“Here Is the King of the Lamanites”

Brant Gardner

The Lamanite king is treated for his wounds and delivered to the Limhite king. This king-to-king exchange is important, and must be highlighted. At this point we do not have a military conflict, but a political one. Even though the Lamanite king has lost his heavenly mandate (as we will see later in the occasion where he is returned to his people) there is yet a protocol to follow, and Limhi honors that code.

If the capture of the king is a Mesoamerican tradition, we may ask why the army of Limhi wants to immediately kill the king. We must speculate, as we cannot enter their minds to know. The first possibility is that this is a formal aspect of the presentation. The Lamanite king is presented to the Limhite king as a forfeited life. He would be ritually presented as one to be killed, so that the conquering king might pronounce favorably upon his life.

It is also even more simply possible that our modern sensibilities would be correct and that the army was simply full of the blood lust of war, and wanted to kill the man responsible for the deaths of their comrades in arms.

Textual: Mormon shifts his narration here from description to citation. We may presume that he had before some official text providing the text of this exchange. Rather than describe the exchange as he described the war (which may also have been descriptive in Mormon's source) he now inserts quoted material.

Multidimensional Commentary on the Book of Mormon

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