BACKGROUND OF LAMANITES
The original group of Nephites followed their prophet, Lehi who was a righteous visionary who foretold the destruction of Jerusalam and prophesied to the city of the approaching, Babylonian captivity. Lehi had four sons. The four brothers, in birth order, were named Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi. Laman and Lemuel resented their father for taking them from their wealth at their home in Jerusalem and were sources of conflict during the entire journey to the Promised Land.
Nephi (the youngest), believed his prophet-father’s prophecies and dreams, and sought to emulate Lehi, eventually becoming the prophet in his own right. Sam generally followed Nephi’s lead, but Laman and Lemuel were deeply resentful, for they believed that their birth order should give them the right to leadership of the migrating group. Nevertheless, the clan remained together under Lehi’s direction, until they reached the Promised Land and began to till the soil and build their cities.
When their prophet/leader Lehi died, Laman and Lemuel’s rebellion against Nephi roiled into armed conflict. Nephi led Sam and others, away from the Laman and Lemuel territory, and moved northward to settle a land of their own.
At this point, the two groups began to be identified as followers of either Laman (the ‘Lamanites’) or of Nephi (the ‘Nephites’). Both groups were prolific and prospered, but in the early stages of their diverging civilizations, the Lamanites became more numerous, but tended to be irreverent, lived as hunters and gatherers for their food, while the Nephites were productive, God-fearing farmers, builders and craftsmen. While they were faithful to God, the Nephites prospered and were successful in expanding their civilization, but when they rebelled against God and become more like their wilder, cousins the Lamanites, God’s favor lagged and they too, became more war-like. Over a period of about 600 years, the opposing cousins’ two armies repeatedly clashed with much loss of life and property and the Book of Mormon records that both sides became more and more sinful and materialistic.
In the beginning, the Lamanites had no historical record, could not read, and knew only of their oral traditions of the perceived injustice and mistreatment of their people by the Nephites. Quite different, the Nephites had brought the religious record of the Tribe of Manasseh (the son of Joseph of Egypt) with them from Jerusalem. Ancient descendants of Manasseh, the Nephites had maintained a written record of their kings and priests up until Lehi had left Jerusalem (ca 600 BC). This record contained many of the writings of the early Israelites to include the first five books of Moses and the prophecies of many prophets such as Isaiah, up to the time of Jeremiah. Known to the Nephites as the ‘Brass Plates,’ this record was the Nephite equivalent of the Old Testament of the Jewish/Christian Bible but there were some books in the Brass Plates that never made it into the Bible. For example, the Book of Mormon quotes Zenos at length in Jacob 3 (chapter 5, LDS) and mentions that both Zenos and Zenoch prophesied of the coming Messiah.
Nephi accepted his father’s belief in God and followed in Lehi’s footsteps as the prophet. The Nephites selected Nephi to be both their king and religious leader and in his honor, successive kings all called themselves ‘Nephi’ regardless of their original names. As king, Nephi started the secular record (sometimes called the ‘Large Plates of Nephi’) of the Nephite kings’ deeds, and as their priest, he recorded a sacred account (the ‘Small Plates of Nephi’) that was devoted more to the things of God—prophesies, visions, and revelations. Parts of both of these two sets of records are in the Book of Mormon of today.
Early on, the Lamanites lagged behind the Nephites, resenting the Nephite’s growing wealth and prosperity. For the Lamanites, it was easier to go to war and obtain the spoils of war from the wealthier Nephites, than to work hard to till the land and achieve their own prosperity. The Lamanites, however, were much more numerous and over the next 600 years (until the coming of Christ), the two sets of cousins were frequently at war, pushing the borders between the Lamanites and the Nephites ever northward.
The Nephite possession of the Brass Plates and their own record of God’s revelations and visions of Lehi, Nephi, and other prophets, gave the Nephites a knowledge of the coming of the Messiah in the Land of Jerusalem. After Christ’s crucifixion, the resurrected Jesus appeared to the people of Nephi, teaching them how to live together in harmony. For a ‘golden age’ of about 200 years there was no more distinction between the Nephite and the Lamanite, for all were Christians. But after those 200 years, there came an age of human ‘enlightenment’ in which many doubted and rejected the Cross of Jesus, so there again, began to be a division between the believers and unbelievers.
