Mosiah 28: The Sons Leave and the King Reaches for the Plates

Melissa asked me last night, while she was drying the dishes and I was finding the place in my scriptures for this morning, "Isn't that the chapter where the sons go off and then the king just starts talking about plates?" I said yes, and that I'd been reading it that way for most of my life. She said, "Well, it does seem like two different chapters." Fair enough. Nine verses about four young men who want to preach to the Lamanites, then a hard left into gold plates, a bow with two stones set in it and a record that runs back to Adam.

I took it out to the picnic table at the cabin this morning to see whether the seam was really there. It is, and it's one verse.

Why does Mosiah 28 jump from the missionaries to the plates?

Verse 10 is a single sentence, "Now king Mosiah had no one to confer the kingdom upon, for there was not any of his sons who would accept of the kingdom," and everything after it hangs from that. Mormon is telling you what the king did about the hole his sons left, and what he did was gather up everything he'd kept (the plates of brass, the plates of Nephi, the plates of gold Limhi's people had found) and decide who would carry it next.

The timing is loose. Verse 11 has him taking up the records "after having translated" the gold ones, so the translating could have been finished long before the sons walked out, and Mormon is only telling it here because it ends in a handoff. The chapter doesn't say, and I'd be guessing if I picked.

What it does say is why he translated at all. "This he did because of the great anxiety of his people," verse 12 says, "for they were desirous beyond measure to know concerning those people who had been destroyed." Limhi's forty-three explorers had already come home from a land "covered with bones of men, and of beasts" (Mosiah 8:8), so Mosiah's people knew there had been a civilization and that it ended badly. They wanted the rest of it, and the king gave them work to do on it instead of reassurance.

The two "perhaps" in verse 2

Read verse 2 slowly and count the word "perhaps," because it turns up twice. They want to go up to the land of Nephi "that perhaps they might bring them to the knowledge of the Lord their God" and "that perhaps they might cure them of their hatred towards the Nephites." The wish list around those words is wide: that the Lamanites would know the Lord, that they'd see the wrong in their fathers' ways, that they'd rejoice, that the two peoples would be friendly and that "there should be no more contentions in all the land." And these were men who'd been working against the church, so they had no way of being sure any of it would take.

Verse 3 gives the reason for all of it, and strategy has nothing to do with it. They "could not bear that any human soul should perish." Verse 4 is Mormon's own sentence about them, and it says they were "the very vilest of sinners" and that the Lord "saw fit in his infinite mercy to spare them." I wouldn't build much on a superlative the narrator chose. The part I'd keep is the end of that verse, where they "suffered much anguish of soul" and feared they'd "be cast off forever," because it explains verse 5. They didn't ask once. They "did plead with their father many days."

Then the king does something I'd have skipped if I were him. He goes to ask. Here's the answer:

And the Lord said unto Mosiah: Let them go up, for many shall believe on their words, and they shall have eternal life; and I will deliver thy sons out of the hands of the Lamanites.

Mosiah 28:7

Look at who it's said to, since the text says "The Lord said unto Mosiah." As far as the text shows, the four who'd pleaded for days weren't in the room, and the promise about their lives was made to their father. The answer is also bigger than the request. They said perhaps, and the Lord said many shall believe and shall have eternal life.

He also said "I will deliver thy sons," which only needs saying if somebody expects them to need delivering.

Alma 17 shows what that deliverance looked like. When Alma meets them on the road years later, the record says they'd been teaching among the Lamanites "for the space of fourteen years" and that they "had many afflictions," including "hunger, thirst and fatigue" (Alma 17:4-5). So I read the promise as being about the end of the road more than the middle of it. The text doesn't promise them an easy time anywhere.

Four heirs, no takers

Four men stood next in line for a throne and not one of them took it. Alma 17:6 adds a detail Mosiah 28 leaves out, that they refused "the kingdom which their father was desirous to confer upon them." So Mosiah wanted to hand it over and they said no. Mormon doesn't tell you what that conversation was like, whether Mosiah pressed or the sons answered quickly or somebody left the room and came back the next day, and a reader who has sat through a hard family conversation about who will take over something can fill in too much.

It runs the opposite way from Helam, where Alma the elder had a people who wanted him as their king and told them "it is not expedient that we should have a king" (Mosiah 23:7). I wrote about that in Mosiah 23: Why Alma Refused to Be King in Helam. The people were asking and the man said no. Here the man is offering and the heirs say no, and where Alma gives his reasons out loud, the sons give none that Mormon wrote down. Mosiah 29 is where the kingdom gets dealt with properly, and I'd rather wait for it than guess at what the sons would have said.

What Mosiah does in the meantime is the end of the chapter. In verse 20 he gives "the plates of brass, and all the things which he had kept" to "Alma, who was the son of Alma," and that's the younger Alma, the one the angel stopped. The interpreters go along with the plates, and so does a charge to "keep and preserve them, and also keep a record of the people." It isn't a crown, but it's a job that needs someone he trusts. I don't know whether Mosiah meant it as a consolation.

What the record did to the people

The span of what Mosiah translated comes in verse 17: the people destroyed, then back "to the building of the great tower," then "back until the creation of Adam." That's a long way to read backward. Verse 18 gives the reaction. "Now this account did cause the people of Mosiah to mourn exceedingly, yea, they were filled with sorrow; nevertheless it gave them much knowledge, in the which they did rejoice."

I keep stopping on "nevertheless." They'd been anxious to know and got told, and the telling cost them. Mormon doesn't pick one reaction and file the other under a footnote. The same account made them mourn and made them rejoice, in one sentence.

Mormon also leaves himself two notes along the way, and both of them come due later. Verse 9 says "I shall give an account of their proceedings hereafter" and verse 19 says the Jaredite account "shall be written hereafter; for behold, it is expedient that all people should know the things which are written in this account." The first one is kept in Alma 17 through 26. The second, as I read it, is the Book of Ether, which Moroni opens by saying he takes his account "from the twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi" (Ether 1:2).

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the two stones in verse 13, and what is a seer?

Verse 13 describes "two stones which were fastened into the two rims of a bow," and verse 20 calls what Mosiah passed on "the interpreters." Verse 16 says whoever has these things "is called seer, after the manner of old times," which matches what Ammon says in Mosiah 8:13. Past that I'd send you to the Church's own study materials before I'd guess.

Why did Alma get the records and not one of Mosiah's sons?

Because the sons were gone, and all four had already said they didn't want the kingdom. The chapter gives that one reason and no other. Just make sure you've got the right Alma, since verse 20 says "Alma, who was the son of Alma."

Is the Book of Ether the same record Mosiah translated?

Same plates, different book. Moroni says in Ether 1:5 that he gives "not the full account, but a part of the account," from the tower down to the destruction, and he leaves out the earlier part because he supposes it's already "had among the Jews" (Ether 1:3). Mosiah's translation, per Mosiah 28:17, went all the way back to Adam.

Where does the story of the four sons pick up?

In Alma 17, and it's less tidy than a promise of "many shall believe" makes it sound. Read chapters 17 to 26 with verse 7 beside you.

Tomorrow morning in the rotation is Mosiah 29, and I want to see how much of the answer to verse 10 is sitting in it. Ether 1 I'll read on the side, extra, with Mosiah 28:17 open next to it, to find where Moroni's part actually starts.

— D.