Mosiah 1:1-5
From Feast upon the Word (http://feastupontheword.org). Copyright, Feast upon the Word.
The Book of Mormon > Mosiah > Chapter 1
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Questions
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Lexical notes
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Exegesis
On the Book of Mosiah as a whole
Though Mormon seems to have been following the plates of Nephi in his division of the Book of Mormon into books, there is reason to believe that he also found ways to structure each book so that each embodies on a rather grand scale some rather poignant themes. The Book of Mosiah is perhaps the easiest in which such grand themes can be read. The book, as a whole, is structured as a giant parallelism that resolves itself by cancelling the separation implied in the parallelism. Some detail is in order.
The small plates report (and one can only imagine that Mormon's parallel text in the missing manuscript reported it as well) that Benjamin's reign was marked, before his great speech, by a rather odd split in his kingdom. A group of people, under the direction of Zeniff, decided to move to the South in an attempt to reclaim the original lands occupied by Nephi after he fled from his brothers. Though this departure is only noted in few words, it must be recognized that it was likely a major political event: to reclaim former territory in the name of the Nephite kings is certainly a daring undertaking, and to establish a kingship there, one parallel to Benjamin's own power, could only have been understood as a relativization of Benjamin's power. In other words, that Zeniff felt to establish a kingship in a more originary sense than Benjamin's monarchy suggests that the movement to reclaim the land of Nephi was fueled in part by a sort of mild defiance, a rejection, to some degree, of Benjamin's place. There does not seem to have been a great deal of concern on Benjamin's part about all of this, and there seem to have been amicable relations between the two groups (Mosiah II sends out parties to search for them, etc.), and so whatever "defiance" is implied in the action was certainly quite mild. But it should be recognized that there were inevitable implications and overtones bound up within Zeniff's zeal to obtain the land of Nephi.
What all of this seems to suggest is that the Book of Mosiah opens on the note of a major political split. When the book opens, the split is already complete, and the majority of the book deals with the parallel kingdoms this split creates. The first part of the book (Mosiah 1-6) deals with things in the land of Zarahemla; the second part (Mosiah 7-24) deals with things in the land of Nephi. The last part of the book (Mosiah 25-29) works out the collapse of the split, the collapse of the parallel kingdoms, and the reconciliation of two rival worldviews. In other words, the Book of Mosiah reads almost like a Hegelian syllogism:
Thesis: Benjamin's/Mosiah's Kingdom (Mosiah 1-6) Antithesis: Zeniff's/Noah's/Limhi's Kingdom (Mosiah 7-24) Synthesis: Mosiah's/Alma's Kingdom/Judgeship (Mosiah 25-29)
This broad structure in the book suggests the incredibly political theme of the Book of Mosiah ("political" understood in the sense it was used among, say, the Greeks--not in the debates and power struggles of today). The book reads into a series of parallel kings (and the prophet Abinadi, as a parallel to Benjamin in a powerful way) in order to think the institution of kingship and to think its relation to salvation. The radically separatist voice of Abinadi ultimately calls for a sort of rebellion under the radically separatist authority of Alma. When Limhi returns to Zarahemla ready to give up the institution of kingship, and when Alma returns to Zarahemla quite convinced that the kingdom of God should be understood as superceding any earthly kingship, the ideals Benjamin had taught in such incredible power have quite clearly been compromised by the parallel history. Mosiah II is forced to make a decision that results in the institution of the judges. The whole book, it seems, sets Mosiah II's grand speech in Mosiah 29, then, against Benjamin's grand speech in Mosiah 2-5. These two speeches are set in parallel, and the great irony is that the first speech (Benjamin's) is specifically the speech given as Mosiah II was enthroned. The book really is the Book of Mosiah, since it centers on the events (almost all of which happen outside the boundaries of his kingdom) that lead Mosiah from a most glorious equation of the Nephite kingdom with the kingdom of God, to a radical rejection of the very concept of kingdom.
In the end, the Book of Mosiah must be read as the process of Mosiah's realization of these difficulties, and as the situation in which he was able to hand over to the Nephites an entirely different era. The book is, in other words, a transition from the cyclical nonsense of the political situation of the small plates to the cyclical nonsense of the political situation of the Book of Alma. The transition is focused on one person alone: Mosiah.
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