Many widows and their daughters, Mormon explains, remain in
Sherrizah. The Lamanites carried away some provisions, and Zenephi’s army has
carried awy much of the rest. They must wander to find food. Many die.
Here again we see the Nephites have turned away from the
responsibilities given them by the Lord.
“Now there were a great many widows [among the people of
Limhi], and they did cry mightily from day to day, for a great fear of the
Lamanites had come upon them.
“Now there was a great number of women, more than there was
of men; therefore king Limhi commanded that every man should impart to the
support of the widows and their children, that they might not perish with
hunger; and this they did because of the greatness of their number that had
been slain” (Mosiah 21:10, 17).
This charge remains with us to this day. “And the storehouse
shall be kept by the consecrations of the church; and widows and orphans shall
be provided for” (D&C 83:6).
Mormon’s army is weak. The Lamanite armies are between him
and Sherrizah. Many fled to the army of Aaron[1]
and they victims to his army’s brutality.
Mormon is appalled by the Nephite’s depravity. There is no
order and mercy. He is only one man and he can no longer enforce the commands
he gives his army.
“[The Nephites] ‘began to cry,’ because ‘no man could keep
that which was his own, for the thieves, and the robbers, and the murderers,
and the magic art, and the witchcraft which was in the land’ (Mormon 2:10).
Everyone was robbing everyone else and using the black arts to do it. Indeed, ‘there
were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics; and the power of the evil one was
wrought upon all the face of the land’ (Mormon 1:19).
“During this time, spiritual blindness, atē,[2]
deepened, and the people began to ‘boast in their own strength’ (Mormon 3:9).
They launched a war of aggression and ‘every heart was hardened, so that they
delighted in the shedding of blood continually’ (Mormon 4:11). The people
became utterly blind to the destruction which their acts were causing. Their
depravity, freed from any restraint of the Spirit, led to the full expression
of the power of atē, and the people sank to depths never before found ‘among all
the children of Lehi’ or ‘even among all the house of Israel’ (Mormon 4:12). Mormon recognized that they were ‘without
order and without mercy … without principle, and past feeling’ (Moroni 9:18,
20).”[3]
The Nephites have become a brutal people. They spare neither
the old nor young. They delight in their evil and depraved actions. While this occurs,
the suffering of Nephite women and children exceeds everything, “yea, tongue
cannot tell, neither can it be written” (Moroni 9:19).
Mormon will no longer dwell upon the horrible acts of the
war. The Nephites are wicked, without principle. They are past feeling. They
are far more wicked than the Lamanites. Throughout their history, the Nephites
had been warned about the consequences of their wickedness. They sinned
knowingly. Their sin was more serious in the eyes of God because they knew
better. “And thus we see that the Nephites did begin to dwindle in unbelief,
and grow in wickedness and abominations, while the Lamanites began to grow
exceedingly in the knowledge of their God; yea, they did begin to keep his
statutes and commandments, and to walk in truth and uprightness before him.” (Helaman
6:34).
“[T]he 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. 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).’”[4]
[1] “And now, the Lamanites had a king, and his name was
Aaron; and he came against us with an army of forty and four thousand. And
behold, I withstood him with forty and two thousand. And it came to pass that I
beat him with my army that he fled before me. And behold, all this was done,
and three hundred and thirty years had passed away” (Mormon 2:9).
[2] “The
word captures the idea that people—due to overweening ambition, the lust for
power, and a desire for the praise of the world—could actually suffer delusions,
deceptions, and infatuations sent by the gods. These allowed individuals to
bring about their own ruin. These individuals were, therefore, actively
involved in bringing about their own downfall. Once the gods decreed against a
person it was impossible for that person to resist impending doom.” (Draper –
see footnote 3)
[3] Hubris and Atē:
A Latter-day Warning from the Book of Mormon, Richard D. Draper, Maxwell
Institute website.
[4] Review
of El Libro de Mormon ante la crítica, Terrence L. Szink, Maxwell Institute
website.
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