(Go: >> BACK << -|- >> HOME <<)
Wikipedia

Ammonihah

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ජපස (talk | contribs) at 13:25, 15 March 2024 (Removing sources with 0 citations.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ammonihah (/ˌæməˈnaɪhɑː/)[1] is a city mentioned in the Book of Mormon that is described as being governed by a class of lawyers and judges who lead an aristocratic and materialistic social order[clarification needed]. When the Book of Mormon prophet Alma visits Ammonihah as part of a ministerial tour[clarification needed], the city becomes the setting of "one of the most disturbing episodes"[2] of the text in which Ammonihah's governing elite imprison him, exile any men converted by his preaching, and kill women and children associated with his mission by fire.

City of Ammonihah
The Martyrdoms at Ammonihah (John Held Sr., 1888), depicting Alma 14:8, in which the city's Christians are "cast into the fire".
First appearanceAlma 8:6
Last appearanceAlma 49:15
RulerAntionah (chief judge)
LocationWestern Nephite lands
NicknameDesolation of Nehors

The narrative set in Ammonihah is intertextual with the Old and New Testaments[specify]. Literary and theological scholarship treat the Ammonihah story as an exploration of suffering and a turning point in the Book of Mormon's use of the phrase "lake of fire and brimstone" as a metaphor for hell.[clarification needed]

Artist John Held Sr. was commissioned[by whom?] to depict Ammonihah in two woodblock prints for George Reynolds's 1888 The Story of the Book of Mormon[relevant?]. These were among the first published illustrations of Book of Mormon content.

Background

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is the primary religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement.[3] In the book's narrative, a family flees Jerusalem, prophetically directed to escape the Babylonian captivity. Led by God, they arrive in the Americas and establish a society which, due to a feud, splits into two: the Nephites and the Lamanites. Despite preceding the birth of Jesus, the Nephites have a Christian society with prophets among them.[clarification needed] The majority of the story is framed as the retrospective work of its principal narrator, Mormon, a Nephite who lives near the end of the chronological narrative and reflexively[citation needed] describes creating the text that is the Book of Mormon by abridging and quoting from Nephite history.[4]

Book of Alma

The Book of Mormon is further divided into fifteen internal books, named after prophets in the text in a manner reminiscent of the prophetic books of the Bible.[5] The ninth book is the book of Alma, named after Alma, a prophet who is the son of the late founder of the then-current incarnation[clarification needed] of the Nephite church. In the Book of Alma, Mormon narrates Alma's ministry and that of his son Helaman during the "reign of the judges", a period in which rule by judges has replaced monarchy in Nephite society.[6]

The book of Alma structurally divides into four quarters that alternatively parallel each other. In the first and third quarters (Alma 1–16 and 30–44), Alma encounters dissent among Nephites and responds; in the second and fourth quarters (Alma 17–29 and 45–63), Mormon narrates Nephite–Lamanite interactions.[7]

The Ammonihah narrative is framed by an inclusio spanning Alma 9–16.[8]{{Efn|Inclusio is the "use of the same word or phrase at the end of a passage as appeared at the beginning, thus rounding off or completing it".

Nephite dissenters and Alma

Prior to the Ammonihah narrative, the Book of Mormon develops an ongoing plot depicting a series of dissident movements in Nephite society whose participants reject the Nephite church's orthodoxy on the need for a Redeemer.[9] The first of these are called "unbelievers", and in Alma's first appearance he is an active and highly persuasive unbeliever who convinces "many of the people to do after the manner of his iniquities". Alma's life drastically changes when an angel appears and commands him to repent; in a reversal typologically reminiscent of Paul the Apostle's conversion in the New Testament, Alma does repent. His transformation is so complete he goes on to become high priest of the Nephite church.

In addition to being high priest of the church, Alma spends some time ruling as chief judge. Early into his career, Alma oversees the case of a man named Nehor who, during a debate about religion, murders a Nephite church member. Nehor is also the founder of a new church whose teachings are similar to the ideas of the unbeliever movement Alma was part of. Despite the resemblance to his past self, Alma sentences Nehor to death for the murder. Nehor's ideas spread among some Nephites, and Ammonihah is a community that accepts the teachings of Nehor.[10]

Setting

The Book of Mormon describes Ammonihah as a city founded by (and named after) a man also called Ammonihah.[11] Relative to the Nephite capital of Zarahemla, Ammonihah lies beyond the city of Melek,[12] and it is located in the western portion of Nephite territory. As a community, Ammonihah is politically and religiously separated from the rest of Nephite society, as they have their own judges and are followers of Nehor's teachings.[13] An elite class of judges and lawyers, unique in the Book of Mormon to Ammonihah,[a] govern the city.[16] The city's residents are called Ammonihahites.

