Text: Mormon uses Korihor’s death to give us a short homily (“and thus we see”), stressing the moral of the story. Mormon created one literary contrast between the mission of Mosiah’s sons and the mission of Korihor with a second following between Alma as Yahweh’s spokesman and Korihor as Satan’s. Mormon concludes with a third contrast. Yahweh supports his children (Alma) while Korihor’s god (the devil) abandoned him.
There is no chapter break at this point in the 1830 edition. The separation of chapters allows us to conceptually separate the stories of Korihor and the Zoramites. However, Mormon saw them as part of the same story and organized his narrative to reflect that unit.
1. Rudy Giuliani, quoted in Pete Hamill, “Give Giuliani His Due: The Best Mayor Ever,” New York Daily News, January 1, 2002, http://www.petehamill.com/nydnews10102.html (accessed February 2004).
2. William Smith, Smith’s Bible Dictionary (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1970), 428–9; references standardized to the style used in this text.
3. Glenn L. Pearson and Reid E. Bankhead, Building Faith with the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986), 74–75; citation style standardized.
4. Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 63.
5. 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), 207.
6. Hugh Nibley, Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price: Personal Development 80, edited by Robert Smith and Robert Smythe (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Division of Continuing Education, 1986), 11, on GospeLink 2001, CD-ROM (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000).
7. John Gee, “A Note on the Name Nephi,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 189.
8. Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, edited by Don E. Norton (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1989), 111.
9. Brigham Young, quoted in Matthias F. Cowley, comp., Wilford Woodruff, His Life and Labors (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1916), 377–78.
10. One example would be the various versions of the origin myth known as the Legend of the Suns, which shows some regional variations. Brant A. Gardner, “Reconstructing the Ethnohistory of Myth: A Structural Study of the Aztec ‘Legend of the Suns,’” in Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community, edited by Gary Gossen (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany, 1986), 19–34.
11. David P. Wright, “Review of Wade Brown, The God-Inspired Language of the Book of Mormon: Structuring and Commentary,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, No. 1 (1989): 13.
12. This ideal begins with Nephi, who “did cause my people to be industrious, and to labor with their hands” (2 Ne. 5:17). This principle is both actively encouraged and used as a measure of apostasy when breached. See Mosiah 2:14, 9:12, 18:24, 27:4–5; Alma 1:3, 17:14, 24:18, 30:27, 30:32.
13. Although Mormon knows that he is writing for a future population, there is every indication that he assumes the future population will be people just like the ones he knows. He rarely explains things that he expects should be common knowledge.
14. S. Kent Brown, “Alma’s Conversion: Reminiscences in His Sermons,” in Alma: The Testimony of the Word, edited by Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1992), 151–52.
15. David P. Wright, “Review of Wade Brown,” 13.
16. John W. Welch, “Cursing a Litigant with Speechlessness,” in Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon, edited by John W. Welch and Melvin J. Thorne (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1999), 154–55, describes an Old World cursing to tie one’s tongue:
Such curses were common in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in the legal sphere. In recent decades, more than a hundred Greek and Roman binding spells—curses inscribed on small lead sheets that were folded up and pierced with a nail—have been recovered from tombs, temples, and especially wells near the law courts, where they were placed in hopes that a deity from the underworld would receive and act upon them.…
The largest body of Greek binding spells deals with litigation, with sixty-seven different defixiones [restraints or hindrances] invoking curses on legal opponents. The earliest of these dates to the fifth century B.C. Eleven of them ask the gods to bind the tongue of a legal opponent so he would lose the lawsuit.
This evidence is an interesting cultural parallel, but its relevance to the Book of Mormon is questionable. Even though the earliest of the defixiones comes close to the time of the Lehite departure from the Old World, we would still have to account for the retention of this custom in a new location and new circumstances for more than five hundred years. The circumstances are also different. Korihor is cursed with speechlessness as a sign of his guilt, and the defixiones curse their opponent so that they cannot testify, regardless of guilt or innocence. The parallel to the cursing is interesting but cannot be taken for more than that.
17. Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 6th ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 13. Coe also notes that the technique for making this bark paper was “diffused from eastern Indonesia to Mesoamerica at a very early date” (p. 58). John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen, “Biological Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages,” in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, edited by Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 268–70, note: “Making bark cloth and paper of mulberry bark is of particular significance to our thesis [of transoceanic diffusion] because of a pair of exemplary studies by Paul Tolstoy. He demonstrated that the bark cloth/paper manufacturing complex of Mesoamerica had detailed parallels to island Southeast Asian bark processing. At the same time MacNeish et al. excavated a stone bark beater in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico that they considered so similar to beaters of Java and the Celebes that they found it ‘extremely difficult’ to account for the similarity by ‘independent invention.’”
18. David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993), 207–10.
19. Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990), 426–27.
20. Freidel, Schele, and Parker, Maya Cosmos, 207–10.
21. Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Harper Perennial), 2002, 93, discusses the fate of poor serving girls who were cast out to beg along the highways and would typically die of starvation or disease. Without a social network or land to farm, an individual would be on his or her own. A beggar was unquestionably at the mercy of strangers. Korihor’s demise at the hands of the Zoramites was a classic case of one who was refused hospitality from those who believed that they did not owe it to this stranger.
Alma 31