Abinadom’s son Amaleki introduced us to a man named “Mosiah, who was made king over the land of Zarahemla,” and who was warned by the Lord to take all the people still willing to listen to the voice of God and flee out of the land of Nephi into the wilderness. Guided by the prophetic voice, they journeyed to a land called Zarahemla. There they discovered the people of Zarahemla, who were immediately excited about the arrival of the people of Mosiah because they carried with them “the plates of brass which contained the record of the Jews.” The excitement was mutual because Mosiah’s people learned that the people of Zarahemla “came out from Jerusalem at the time that Zedekiah, king of Judah, was carried away captive into Babylon” (ca. 589 b.c.).
At this point in Book of Mormon history we see the various groups that the Lord brought out of the Old World now mixing in the New World: groups from the tribes of Joseph (Lehi’s descendants from Manasseh and Ishmael’s descendants from Ephraim) and these new people, who were from the tribe of Judah.
These Judahites, known as the people of Zarahemla (or Mulekites), fled Jerusalem before the Babylonians finished destroying it in 586 b.c.; they sailed to the Western Hemisphere and occupied this “land of Zarahemla” ever since, where they had become numerous. “Their language had become corrupted,” and one of the main reasons was because “they had brought no records with them.” Hebrew scholar and grammarian William Chomsky concluded that “two main factors generally operate as controls in the process of linguistic change: (1) isolation and (2) possession of written records.” 1 Because the people of Zarahemla had been so long isolated and without written records, their language had understandably deteriorated to the point that the people of Mosiah could not communicate with them. Without scriptural records, they had lost their religious heritage and were denying the existence of their Creator.
This has to be one of the overarching lessons of the Book of Mormon: when records are lost or disregarded, language is corrupted, identity is lost, doctrinal purity is destroyed, and revelation ceases. Record keepers are the preservers of the social memory—for families and entire cultures. Without records, families, societies, and civilizations erode. This decay undermines a society’s cohesion and threatens its survival. King Mosiah caused his language to be taught to the natives of Zarahemla, after which they secured from Zarahemla an oral genealogy.