Narrative

Ministry

The Ammonihah narrative begins in the Book of Mormon's tenth year of the reign of the judges[17] with Alma on a preaching tour throughout Nephite cities, having stepped down as chief judge in order to focus on spiritual ministry.[18] Ammonihah is the fourth city he preaches in, after doing so in Zarahemla, Gideon, and Melek.[19] When Alma arrives at Ammonihah, the people refuse to give him an audience, aggressively mock him and the Nephite church, and turn him out from the city, a response to his role in the execution of Nehor. Alma leaves, but once he is outside the city, an angel directs him to return and preach repentance to Ammonihah.[20] The angel warns Alma that Ammonihah is not only doctrinally heterodox but also plotting political sedition, as some "study at this time that they may destroy the liberty of thy people".[21]

Alma's metaphor

"I say unto you then cometh a death, even a second death, which is a spiritual death; then is a time that whosoever dieth in his sins, as to a temporal death, shall also die a spiritual death; yea, he shall die as to things pertaining unto righteousness.

"Then is the time when their torments shall be as a lake of fire and brimstone".

Alma, Book of Mormon, Alma 12:16–17

When Alma reenters the city, he meets Amulek, a resident of Ammonihah.[22] Having been commanded by an angel to host Alma,[23] Amulek offers Alma food and a place to stay, which Alma accepts.[22] Alma invokes a blessing on Amulek's home and family,[24] and they commence preaching in Ammonihah as a duo.[20] The Book of Mormon goes on to stress, eight times, Amulek's house as a setting for his hospitality, highlighting by contrast with Amulek's welcoming attitude the inhospitable reception Ammonihah initially gave to Alma.[25]

Ammonihah lawyers and judges confront Alma and Amulek, accusing the pair of trying to undermine Ammonihah's aristocratic and materialistic political order.[26] Among these interlocutors are the lawyer Zeezrom and the chief judge Antionah.[27] When Zeezrom addresses Amulek, he foregoes asking questions and attempts to bribe Amulek into denying the existence of God[28] by offering him six onties, an amount in the Book of Mormon monetary system that amounts to forty-two days' wages as a judge.[29] Amulek rejects the bribe and retorts that Zeezrom values money more than God.[30]

Alma preaches elaborately, and he engages Ammonihahite lawyers in public debates. In a sermon, he warns that for those who experience "spiritual death" because they do not repent, their "torments shall be as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever".[31]

Some residents of Ammonihah respond to Alma and Amulek's preaching by repenting and reading the scriptures.[32] Others, however, are outraged, and these eventually seize the pair and imprison them.[33] Alma and Amulek are accused of having "reviled against the law [in Ammonihah], and their lawyers and judges", and threatening to undermine Ammonihah's government.[34] The plot escalates into a mass persecution as the Ammonihah majority drive male Christian converts out of the city (despite Amulek having specifically warned the Ammonihahites that God "will come out against you" if they "cast out the righteous"), arrest their wives and children, and seize any scripture in their possession.[35]

The chief judge echoes the metaphor

"Now it came to pass that when the bodies of those who had been cast into the fire were consumed, and also the records which were cast in with them, the chief judge of the land came and stood before Alma and Amulek, as they were bound; and he smote them with his hand upon their cheeks, and said unto them: After what ye have seen, will ye preach again unto this people, that they shall be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone?"

Book of Mormon, Alma 14:14

Martyrdoms

After gathering Christian scriptures and prisoners, the people of Ammonihah create a fire in which they destroy scriptures and burn women and children alive as an intentional and distorted reference to Alma's sermon.[36] Any who believed Alma and Amulek's teachings or listened to them at all become victims in Ammonihah,[37] martyred by burning.[38] Ammonihahites bring Amulek and Alma to the "place of martyrdom" and force them to watch, and Ammonihah's chief judge asks, "After what ye have seen, will ye preach again unto this people, that they shall be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone?" Literary scholar Kylie Nielson Turley explains that the judge "ensures that Alma understands the brutal irony at the heart of this horror. Alma's unfortunate gospel metaphor about a lake of fire and brimstone prompts the literal lake of fire and brimstone that burns before his eyes".

