Although it is not clear how long Alma’s group has been in existence, it has doubled in size. While many of the members of the church would have lived with Alma, many still lived in Lehi-Nephi, as discussed above.
Text: There is no break at this point in the 1830 edition. While modern readers see a clear break between the stories of Alma and the next one of Limhi, Mormon did not separate them. Perhaps he placed them in the same chapter because they were happening almost simultaneously. The army that is sent to destroy Alma’s people causes Alma’s people to leave but also figures in the story of Limhi.
1. Alma the Younger similarly experienced a life-changing conversion. See Mosiah 27:24–31.
2. This phrase occurs with the same meaning in Enos 1:19; Mosiah 3:1, 18; 4:11; Alma 5:48; 7:6; 30:13; 58:40; Hel. 8:22–23.
3. John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1985), 176.
4. Ibid., 176–79.
5. See Geo Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion (Uppsala, Sweden: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1951), 35; and Richard J. Clifford, “The Temple and the Holy Mountain,” in The Temple in Antiquity, edited by Truman G. Madsen (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984), 111.
6. Clifford, “The Temple and the Holy Mountain,” 111.
7. John M. Lundquist, “The Common Temple Ideology of the Ancient Near East,” in The Temple in Antiquity, edited by Truman G. Madsen (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984), 66.
8. David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993), 31.
9. See Daniel C. Peterson, “Priesthood in Mosiah,” in The Book of Mormon: Mosiah, Salvation Only Through Christ, edited by Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr. (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1991), 187–210, for an important discussion of priesthood and church in this period of the Book of Mormon.
10. Joan E. Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997), 64–69, argues that while the miqveh functioned for both ritual cleansing and for proselyte baptisms, the function of the washing was always cleansing rather than a rite of initiation. That is, the ritual immersion cleansed the person but did not indicate that he or she had crossed a social boundary.
11. Ibid., 63.
12. Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 45.
13. Peterson, “Priesthood in Mosiah,” 202.
14. Angel Miguel Rodríguez, “The Place for Applause,” http://biblicalresearch.gc.adventist.org/ Biblequestions/applause.htm (accessed February 2005).
15. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 156–77.
16. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, 179, 224.
17. Cyril C. Richardson, ed., “Didaché,” in Early Christian Fathers (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1970), 174.
18. Karen Bassie, Unpublished, untitled manuscript, 1999, photocopy in my possession. Used by permission. Internal references removed.
19. Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1957–66), 3:203.
20. Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 188.
21. Peterson, “Authority in the Book of Mosiah,” 164–65.
22. Taylor, The Immerser, 52.
23. Ibid., 71–72.
24. Book of Mormon Critical Text: A Tool for Scholarly Reference, 3 vols. (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1987), 2:453–54; 2:475–79.
25. Ibid., 2:497, 2:670.
26. Royal Skousen, “How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon; Evidence from the Original Manuscript,” in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 27.
27. Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon,The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2005), Vol. 4, Part 3, 1371.
28. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 81.
29. Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1997), 128.
30. Daniel N. Schowalter, “Church,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 121.
31. Ibid.
32. Peterson, “Authority in the Book of Mosiah,” 173, uses a similar social definition of early Nephite religion: “I propose that the early Nephites found their primary social and religious identification in the very fact that they were Nephites.”
33. Ibid.
34. Horsley and Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom, 102–3. A trend of communalism has also been documented in the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 106–10.
35. For an analysis of koinonia (“community or fellowship”), see Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, 286–88.
36. Angel María Garibay K., Historia de la Literatura Nahuatl, 2 vols. (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1971), 1:65–66.
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