Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Part Two by Hugh Nibley

Author:Hugh Nibley [Nibley, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LDS, Book of Mormon, Religion, Mormon
ISBN: 9781621081067
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2012-03-28T06:00:00+00:00

TEACHINGS OF THE BOOK OF MORMON

HUGH NIBLEY

Semester 2, Lecture 44

Alma 2–3

Alma and Amlici

We are on this affair between [Amlici] and Alma, and it’s a very important one. It’s the second chapter of Alma. Now who is fighting whom here?

Things had been going very bad with the church because of Nehor, who had taken all the people away. They all thought they were the true church. Nehor did, and Alma did, too. A man by the name of Amlici thought he could “cash in” on the Nehor movement. He wanted to go all the way, become extreme right wing, and make himself king. So we have two factions facing each other. Here you don’t have Nephites versus Lamanites at all. On both sides there are Nephites and Mulekites all mixed up. Already Amlici has planned to join up with the Lamanites. As far as the Nephites are concerned, it was not the good people and the bad people. It was not the church against the opponents of the church; they were both following Alma. Most of them didn’t want to go as far right as Amlici went. All the church and most of the other people stuck with Alma, so we have a very mixed thing.

This is a typical Central America mix-up of things. Some guy wants to have power. He’s a general and he wants to be the whole thing. We’re on familiar ground here. All these wars take place on that scale amid great confusion. Who’s on which side? Some of the people are going to start running away; some people are going to change sides. So this is not Nephites versus Lamanites, and it’s not believers versus pagans. There are believers on both sides. Amlici got a lot of Nehor’s people. He was [a follower of] Nehor himself, and they said, “We are the true church.” On the other hand, most of the people that followed Alma didn’t belong to his church. So it went that way, and it certainly wasn’t the good guys versus the bad guys, as we will find out. You would think that it would be at least that, but no it wasn’t.

We won’t try to put a situation map on the board; it would be useless here. It’s quite a complicated affair militarily, and a very interesting one, too. Amlici was a very shrewd strategist; he knew how to do it. He set up on a hill, which seems to have been a fortified hill. It is referred to at other times. It was apparently on the shore of the river, which made it impossible to surround him. That would give him one advantage at least. It was on a hill which was east of the river Sidon, which was the boundary of the land. The war was fought on both sides of the river. We don’t need to worry about these particulars, but it’s an interesting one if you try to analyze what they were doing here. On the east side of the river Sidon, “they began to make war with the Nephites.

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