 
The Deliverance of Alma and Amulek by John Held Sr., 1888, depicting Alma 14:27–28

The people of Ammonihah keep Alma and Amulek imprisoned, and the jailers take away their clothing, mock them, starve them, and even beat them.[39] After days spent in this manner, Alma and Amulek finally escape through miraculous deliverance when the prison, in response to a prayer by Alma, spontaneously collapses without harming them, whereupon they leave Ammonihah and reunite with survivors in a place called Sidom.[32] In Sidom, a community of Nephites are sheltering surviving refugees from Ammonihah.[40] This is the first occurrence in the Book of Mormon of a community taking in religious refugees, which goes on to become a recurring trope for the rest of the book.[41]

In Sidom, Alma and Amulek encounter an ailing Zeezrom, who has survived and repented, and Alma miraculously heals him.[32] Amulek is no longer in possession of any of the wealth he had while living in Ammonihah,[42] and his immediate family is implied to have died in the fires.[b] The story closes with Alma taking Amulek into his home where he "did administer unto him in his tribulations".[44]

Aftermath

Some time after Alma and Amulek leave Ammonihah, Lamanites attack the city and destroy it. As the narrator of the book and the compiler in the framing narrative, Mormon places Ammonihah's destruction in the context of an unexpected Nephite–Lamanite war, casting the leveling of the city and its people as divine retribution for the violence committed in the narrative.[45] The Nephites repel the Lamanite invasion, but Ammonihah is destroyed, with the scale of death so immense the resulting odor discourages reoccupation of the area for years.[46] Because the Ammonihahites were followers of Nehor, the ruins are called the "Desolation of Nehors".

In the rest of the Book of Mormon, Ammonihah briefly reappears twice. The first time is in Alma 25, when Mormon recapitulates its destruction as part of an overlapping plot involving war and politics, portraying Ammoniha's destruction earlier in the book as not wholly sudden but the result of other Nephite–Lamanite tensions.[47] The last appearance is set ten years later in Alma 49:15, in which the city of Ammonihah—described as having been rebuilt with fortifications under the direction of Nephite military leader Captain Moroni—repels a Lamanite attack.[48]

Intertextuality

Amulek's hosting of Alma at the command of an angel resembles the story of Lot hosting angels in Sodom: for both Amulek and Lot, providing hospitality to divinely sent messengers (a prophet in Amulek's case and angels in Lots) against the grain of the inhospitable surrounding community (Ammonihah or Sodom) comes at a terrible cost to them and their families, as the mob of Sodom attacks Lot's daughters while Ammonihah kills Amulek's family.[49]

According to G. St. John Stott, the martyrdoms at Ammonihah are "possibly intended to be a parody of" the instructions for sacrifices given in Leviticus 16 (part of the Acharei Mot), in which God instructs Aaron and Moses to release one goat as "a scapegoat into the wilderness" and to take another as a "sin offering" to "burn in the fire".[50] The men cast out from Ammonihah parallel the scapegoat while the women and children "serv[e] as a grotesque sin offering", Stott explains.[51] Alma's statement about the martyrdom that "the blood of the innocent" will "cry mightily against" the murderers to God alludes to Genesis 4:10.

When Alma justifies God not intervening to save the martyrs at Ammonihah, he says "the Lord receiveth them [the martyrs] up unto himself, in glory", and Stott connects this statement to the words of the martyr Thomas Bilney as given in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, who said that although martyrdom entailed "pain for a time", there followed "joy unspeakable".[52]

Alma's and Amulek's divinely-enabled escape from the Ammonihah prison resembles the New Testament's prison deliverance stories: the liberation of Peter in Acts 12 and that of Paul and Silas in Acts 16.[53] The prayer Alma gives that precipitates his and Amulek's deliverance alludes to Samson's prayer in Judges 16.

