Rhetoric: Alma concludes by pointing out that Yahweh has delivered them from their “bonds of iniquity” (v. 12). The king led them away from Yahweh and Yahweh led them away from a king. As a final logical argument, Alma is saying to his people that, since Yahweh led them away from a king who caused them to stray from God, they should honor Yahweh by staying away from kings. Alma tells his people, “I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free.” He is not contrasting two political systems: monarchy and democracy. He is rather contrasting the freedom of Yahweh to the tyranny of a king who did not follow Yahweh.
If Alma’s concerns are so clearly religious, why does he focus those concerns on the king rather than the people’s individual righteousness? Part of the answer lies in the intimate connection between the king’s roles as both political ruler and anointed religious ruler. Ancient kings were considered to rule under a divine mandate. It was because of this religious power that Noah had the ability to bring the people into the “bondage of iniquity.”
Kings over Lamanite cities may have also fit Alma’s argument. The elaboration of the Maya concept of kingship occurs in the Late Preclassic (500 B.C. to A.D. 250). Schele and Freidel discuss the archaeological evidence for the rise of kingship in a site named Cerros in present-day Belize (near Chetumal Bay) dating to around 50 B.C. Although kings had been known in Mesoamerica for a thousand years, Cerros saw a distinctive elaboration of the ruler’s social role, caused by social stratification. Schele and Freidel note:
We know that the problem the Maya were trying to resolve was one of social inequality because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau [“lord”] defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the cosmos. The development of a high civilization always creates problems of social inequality, but such differences between people need not be manifested negatively. For the Maya, kingship became the primary symbol of and rationale for the noble class, the ahauob [“lords,” plural of ahau]. Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself.
Noah’s reign was characterized by increasing class distinctions. Neither Noah nor his priests worked with their own hands (the traditional Nephite egalitarian ideal). The proliferation of expensive buildings created visual monuments to the ruler’s power and parallel the manifestations for social stratification that Schele and Freidel see in Cerros. It seems reasonable that Noah’s excesses mimicked the social style of other kings he might have seen or heard about. Hence, Alma’s mistrust was not of Noah alone but of the entire social, political, and religious ideology that had become identified with Noah as monarch. He feared that, if his people insisted on reestablishing the institution of kingship, they would also accept social stratification (Alma’s first reason) and ultimately the erosion of their religion (Alma’s second reason).