayer.” So it was very powerful to me that even for Alma, and this is likely it's Mormon here, Mormon who himself has seen untold atrocities and slaughter, and he has hope in Christ, and death is not the worst thing can happen, but mourning is real and it's appropriate, and there's a place for grief, and to express profound grief and sadness is not to deny our faith in Christ. It's not to minimize our faith in the resurrection. It's just to respond at a deeply human level to the love that we have, the love that is itself a part of our divine nature. And then I see a kind of blessing here on the work of grief and the work of mourning.

Matheson: Oh, that's really lovely. I agree so much about the importance of keeping the resurrection in mind. I think so much of the way that we moderns are taught to do our ethical reasoning is from a secular frame, where death and suffering and pain are the worst evils. But if you believe in the resurrection, that's going to change the moral calculus that we do. And yet nonetheless, as you say, the gospel includes the admonition to mourn with those that mourn, and even right there in Alma 14, as Alma and Amulek are witnessing the martyrdom at Ammonihah, several Book of Mormon scholars have pointed out that over the course of the text, you watch as Alma falls silent. He stops giving answers. He stops giving explanation. And I see that in part as a gesture precisely of the kind of mourning that you're pointing us to there. That's really beautiful.

Welch: I love that. That's so true. And so you're thinking right after in the trial, right, when Alma and Amulek are in prison and then through their trial, Alma is conspicuously silent and he won't respond. And part of what might be happening there, just as you say, and as others have suggested, is that he is going through his own profound sense of, period of, mourning and of grief and of trauma for what he's just witnessed.

Matheson: Yeah, yeah. Well, since you pointed us to the end of our text block, can I sneak in one extra thing at the beginning? This is from Alma 5. I've recently stumbled on a new kind of, a new lesson that has been meaningful to me from Alma chapter 5. On my latest read through, I was struck by the way that Alma frames the Christian message at the end of his sermon in Zarahemla. This is Alma 5 verse 48, where he says unto the people: “I say unto you, that I know of myself that whatsoever I shall say unto you, concerning that which is to come, is true; and I say unto you, that I know that Jesus Christ shall come, yea, the Son, the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace, and mercy, and truth. And behold, it is he that cometh to take away the sins of the world, yea, the sins of every man who steadfastly believeth on his name." This is kind of the word about Christ and his coming that Alma sneaks in at the end in Zarahemla. Typically when I have read this verse in the past, I've always been a little bit underwhelmed because it just feels so short and so obvious. Obvious to me, as someone who has been raised with the gospel, it just feels like a very straightforward, bare bones announcement of Jesus. He's gonna come and he's gonna take away the sins of the world. And I've always felt just kind of deflated that, like that's it? What more do you have? You're a prophet, tell us more, tell us more. But it struck me recently that we should not discount it so quickly, as I have been prone to do. What Alma is giving in this little short testimony is the Gospel. It's the good news of Christ. And I'm reminded of something that the pastor Timothy Keller once said, that it is important to remember that the Gospel at the end of the day is good news, not good advice. He talks about how we're prone as Christians to treat the gospel as good theology or good feelings or good experiences or a good story and it's not, it's good news, it's not about what we do about something that we're supposed to do in the future news is something that someone else has done and it's telling us what has happened in the past I think it's important to keep clear that the scriptures in a lot of ways are less about telling us what we should do and far more about telling us what god has already done for us. Christianity is not about self-improvement fundamentally. You can improve, you should, but fundamentally it's not a place to get inspiration and guidance for your life. Christianity is a community of people who believe the report that Jesus came down into history, took on a body, and saved us. And you get started with Christianity by believing that report. And so I'm actually quite glad to be challenged by Alma's announcement here, because I think he's giving us the core of the gospel. The gospel in many ways is less about advice for our lives, so that's in there, and it's about responding to God's intervention in history on our behalf. So I trust that there are blessings for living the gospel. I experience them. But even if I never saw a single blessing, and even if the gospel made my life harder rather than easier, and on some days it kind of does, I don't know that I should care. I'm not in this gospel for an easy life. I'm not in this gospel for good advice. I'm in this gospel because Jesus is the Christ and he came into the world to save me. That's true and that demands a response. So I'm really grateful to Alma for giving us good news in verse 48, even though I spent so many years craving good advice. The news is the gospel.

Welch: Ha ha. That is wonderful, Kim, and it's so powerful again in the context of Alma's own experience. He had that message hand delivered to him in an extremely painful and difficult way, but he received it. He opens his heart and he received it, and it didn't make his life easier. As I've been talking about, he is a man of sorrows in some ways, I suspect. And his life was made infinitely heavier by the responsibilities he was then given. But he couldn't deny what he knew. The good news had come into his heart. He had received it. And he was going to live out his life in faithfulness to that message. Thank you so much for helping us to get to know Alma better and for giving us an amazing tour through these chapters of the first half of the Book of Alma. Thank you Kim Matheson for being with us and join us next time as we dive into the scholarship on Alma 1 through 29. Bye bye.