Interpretation

Literary scholar Kylie Nielson Turley writes that the Ammonihah story is "one of the most disturbing episodes in the Book of Mormon" on account of its graphic violence and the twisted, personal motives behind that violence.[54] Literary critic Michael Austin calls the Ammonihah martyrdoms "perhaps the most disturbing scene in the entire Book of Mormon". Professor of scripture Charles Swift considers the story "one of the most poignant in all of scripture", observing that what starts as an uplifting story about Alma and Amulek becoming friends and colleagues "ends with the horrible death of innocent women and children and Amulek's having lost everything".[55]

Suffering

The narrative set in Ammonihah invites readers to ponder why a god capable of miracles seemingly allows suffering and evil to exist. In the story, God delivers Alma and Amulek from prison but does not stop women and children from being burned at Ammonihah.[56] While watching the mass killing, Alma tells Amulek that God forbids him and Amulek from invoking a miracle to intervene, and Alma concludes that the deaths are willed by God so that he can receive them into heavenly paradise and visit just punishment on Ammonihah.[57] In a commentary, Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming consider this an unsatisfactory theology of suffering, stating that "Alma's response does not stand up to the scrutiny of the people's pain in front of him".[58] Religious studies scholar Grant Hardy calls Alma's justification "a troubling interpretation of theodicy, in which God allows terrible suffering to be inflicted on the innocent in order to condemn the wicked perpetrators". Within the Book of Mormon's framing narrative, Alma's theological exposition may be read as a lapse on Alma's part, caused by shock from the carnage, or as a case of Mormon as narrator-editor inserting an attempted explanation for inexplicable horror.[59] Ultimately, the Ammonihah narrative, Salleh and Olsen Hemming explain, "does not necessarily answer the question" of suffering in a world with God and instead "it simply invites us to sit with it."[56]

Fire imagery

Ammonihah marks a turning point in the Book of Mormon's vocabulary. In the Book of Mormon before and during the Ammonihah arc, "lake of fire and brimstone" is a relatively common metaphor for hell and spiritual death.[60] However, after Alma and Amulek escape Ammonihah, the phrase "lake of fire and brimstone" is never repeated for the remainder of the book. This can be read as a Nephite cultural response to the tragedy.[58] Alternatively, in the context of the framing narrative it can be read as part of Mormon's character as the internal editor-historian, responding to his own experience of reading the Ammonihah story.[61]

 
Front cover of The Story of the Book of Mormon.

Artistic depictions

Artistic depictions of scenes of Ammonihah appear in George Reynolds's 1888 The Story of the Book of Mormon, a book containing what Noel Carmack identifies as "the first published attempt at illustrating the Book of Mormon".[62] John Held Sr., an engraver and the father of cartoonist John Held Jr.,[63] created The Martyrdoms at Ammonihah and The Deliverance of Alma and Amulek (both pictured above) as woodblock prints. Carmack calls Martyrdoms Held's "strongest, most skillful piece" created for Story of the Book of Mormon and considers its "complex, action-filled" scene rare even in contemporary Book of Mormon art.[64]

American painter Minerva Teichert renders the Ammonihah prison deliverance scene in her The Earthquake (c.1949–1951), showing Alma and Amulek's chains breaking as an earthquake collapses the building on their captors.[65]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Religious studies scholar Matthew Bowman states that "Ammonihah is the only city in the Book of Mormon in which the famous 'lawyers' are present".[14] Professor of scripture Dan Belnap concurs, calling "the employment of lawyers" an "Ammonihahite innovation" in the setting.[15]
  2. ^ Charles Swift and Grant Hardy both note that while the Ammonihah story does not overtly narrate what happens to Amulek's earlier-mentioned family, as written the content implies they die. See their assessments as follows: "What has happened to Amulek's wife and children? The narrator does not speak of them, but apparently Alma and Amulek watch the deaths all of the women and children who are murdered… It is quite possible that his family is martyred before Amulek’s eyes, since the wicked people are killing those who were taught as well as those who believed and it is unlikely that his family was not taught when Alma was in their home or when the two taught the crowd";[43] "Amulek moves into Alma's house alone, even though there was a reference earlier to his wife and children (10.11). If they had been among those burned at Ammonihah… his loss may explain his continuing tribulations".

