“Have Ye Taught This People?”

Brant Gardner

Textual: While Mormon's short interjection appears to be the reason he split the chapters, it is still somewhat problematic in that it is such a short interjection between cited material. Mormon tends to interject when he is leaving out material in the original, and therefore we may presume that there is some recorded event here that has been left out. It is difficult to speculate what that might be, because Abinadi's text appears to be here in full. Perhaps the skipped material had to do with the manuscript he may have been reading. Perhaps there was an official response from the priests declaring that they did believe in the laws that Abinadi has cited, similar to that which occurred earlier in his discourse. In this case, the similarity in this opening to that seen in Mosiah 12:37 ("…Have ye done all this? I say unto you, Nay, ye have not. And have ye taught this people that they should do all these things? I say unto you, Nay, ye have not.") could be seen as similar responses to similar stimuli, though 12:37 responds to comments in 12:32 which appear to have precipitated the recitation of the Mosaic proscriptions.

Multidimensional Commentary on the Book of Mormon

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