Book of Mormon Ammon and Ramesses the Great : Hero or Zero?

When the triumphant but amazed servants of King Lamoni streamed back into the palace, bearing the hewn arms of their enemies, the king had them "stand forth and testify" about what they had witnessed. The servants gushed out the tale of how the mysterious newcomer Ammon (in reality the Nephite prince) had single-handedly slain and driven away a force of rebels, "not few in number," with sling and with sword. Lamoni "was astonished exceedingly, and said: Surely, this is more than a man. Behold, is not this the Great Spirit?"

"And they answered the king, and said: Whether he be the Great Spirit or a man, we know not, but this much we do know, that he cannot be slain. . . because of his expertness and great strength.

"And now, O king, we do not believe that a man has such great power, for we know he cannot be slain.

"And now, when the king heard these words, he said unto them: Now I know that it is the Great Spirit.


It all sounds like the stuff of legend: exaggerated? an embarrassment? Heroes embarrass us today: sum total zero.


Yet consider how Ramesses the Great, the friend of the high god Amun, presents himself through the "words" of his enemies, after boldly driving his chariot like great Montu--god of war--none with him, through the enemy host:

He is no mere man, he that is among us!--
it's Seth, great of power, Baal in person!
Not the acts of a mere man are the things that he does,
that belong to one utterly unique!--
one who defeats myriads, no troops with him, no chariotry.


Note how the Pharaoh personifies several gods of war: Montu, Seth, Baal. Montu, Amun: it all has the Book of Mormon flavor. No mere echoes: We hear Ammon; we hear Manti!


Indeed the "traditional image of the king" appears in the following words:

He who shoots the arrow like Sekhmet
to fell thousands of those who mistake his power


(Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 261).

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A little more:

Mighty Prince Ammon and the Trophy Presentations at the Palace of King Khyan (Archaeological Discovery in Egypt Sheds Light on the Book of Mormon)

In what surely is one of the most dramatic moments in a book replete with dramatic moments, Book of Mormon prince and missionary Ammon withstands a band of plunderers with sword and sling (Alma 17:37-9): http://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/alma/17?lang=eng

37 But behold, every man that lifted his club to smite Ammon, he smote off their arms with his sword; for he did withstand their blows by smiting their arms with the edge of his sword, insomuch that they began to be astonished, and began to flee before him; yea, and they were not few in number; and he caused them to flee by the strength of his arm.

38 Now six of them had fallen by the sling, but he slew none save it were their leader with his sword; and he smote off as many of their arms as were lifted against him, and they were not a few.

39 And when he had driven them afar off, he returned and they watered their flocks and returned them to the pasture of the king, and then went in unto the king, bearing the arms which had been smitten off by the sword of Ammon, of those who sought to slay him; and they were carried in unto the king for a testimony of the things which they had done."

It is a marvelous story--but can there yet remain a "testimony of the things" which Ammon once did? A newly announced archaeological discovery in Hyksos Egypt--the first of its kind--recalls the presentation of the enemies' right arms to the Ishmaelite king, Lamoni, and bespeaks the earnest ritual nature of such trophy presentations:

http://www.livescience.com/22267-severed-hands-ancient-egypt-palace.html

http://www.auaris.at/downloads/TD__Report_2011_ASAE.pdf

For a prior look at the same Book of Mormon episode in light of Ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography (but not archaeology), see John Welch and John Lundquist, "Ammon and Cutting Off the Arms of Enemies":

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=71&chapid=817

Hugh Nibley, in his Book of Mormon classes, would also comment on "the Sebus sport", the Waters of Sebus being the setting for Ammon's feat: "The games of chivalry were just as rough and deadly as the Sebus sport, and far more ancient. Sinuhe is a thousand years older than Achilles or David, and monuments from prehistoric Egypt show the first 'pharaohs' bashing the heads of rival rulers with the ceremonial mace. The famous scenes of the battles of Megiddo and Carchemish display the piles of severed hands and arms brought as trophies to the king. That's how you would prove that you had slain them; you would bring the right arms to the king and pile them up. This is Bible stuff, too, as well as Babylonian, and the Egyptians were in it, too. At Carchemish and Megiddo the king sat there with big piles of arms in front of him. Well, Ammon brought piles of arms to show his prowess to King Lamoni" (Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Lecture 51: Alma 17-19).

At Carchemish and Megiddo the trophies were laid before the king right on the spot--on the battlefront. But the evidence of sixteen hands found in four burial pits near the palace of the Hyksos Pharaoh Khyan at Avaris even more closely recalls the statement in Alma about how the servants of the king carried the arms "in unto the king," that is, into his palace. "Two of the pits," we read, "[are] located in front of what is believed to be a throne room" (livescience.com).

Arma virumque cano--valorous deeds and glorious feats of arms are the province of the king, and the hands buried in front of Khyan's throne room serve as a lasting testimony of that fact.

Copyright 2012 by Val Sederholm

Tally

There are times we should pause to take tally.

For Book of Mormon Prophet Alma, that time came at the end of the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges:

"And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed."

Fifteen years.

Our Millennium opened with celebration--and with boundless hope. It was the Year 2000! In like manner, the Nephites opened a new system of government, a free government by the voice of the people--not by kings--with joy and a sense of promise.

We now approach the fifteenth anniversary of the terror attack of September 11, 2001.

Is it time to take tally?

Beauty and Compelling Awkwardness in Book of Mormon Narrative

All readers of the Book of Mormon mark both the strange and compelling beauty of its language and its frequent awkwardness--a jarring contrast. And often enough that frequently contrasting awkwardness becomes for the devoted reader something he begins to expect, even a compelling, and oddly satisfying, awkwardness. Yet one doubts a conscious attempt at the awkward on the part of the Nephite writers, a conscious shaping in wabi-sabi, unglazed and artfully natural. Where we find the awkward, the people of Zarahemla just wrote that way--and that's that. Too bad for them. 

