“To Pray Without Ceasing”

Alan C. Miner

What does it mean to "pray without ceasing" (Mosiah 26:39)? According to Hugh Nibley, it means simply that you continue in the practice of prayer. It's like saying, "They went on having breakfast every morning without ceasing." That doesn't mean they ate breakfast all day and all night, but they did it without ceasing. Or "he constantly brushed his teeth" doesn't mean he did it twenty-four hours a day. The interesting thing is that in a Semitic language like Arabic, the only way you can say "continually," or "go on doing a thing" is la zalla or lam yazil/ma zalla, he did not cease. Ma zalla yaktubu, "he did not cease writing," means he wrote from time to time, or he wrote regularly. . . . When it says, "they continued in prayer without ceasing," that doesn't mean they had a monastic fanaticism here, or anything like that. [Hugh W. Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Semester 2, p. 183]

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References