Helaman is selected as the leader of this force of young men. Mormon will tell more about these young men later, but at this time the point is to demonstrate the importance of covenants. The first covenant was for the parents who had covenanted not to pick up arms, and how, even though they desired to help, Helaman would not allow them to break the covenant. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently desirous to help that they found a way, and their sons made a new covenant to fight in their stead. Mormon’s moral for this part of the story is that these young men “were men who were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted.” Given what those young men learned from their parent’s examples of the importance of keeping covenants, it is not very surprising that they should feel the same way about the covenant that they had made.
The chronology of these verses is somewhat confusing. In the last verse, Mormon tells us that it is the end of the twenty-eighth year. This original chapter began in the twenty-sixth year (Alma 52:1, where our current chapters 52 and 53 were originally the same chapter). Thus, this chapter told the events from the twenty-sixth year to the ending of the twenty-eight. This is important because we will learn that Helaman marched out with his stripling soldiers in the twenty-sixth year. See Alma 56:9.
This ends a chapter in the 1830 edition.