For Laman to assert leadership in this murderous enterprise, he has to provide reasons for abandoning known moral standards. Thus, he recasts Nephi as a cunning trickster, a flim-flam artist whose dazzling rhetoric hides the truth. Laman attacks Nephi by becoming precisely what he accuses Nephi of being—a cunning liar. Laman focuses on undercutting Nephi’s spiritual stature and denying God’s favor in the Liahona/hunting episodes. In Laman’s sly words, those miracles become tricks of “cunning arts, that he may deceive our eyes.”