How Many Priests Did King Noah Have?

John W. Welch

We will later learn that King Noah’s wicked priests later kidnapped the Lamanite daughters, and we can assume that they took one each. Since twenty-four of the Lamanite daughters were abducted, that becomes one evidence that King Noah had 24 priests (Mosiah 20:1–5).

Several other evidences support that conclusion, as I argue in my chapter "The Trial of Abinadi." For example, in Israel, the seventy members of the Sanhedrin sat in three rows, and seventy divided by three is twenty-three and a third. One of the rows had twenty-four and the other two rows had twenty-three. For the big cases, you had to have the full Sanhedrin, all seventy. For a minor case, or for a case tried outside of Jerusalem, you just had to have one row: twenty-three or twenty-four. So that number seems to me to be at least plausible.

Further Reading

John W. Welch, "The Trial of Abinadi," in The Legal Cases in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 2008), 170–173.

John W. Welch Notes

References