Alma 12: Antionah Asks About a Flaming Sword

Alma 12 gets remembered for the second death, and I think that's the wrong thing to remember it for. The phrase turns up in verse 16 and again in verse 32, and verse 36 calls it the last death. Most of what sits between those verses is Alma answering a man who asked about a flaming sword, and the answer runs longer than the warning does.

I'll give the second death its due first, because the verses are blunt and people argue about them. After that I want to spend most of the post on the man with the sword question, since I think he's the reason the chapter goes the way it goes.

What is the second death in Alma 12?

Alma defines the term himself, which doesn't happen as often as you'd like, and he does it in a single sentence that I'd rather you read than have me paraphrase.

And now behold, I say unto you then cometh a death, even a second death, which is a spiritual death; then is a time that whosoever dieth in his sins, as to a temporal death, shall also die a spiritual death; yea, he shall die as to things pertaining unto righteousness.

Alma 12:16

So it is a death "as to things pertaining unto righteousness." Verse 32 uses nearly the same words for it, "an everlasting death as to things pertaining unto righteousness." Nobody in this chapter dies in the body twice. The first death is the one Alma names in verse 24 as the temporal death, and when verse 36 says "the last death, as well as the first" it's counting those two.

Verse 17 reaches for a lake of fire and brimstone, and verse 18 says the people in that state "shall be as though there had been no redemption made" and that they "cannot die, seeing there is no more corruption." That last clause is a hard one, and what helped me was finding that Amulek used the same wording at the end of Alma 11, in verse 45, about the raised body, which "can no more see corruption." I take Alma to be saying that the body they're raised in can't wear out and give them a way out by dying again. The verse doesn't spell that out and I won't pretend it does.

If you only have a minute with the chapter I'd point you at verse 15. The people in the awful state of verse 14, the ones who wish the rocks and mountains would fall on them, still end up acknowledging "that all his judgments are just" and, in the same breath, "that he is merciful unto the children of men." Verse 15 goes on to say he "has all power to save every man that believeth on his name and bringeth forth fruit meet for repentance." Those are the same people who have the most reason to leave that part out.

Who is Antionah, and why does Alma agree with him?

Verse 20 gives him one line of introduction: "one Antionah, who was a chief ruler among them." The text gives us nothing about his tone, and I've heard him read as a heckler and I've heard him read as an honest man with a real question. I lean toward honest, mostly because of how Alma treats him.

Zeezrom goes first, and he gets four verses of exposure, 3 through 6, for the plan he had to deceive the people. In verse 8 he "began to inquire of them diligently" and from that point he gets answers where he'd been getting rebukes. He was already trembling when Alma 11 ended with Amulek's account of the resurrection, in verse 46, and he trembles "more exceedingly" in verse 7 here. Antionah never gets any exposure at all. He comes forward and says this:

What does the scripture mean, which saith that God placed cherubim and a flaming sword on the east of the garden of Eden, lest our first parents should enter and partake of the fruit of the tree of life, and live forever? And thus we see that there was no possible chance that they should live forever.

Alma 12:21

I'd have asked him the same thing.

It's an argument, and a decent one: he's taken a scripture, drawn a conclusion from it, and pointed the conclusion at Alma: you're promising people they'll rise and never die again, and the old account says the door was shut on exactly that. Alma's reply is the first half of verse 22, "This is the thing which I was about to explain," which is not how a man sounds when he's defending himself.

He doesn't tell Antionah the premise is wrong, and agrees with it instead: the way to the tree was closed, and Adam did fall, so that "all mankind became a lost and fallen people." Then he turns the argument around by asking what would have happened if the door had been open.

And now behold, I say unto you that if it had been possible for Adam to have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life at that time, there would have been no death, and the word would have been void, making God a liar, for he said: If thou eat thou shalt surely die.

Alma 12:23

Verse 26 gives the other side, that they "would have been forever miserable, having no preparatory state." Antionah reads the sword as a door shut against life. Alma reads it as the thing that makes the rest of the chapter possible, because without death there's no space in which anything can be prepared. Whether it persuades you is a separate matter, but it does answer the question that was asked, and that's more than I can say for most replies in most arguments I've been part of. Verse 27 then turns on six words, "But behold, it was not so," and what follows is the appointment that men "must die; and after death, they must come to judgment." Death in Alma's telling is something decided on purpose, by God, with the end in view. It's a hard thing to hear at a funeral and I'm not suggesting anyone say it there. Read slowly on an ordinary Friday it makes a kind of sense I can't quite argue with.