Citations

  1. ^ churchofjesuschrist.org: "Book of Mormon Pronunciation Guide" (retrieved 2012-02-25), IPA-ified from «ăm-a-nī´hä»
  2. ^ Turley 2019, p. 1.
  3. ^ Shipps 1985, pp. 26–33.
  4. ^ Bushman 2005, pp. 85–87.
  5. ^ Bushman 2008, p. 23.
  6. ^ Thomas 2016, p. 18.
  7. ^ Spencer 2017, pp. 273–282.
  8. ^ Turley 2019, pp. 8–10.
  9. ^ Clark 2002, pp. 18–25.
  10. ^ Clark 2002, p. 25, 108n27, 108n29; Belnap 2014, p. 114.
  11. ^ Gee 2023, p. 222.
  12. ^ For Zarahemla as the Nephites' capital city, see Gardner 2007, p. 139.
  13. ^ Belnap 2014, pp. 107n10, 108n10, 109, 114.
  14. ^ Bowman 2023b, pp. 344–347.
  15. ^ Belnap 2014, p. 115.
  16. ^ Bowman 2023b, pp. 344–347; Belnap 2014, p. 115.
  17. ^ Gardner 2007, p. 139.
  18. ^ Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, pp. 147–149.
  19. ^ Belnap 2014, p. 109.
  20. ^ a b Thomas 2016, p. 91.
  21. ^ Belnap 2014, p. 115; Bowman 2023b, p. 345 Quotation is Alma 8:17.
  22. ^ a b Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, pp. 162–163.
  23. ^ Warnick, Johnson & Kim 2014, p. 31.
  24. ^ Turley 2019, p. 11.
  25. ^ Warnick, Johnson & Kim 2014, pp. 30–31, 38.
  26. ^ Bowman 2023b, pp. 344–347.
  27. ^ Bowman 2023a, p. 311
  28. ^ Gardner 2007, p. 183–186.
  29. ^ Gardner 2007, p. 183.
  30. ^ Gardner 2007, p. 186.
  31. ^ Turley 2019, p. 20. Quotation is Alma 12:17.
  32. ^ a b c Thomas 2016, p. 93.
  33. ^ Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, p. 183.
  34. ^ Belnap 2014, pp. 114–115. Quotation is Alma 14:5.
  35. ^ For the mass persecution, see Stott 2009, pp. 170–171.
  36. ^ Turley 2019, pp. 1, 20.
  37. ^ Swift 2012, p. 95.
  38. ^ Häde, Wolfgang (2019). Furey, Constance M.; Gemeinhardt, Peter; LeMon, Joel Marcus; Römer, Thomas; Schröter, Jens; Walfish, Barry Dov; Ziolkowski, Eric (eds.). "Martyr, Martyrdom, D: New Christian Churches and Movements". Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception Online. doi:10.1515/ebr.martyrmartyrdom.
  39. ^ Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, pp. 188–189.
  40. ^ Warnick, Johnson & Kim 2014, pp. 33, 36.
  41. ^ Warnick, Johnson & Kim 2014, p. 33.
  42. ^ Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, p. 193.
  43. ^ Swift 2012, p. 97
  44. ^ Swift 2012, p. 100. Quotation is Alma 15:18.
  45. ^ Hardy 2010, p. 116.
  46. ^ Belnap 2014, p. 129.
  47. ^ Hardy 2010, pp. 117–119.
  48. ^ Anderson 2013, p. 163n26.
  49. ^ Warnick, Johnson & Kim 2014, p. 32.
  50. ^ Stott 2009, p. 171. Quotation is Leviticus 16:10, 27.
  51. ^ Stott 2009, p. 171.
  52. ^ Stott 2009, p. 175. Book of Mormon quotation is Alma 14:11.
  53. ^ Vogel 2004, p. 219.
  54. ^ Turley 2019, pp. 1, 13, 20–21.
  55. ^ Swift 2012, pp. 89, 100.
  56. ^ a b Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, pp. 189–190.
  57. ^ Stott 2009, pp. 171–175, 183–186.
  58. ^ a b Salleh & Olsen Hemming 2022, p. 186.
  59. ^ Turley 2019, pp. 15–19.
  60. ^ Turley 2019, pp. 20, 38.
  61. ^ Turley 2019, p. 38.
  62. ^ Carmack 2008, pp. 115, 130–131.
  63. ^ Topping 1994, p. 248.
  64. ^ Carmack 2008, p. 130.
  65. ^ "Minerva Teichert's Book of Mormon Paintings: A Come, Follow Me Study Supplement". BYU Museum of Art. Retrieved February 3, 2024.

Sources

 
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ammonihah&oldid=1213844965"