This brief description certainly does not paint the full picture of what happened. Mormon’s interest terminates when he demonstrates that both parties behaved honorably. However, the statement that the Lamanites forgave because they were motivated by compassion is too simple. The actual reconciliation had to have occurred with the reinstatement of the original oath-treaty. I include Mosiah 21:1 because it is more logically a conclusion to this section than a beginning to the next story.
Text: There is no chapter break here in the 1830 edition. The current break between chapters 20 and 21 is arbitrary. From a literary standpoint, however, verse 1 of chapter 21 belongs with the current unit, since it concludes the story with the restoration of peace. The next literary unit begins another story of conflict.
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1. Alan Goff, “The Stealing of the Daughters of the Lamanites,” in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon, edited by John L. Sorenson and Melvin J. Thorne (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1991), 69–70.
2. John A. Tvedtnes, The Most Correct Book: Insights from a Book of Mormon Scholar (Salt Lake City: Cornerstone, 1999), 183–86.
3. John W. Welch, Robert F. Smith, and Gordon C. Thomasson, “Dancing Maidens and the Fifteenth of Av,” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, edited by John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1992), 139–41.
4. Saburo Sugiyama, “Rulership, Warfare, and Human Sacrifice at the Ciudadela: An Iconographic Study of Feathered Serpent Representations,” in Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacán, edited by Janet Catherine Berlo (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992), 209–10. This temple was constructed around A.D. 200. The imagery of the war serpent continued to be important in Mormon’s times.
5. John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1985), 187. The caiman is a species of crocodile indigenous to Central America.
6. David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993), 309, note that the war serpent was imported into Maya culture from Teotihuacán. This makes it a late symbol and not present when these events took place. It was, however, a symbol with which Mormon would have been painfully familiar. (See Helaman, Part 1: Context, Chapter 3, “The Gadianton Robbers in Mormon’s Theological History: Their Structural Role and Plausible Identification.”)
Mosiah 21