Samuel declares the irony that he, a Lamanite, is teaching the Nephites about the Messiah. It is obvious that the Lamanites have not followed Yahweh; that has been the Nephite path. But now, thanks to the Nephites’ preaching, many Lamanites are believers. Samuel attributes the Nephites’ survival to the righteous few who brought the gospel to the Lamanites, an oblique reference to Nephi. He is the prophet they once tried to kill and now apparently is tolerated more than honored in spite of the miracles they witnessed (Hel. 9:19, 11:17–18).
Text: Mormon includes this information from Samuel the Lamanite as a precursor to last-days events. The Nephites have the promise that they will be preserved if they are righteous. Before the Messiah’s coming to the Americas, the Nephites had become wicked. The promise of protection lapsed. The Lamanites were more righteous. The Lamanite government will survive until the Messiah comes to the New World. However, the Nephite government and people will be destroyed (3 Ne. 7:1–3). Mormon is also foreshadowing the end of the Nephite nation, which he is witnessing, along with the Lamanites’ obvious survival. He must have seen the situation as paralleling the events leading up to the Savior’s arrival in the New World. Mormon constructs his story to show us that what happened before will happen again. Samuel the Lamanite becomes, in Mormon’s text, the symbolic survival of the Lamanites when the Nephites are destroyed, a situation that will occur again at the end of the Book of Mormon.
Culture/Literature: The phrasing that Yahweh “hath hated” the Lamanites is quite strong. In many ancient cultures, however, this attitude is expected toward outsiders. In the Old World, covenant language between a suzerain and his people was phrased in such extremes. For the Bible, David Bokovoy, a graduate student in Old Testament studies, and John A. Tvedtnes point out:
In recent decades, scholars have shown that in the biblical world love often represented a covenantal devotion to one’s superior while its opposite, namely hate, at times signified the status of an individual outside of this affiliation. While the connotation of these words for westerners usually signifies an intense emotional charge, in the ancient Near East, love and hate often carried this unique covenantal connotation.
The Lord told Hosea, “All their [the Ephraimites] wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house” (Hosea 9:15). As demonstrated in this biblical passage, the Ephraimites’ wickedness resulted in their loss of the blessing associated with having the God of Israel serve as their sovereign. The Lord hated the Ephraimites, “for the wickedness of their doings,” since in the context of ancient Near Eastern treaties these acts were tantamount to a political insurrection. As a result, these individuals were removed from God’s covenantal “house” or “family.” The Hosea passage continues, “I will love them no more,” declared the Lord, “all their princes are revolters” (Hosea 9:15). Thus, the words love and hate in the biblical world often carried a deliberate connotation of political alliance (or lack thereof). With this observation in mind, the problematic passages in Helaman 15 where Samuel the Lamanite described God’s love and hatred seem to convey a specific nuance derived from the world of antiquity.
In Helaman 15, Samuel presented his inspired message to the people of Nephi. Among his many observations the prophet declared, “they [the Nephites] have been a chosen people of the Lord.… [Y]ea, the people of Nephi hath he loved” (v. 3). With these words, the prophet attempted to remind the Nephites that they had traditionally served as God’s covenant people. In this relationship, the Lord had acted as the Nephite suzerain from whom the people of Nephi received reciprocal “love.” In contrast, Samuel presented his own people, the Lamanites, as those whom God “hath hated because their deeds have been evil continually” (v. 4).
Significantly, Samuel used the verb to hate in the same context in which it appears in the book of Hosea. God hated the Lamanites in a parallel manner to the way he hated the Ephraimites. Their evil acts had placed them outside the boundary of his covenantal love.
By the time of Helaman, the Nephites have been separated from the Old World for nearly four hundred years, and there is no indication that any of Lehi1’s family would have explicitly understood these terms as covenantal. However, the same cultural conditions that created these insider/outsider relationships in the Old World would have been present in the New, so it is not surprising to have Yahweh love the insiders (those of his covenant) and “hate” those who are outside of that covenant. The extreme status of insider/outsider is repeated in the reversed terms “love” and “hate.”