What does "a space granted" mean in verse 24?

The featured verse above is the one I'd mark, and the phrase I keep stopping on is "a space granted unto man in which he might repent." The nearest thing I have to it is a man named Marv Tolliver. Marv was an instructor at the small field south of the valley where I trained to fly helicopters, with something like nine thousand hours and a habit of saying nothing for long stretches. He had a student ahead of me, a young guy named Colby Rask, twenty-four or so, who flew like he'd memorized the book, which he had.

I wasn't in the aircraft for this. I got it from Colby afterward on the folding chairs outside the office, and he told it a little sheepishly.

A couple thousand feet over empty ground, Marv rolled the throttle to idle and said the engine was out. Colby knew the procedure cold. What he did was look at the tach, then at Marv, then back at the tach, while Marv sat with his hands in his lap and didn't say a word. Colby figured it was two seconds. He said it felt a good deal longer. Then he did what he knew and they came down, and Marv had him do it eleven more times before lunch.

Verse 24 is about that gap between the trouble arriving and the work starting. Death comes upon mankind and then, in the next breath, a space is granted, and the second clause is a gift of time. The comparison doesn't hold all the way, since Colby's engine was never out and Alma isn't describing a drill. He says plainly that the time is for preparing "to meet God" and for "that endless state" after the resurrection, so nobody gets to treat it as practice. What carries over is smaller. There's room before the end, and somebody made it.

People shorten this verse to "life is a test." The chapter says "probationary state," and in the same verse it says "a time to prepare," and I think those two phrases are doing more than the shortcut allows. Nobody prepares for a test the way Alma means it. You prepare for a meeting or a trip or somebody arriving, and the verse puts the "to meet God" part right in the sentence.

Do the commandments come before or after the plan?

The commandments come after, which you can see if you read verses 27 to 32 in order: death and judgment are appointed, angels are sent to talk with people, God "made known unto them the plan of redemption" in verse 30, and only then, in verse 31, "he gave commandments unto men." Verse 32 says it again so nobody misses it: "Therefore God gave unto them commandments, after having made known unto them the plan of redemption."

A lot of us tell it the other way round, with the rules first and the rescue as the repair after we break them. Alma tells it with the plan underneath from the start (verse 25 says it was "laid from the foundation of the world"), and the commandments land on people who already have it. That changes how the penalty in verse 32 sounds, because it's attached to people who were told about the plan and about mercy first. I'm not claiming more than the order of the verses, but the order is there and it's easy to hurry past on the way to the lake of fire.

Where does Alma stop saying "you"?

Alma starts with "thou" for Zeezrom and widens it in verse 5 ("what I say unto thee I say unto all"). Through verse 36 it's "ye" to the whole crowd, and the warning there is plain: "if ye will harden your hearts ye shall not enter into the rest of the Lord." Verse 37 changes the pronoun. "Seeing we know these things, and they are true, let us repent." After that it's "us" and "our" until the chapter ends, and I'd say the man who asked about the sword is somewhere in that "us" too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the second death in Alma 12?

A spiritual death, in Alma's words dying "as to things pertaining unto righteousness" (verse 16). People sometimes read it as a second physical death or as ceasing to exist, and verse 18 rules out both, since the people in that state "cannot die."

Who is Antionah in the Book of Mormon?

A chief ruler who appears in verses 20 and 21 and then is gone. I wouldn't build a character out of him, and the text doesn't tell us his tone. What he asks is the useful part, because it's the question a careful reader of Genesis 3 would raise.

What are the chains of hell in Alma 12:11?

Alma tells you in the verse itself, where people who harden their hearts get less of the word until they "know nothing concerning his mysteries," and then they're taken captive and led "down to destruction." The chapter ties the chains to a hardened heart, not to a location, so I'd read them that way.

Does Alma 12:31 teach that people become gods?

I'd leave it where Alma left it, since "becoming as gods, knowing good from evil" is a phrase inside a sentence about the first transgression and being placed in a state to act. He doesn't build anything on it in the next verses and I'd be careful about building on it for him.

— D.