At this point, the Book of Mormon again distinguishes between the rebellious and the believers by identifying them as being either Lamanites or Nephites, respectively. At this point, however. those labels no longer were identifying the people in terms of their lineage (genetic composition), but of whether they believed in Christ.
Following the ‘golden age,’ as the righteousness of the post-crucifixion people continued to decline, the real distinction between the newly defined ‘Lamanites’ and ‘Nephites’ became blurred for at the end, both groups were living on hatred and blood-thirsty anger as they battled to a prophesied, but bitter end. The result was that the more numerous Lamanites completely eliminated the Nephite culture. According to Moroni’s account, following the final battle, any former ‘Nephite’ that professed to believe in God was summarily executed–the only ‘true’ Nephites who survived, had to renounce their Christian beliefs or die. Those who recanted became Lamanites.
Thus, when the Book of Mormon speaks of the ‘Lamanites’ as recorded by Mormon and Moroni around 400 AD, it is referring to non-believers and believers and not whether their ancestor lineage was through Laman or Nephi. The Book of Mormon was written BY Mormon and Moroni, but it was written FOR the Lamanites (and other specific groups—read on). But at the very time that Mormon and Moroni were acting as senior officers in the Nephite army. The Lamanites were their enemies, sworn to destroy the Nephite civilization. Between their battles, the father and son were at work on abridging the sacred records which, they had been assured by God, would become a testimony of Jesus TO the descendants of their Lamanite enemies in the distant future!
Enos, one of the early Nephite prophets, recorded an experience he had while praying for his Lamanite cousins of the future [Enos 1:19-20, 28 CofChrist; 1:13, 18 LDS ]:
19….if it should so be, that my people, the Nephites, should fall into transgression, and by any means be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the Lord God would preserve a record of my people, the Nephites;
20Even if it so be, by the power of his holy arm, that it might be brought forth, at some future day, unto the Lamanites, that perhaps they might be brought unto salvation….
28And the Lord said unto me, Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith, for their faith was like unto thine.
Jesus appeared to the Nephites and Lamanites after Christ’s resurrection. The Book of Mormon tells how all who saw the risen Christ became Christians [4 Nephi 1:3 CofChrist; 1:2 LDS]:
3And it came to pass in the thirty and sixth year, the people were all converted unto the Lord, upon all the face of the land, both Nephites and Lamanites, and there were no contentions and disputations among them, and every man did deal justly one with another;
But by Mormon’s time some 400 years later, all had become blood-thirsty and were warring to the last Nephite warrior [Mormon 4:8 CofChrist; 8:7 LDS]:
8And behold, the Lamanites have hunted my people, the Nephites, down from city to city, and from place to place, even until they are no more, and great has been their fall; yea, great and marvelous is the destruction of my people, the Nephites.
There are only THREE CT references to the Lamanites: at B8, C23, and D16 and the next three slides give the tentative translations of characters around the Lamanite character.
{Note that Nephi’s name [B10] is included in the character, ‘the Nephite record’ [B7].
The horizontal line is ‘the record.’ For more information,
view Rules of Reading and Bibliography} (links coming soon: 4/9/17)
[‘Christ-tongue’ meant ‘Christ language’ and is the way the Nephites referred to the language of the Jaredites, the language of the prophet Ether.]
Between their deadly battles, Mormon and Moroni were recording the demise of their civilization, knowing full well what the outcome would be. Yet, the Lord had promised them that the record they were making would be preserved to come forth at some time in the future. Mormon trusted in the Lord and persisted to his death, fighting for his people, blood-thirsty, sinful and rebellious as they had become—for they were his people. Moroni viewed his father’s last battle from afar and, hiding from the victorious Lamanites, he completed his abridgement of the Jaredite record. He assembled the library of sacred records and hid them so they would not be found until the Lord would reveal them to the world.
Consider the clash of feelings these men must have felt as they gave countless hours to abridging and recording the records, knowing that the records’ purpose was to bring unsaved souls to Christ, sometime way, way into the future—and among those souls would be the descendants of the Lamanites that would destroy the Nephite culture—the very people they had faced on the battlefield.
Is this not a testimony that the steadfast love and presence of God that was in their hearts as they forgave those they had fought so diligently? Is this not a testimony of the Christian principle of forgiving and loving your enemies? Is this not a testimony of the saving power of Jesus Christ himself?