It's tough to decide whether the awkward or the poetic and flowing came more naturally to the Nephite writers. They had their moments anyhow.

Consider Alma's catalog of the cities of the converted Lamanites (Alma 23). It's not the Iliad--and yet. . . 

Now, these are they who were converted unto the Lord: 

The people of the Lamanites who were in the land of Ishmael; 

And also of the people of the Lamanites who were in the land of Middoni; 

And also of the people of the Lamanites who were in the city of Nephi;


So far, so good. The catalog proceeds in a stately rhythm, a biblical rhythm, but nothing rises beyond dictionary entry. 

Then, as poetic coda:

And also of the people of the Lamanites who were in the land of Shilom, and who were in the land of Shemlon, and in the city of Lemuel, and in the city of Shimnilom. 

And these were the names of the cities of the Lamanites which were converted unto the Lord.

Shimmering verse 12 alone packs in 6 l's, 6 m's, 3 n's, and 3 sh's. For those who may savor consonantal above secret combinations, Shilom finds subtle reversal in Shemlon, only to shift back in Lemuel, and all building up to startling Shimnilom. 

There's really nothing to say about such loveliness. Read the verses aloud, two or three times. The stolid rhythmic lines end with a touch of playfulness just shy of rococo. 

A few verses to come, and we delight in the elaborated name of Anti-Nephi-Lehi. More likely, we shudder, or even laugh, at it. Or what to say about the stunning, and stunningly ambiguous, eruption of geography in the previous chapter? Such moments are all little literary delights, flow or none, that leave the reader longing for more--and sooner or later, more comes. These pepperings, more to be savored than comprehended, remind us that the book has us, however pedestrian the language may at times be. 

Much is made of Book of Mormon geography. Oh, good luck with that. The book has you by the tail; not t'other way round. It has you running circles round the head of the river Sidon by the borders of Manti. It's all a tour-de-force of non-specific specificity, and one senses Alma's delight in putting the reader over the border and into the wilderness, little strips of which run every which way. And you wish to lead tours?  

Don't get lost in the jungle.

It is wordplay, to be sure; yet again, far too much is made of wordplay in the Book of Mormon, and frankly, I just don't see it in so many, many of the places others point at. I don't see it in the name of Nephi; I don't see it in the name of Benjamin--neither on the left hand nor on the right. I don't even see traces of it, etymological or otherwise. I'll skip that tour too.

We can't just make things up.

Neither were the Nephites gauche--confused maybe, but not gauche.

How about this phrasing? Now it came to pass that after Alma had received his message from the angel of the Lord. . . (Alma 8:18)? In Hebrew (and, likely, in Nephite), the words "message" and "angel" (or "messenger") come from the same root. A play on words? No--just linguistic compactness.

And that compactness, and so much else in the language of the Book of Mormon: the rhythm, the anaphoric cadences, the quotations from the prophets, the jewel-like prayers and hymns (these often belonging to the older strata of the plates), the inverted patterns and chiasms, even the occasional play on words--not to mention the pathos and immediacy of every single narrator--all speak beauty to the reader. The most beautiful verses of all nevertheless belong more to the realm of the spiritual than the literary. We know that. And we can't explain it.

There yet riots throughout--and more especially in the long narrative sweep from Alma on--an awkward and bedizening tangle of undergrowth: behold, or, and it came. . . Behold, and it came to pass that the people of Lamoni, or, the people of his kingdom. And the point? Behold, though too much with us, does signify: it signals a heightened intensity, the moment of surprise. Look at Helaman's letters to Moroni: though really pouring things on, he knows how to use the intensifier as correctly as any biblical writer. And it's beautiful in a biblical kind of way; and to the reader of Egyptian or of Hebrew it may even be very lovely. But we must look askance at it. We simply must.

And then there are Alma's incessant, and for the most part, never truly clarifying, phrases beginning with or. They shoot out of the undergrowth like ankle-seeking tendrils. And yet even these add a certain spell-binding ingredient--a search for heightened expression and exactitude, even in cases where no ambiguity is at hand. Or, especially in cases. . .

It's intriguing to see these or's as the translator's attempt to clear things up as he runs along. And, by the way, Joseph Smith is the translator. (Someone has a different idea?) Or, perhaps Mormon put them in: Alma's text may have seemed vague, non-specific, all the way through. But read Alma again: the or's, or Hebraic ki's or whatever they are, never cease roiling the sea of narrative, and it's clear the tick is built into the original text. It's part of the idiom; yet it's something no English speaker would have ever invented: with such constant, and unnecessary, interruption, such clarity by entanglement, you can never hope for literary beauty in English. And it's hard to believe the usage struck the Nephites as beautiful either. 

And yet, once the reader comes to expect the fracturing moments of amplification and clarification, what is awkward comes instead to charm. Frustration finally turns to truth, as we merge from fractured phrase to hypercorrection. What's the truth? It is that Moroni, Helaman, Alma, Ammon, all burden their crystalline, even scrubbed, narratives with or's quite purposefully. The rhetoric loops into a rococo search for specificity. Round and round the shell of narrative curves--the or-phrases conspiring with what is also a constant need to summarize what has just been plainly stated--and for what? Just to tell us it "was that same Zeezrom" who we met moments before in Ammonihah? Alma, who perfectly knows that the reader hasn't quite forgotten anyone bearing the name of Zeezrom, much less a principal and dramatic character, seems unhappy with even the slightest hint of a loose end. It is a peculiarity, a peculiarity for sewing up everything, and it is idiom, and. . . well. . . the Nephites can keep it. And I think we love it.