Alma 62-63 - The End of the War

There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from the end of the war. One is an exclamation point on need for national unity. Internal strife and factions almost destroyed the Nephites. The Nephites won only after the Chief Judge Pahoran, backed by the military might of Captain Moroni, put an end to the dissension.

Another lesson is given a choice, the masses, the people who actually get sent to war to fight, don’t like fighting and won’t. The Lamanite armies not only lost the battles, but also the war in large part because their soldiers defected and joined the Ammonites. No soldiers… no army. No army… no war. You really have to stir people up emotionally to get them to go to war because by nature people are appalled and terrified by it.

We get another glimpse into the different culture of the Nephites with the end of the war. They demobilize to a certain extent, but Moroni oversees the construction of more “places of defense” or refuge throughout the country. He then retires and hands over command of the army to his son, Moronihah. (Can you imagine the Commander of the Joint Chiefs saying, “I’m retiring now, so my son is going to take over in my stead.” Not in America.) The Nephites were okay with that. It would never happen here.

Helaman resumes the role of High Priest, but soon dies. Shiblon becomes custodian of the records. But he’s old too and knows he’s going to die soon. Since Pahoran doesn’t want the records, they are given to Helaman’s oldest son Helaman. I just have to comment here for a moment. We assume the custodian of the records is THE High Priest. Like so much of the Nephite society, these high leadership positions seem to be handed down from father to son among the Nephites. The judgeship passes from father to son. The army passed from father to son. The church did with Alma the Younger getting the job after his father. And then Helaman got it from his father.

Lest you think it was coincidence that the church leaders were such good men, I think the better interpretation is this patrilineal descent from father to son is something Heavenly Father worked with. So, he made sure men worthy of the callings were born at the right time to the right family.

And so ends the Book of Alma. The stage is set for the next epoch of the Nephite saga.

Personal Note: This actually is the end of my first pass of blogging through the Book of Mormon. It was  nearly a year ago, July 5, 2015 to be exact, when I made my first post on Helaman chapter one. Rather than rehash things, After this post I'm going to spend some time consolidating these entries into book form. Surprisingly, it's 47,000 words long - about 150 pages. I plan on posting it to Amazon where you can get it for free, or $0.99 if I must charge something for it.

In the mean time, about once a week, I'll post entries consisting of my impressions of our Gospel Doctrine lessons. It'll be more Book of Mormon goodness, but I'm going to spend most of my writing time working on a new Sci-Fi novel. I had a chance to pitch the idea to a book publisher recently and they really liked the idea, so I want to work on that to see where it goes. I plan on posting chapters to another blog so you can read along if you'd like.

I love feedback. If you'd like to see the contents of the past year's blog posts in a book, please let me know. The amount of interest will tell me how much effort to put into putting it together.