Moroni tells us his people are no more. The Lamanites have
hunted them from city-to-city and place-to-place. “[G]reat has been their fall;
yea, great and marvelous is the destruction of my people, the Nephites” (Mormon
8:7).
The Lamanites, no longer having the Nephites to fight,
turned against each other. Their war is one round of murder and bloodshed. Who
knows when it will end?
Nephi had foreseen this day.
“I beheld, and saw the people of the seed of my brethren
that they had overcome my seed; and they went forth in multitudes upon the face
of the land.
“And I saw them gathered together in multitudes; and I saw
wars and rumors of wars among them; and in wars and rumors of wars I saw many
generations pass away.
“And the angel said unto me: Behold these shall dwindle in
unbelief.
“And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled
in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of
idleness and all manner of abominations” (1 Nephi 12:20-23).
“In fact, the reason the Nephites were allowed to be
destroyed was because they had sinned against the knowledge of the gospel while
the Lamanites were ignorant of the truth (again because of the ‘traditions of
the fathers’) and thus were less culpable and allowed to remain on the land.8
Nibley has written concerning this situation:
“‘Every Latter-day Saint knows that
[the Book of Mormon] is a tale of Nephites versus Lamanites, conveniently
classified as the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys. In a book called Since Cumorah, I pointed out that a line
drawn between the two peoples does not automatically separate the righteous
from the wicked at all. Far from it—the Lamanites were often the good guys and
the Nephites the bad guys; and they had a way of shifting back and forth from
one category to the other with disturbing frequency. In the end, as Mormon
sadly observes in letters to his son, it is a toss-up as to which of the two is
the worse. Cumorah was no showdown between good and evil; it was not even a
contest to pick the winner, for while the Nephites did get wiped out, the
Lamanites went right on wiping each other out, “and no one knoweth the end of
the war” (Mormon 8:8).’”[1]
Moroni intends to end his words concerning the wars and the
Lamanites. Only the Lamanites and robbers live upon the face of the land. “And
it came to pass that the robbers of Gadianton did spread over all the face of
the land; and there were none that were righteous save it were the disciples of
Jesus. And gold and silver did they lay up in store in abundance, and did traffic
in all manner of traffic” (4 Nephi 1:46).
“Within Mormon’s lifetime, he reported that ‘robbers’ were a
component of the Nephites’ enemies as much as were the ‘Lamanites.’ It is not
clear whether those robbers constituted a single body or several. Even before
the Nephites left their Zarahemla homeland, ‘the land was filled with robbers
and with Lamanites’ (Mormon 2:8) … After his father had perished, Moroni
observed ‘there are none save it be the Lamanites and robbers’ upon the land
(Mormon 8:9). It is clear that those robbers had existed as organized
sociopolitical entities apart from the Lamanites for well over a century
(compare 4 Nephi 1:41–47).”[2]
[1] Review
of Josué Sánchez, trans. and ed., El Libro de Mormon ante la crítica. Salt
Lake City, UT: Publishers, 1992. xxiii + 481 pp., with bibliographies and
appendices, reviewed by Terrence L. Szink.
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