After the previous
chapter, in which the Nephite people of King Limhi salvage their lives at the
expense of paying tribute to the Lamanite nation that surrounds them, we gaze
forward.
As this chapter opens,
we find that the legacy of wickedness from Limhi’s father, the late King Noah,
continues to bedevil everyone. One of the lands that the surrounding Lamanites
occupy is called Shemlon. In a secluded place in Shemlon, the corrupt and
cowardly priests of Noah—who fled the recent Lamanite invasion and left their
families and the people they were supposed to lead to fend for themselves—come
upon young women from the Lamanites who gather together to sing and dance.
Noah’s former priests carry these young women away into the wilderness (verses
1-5). The rest is left to our imaginations, but presumably the men have desired
to make the young women their companions.
The priests of Noah are
a textbook example of people who draw the wrong lesson from the shame of their
past sins. Instead of doing what they can to repair the pain they have caused
others and heal themselves too, they compound their previous mistakes by
focusing only on what will satisfy their immediate appetites, and avoid
personal accountability. They trick themselves into thinking that they can get
away with it all so long as they don’t get caught. One of the great lessons of
the Book of Mormon that almost all of its prophets teach is that we all
eventually face God, and the priests of Noah are no exception. They vainly try
to escape the inescapable, but they are clever enough that they are able to
delay the consequences, with the schemes they hatch for their own survival
inflicting grief and heartbreak on an untold number of Nephites and Lamanites.
In this case, the
priests of Noah have triggered confusion and misunderstanding. The Lamanites
assume that the Nephites have taken their young women, and in their anger come
against the Nephites in battle. King Limhi sees the Lamanites coming, so the
Nephites are prepared to ward them off (verses 6-8). It’s a situation where the
reader wants to be able to jump in to correct the misunderstanding, but can
only follow the story helplessly to learn of the unnecessary tragedy of death
that ensues.
When the Nephites find
the Lamanite king among the fallen, and learn that he is not dead, but only
wounded, they transport him to King Limhi so that they can understand why the
Lamanites came to battle with them—and are still threatening to do them harm.
When the Lamanite king explains about the young women taken away, Limhi
initially promises to conduct an investigation among his people (verses 12-16).
But his trusted servant
Gideon, the same valiant Nephite who confronted King Noah in his wickedness,
has a flash of insight. He takes Limhi aside and reminds him that King Noah’s
priests escaped in the wilderness. It is these people, Gideon insists, who are
almost certainly responsible for kidnapping the young Lamanite women, not
anyone else among the Nephites (verse 18). Limhi recognizes that Gideon’s
insight has to be correct.
When Limhi explains the
situation to the Lamanite king, he accepts Limhi’s account as the honest truth
and promises to intercede with his army. When the army sees unarmed Nephites
bringing their king back to them, and the king tells them about the priests of
Noah, the army has sympathy for the Nephites and stands down. They call off the
attack and return to their lands (verses 23-26).
This doesn’t mean that
the Nephites are freed from paying a heavy tribute to the Lamanites. But at
least the two sides aren’t killing one another. It’s a beginning. Perhaps one
of the lingering lessons from the experience for Limhi and his people comes
from something Gideon says to Limhi. Gideon soberly observes that the threat of
destruction the Nephites face comes from their own past disobedience of
prophetic warnings from Abinadi and others (verse 21). Even as Limhi and his
people have started to turn away from wickedness, real-world consequences come
from being slow to hearken to the Lord.
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