Rhetoric: In the Mesoamerican context, this statement takes on powerful added meaning. When Amulek asks if the blood of one man can atone for another, he uses the peculiar phrasing, if “any man… can sacrifice his own blood.… ” The Messiah’s blood was shed—by others, not by himself. Amulek says “sacrifice his own blood” because the king’s letting of some of his own blood was “the mortar of ancient Maya ritual life. The Maya let blood on every important occasion in the life of the individual and in the life of the community. It was the substance offered by kings and other nobility to seal ceremonial events.” Unquestionably, it would have been familiar to Amulek’s listeners. Amulek is contrasting the Messiah’s great atoning sacrifice to these familiar, similar, local versions.
Amulek then argues that even sacrificing one’s blood is ineffective to achieve atonement by noting that the law will not take the life of a murderer’s brother and thereby exonerate the murderer himself. Clearly Amulek expects his listeners to understand this argument. The Anti-Nephi-Lehites had accused themselves as being “murderers” in the context, I argue, of Mesoamerican human sacrifice. (See commentary accompanying Alma 24:9–11.) I believe that the same context applies here as well. The concept of murder in this religious sermon contrasts to the cult of war present in surrounding lands which did, in fact, sanction killing an “innocent” man for the religious benefit of those who captured him (his “murderers”). This human sacrifice takes a different form from the king’s ritual letting of his own blood, but it is part of the same religious worldview. Amulek is preaching the Messiah by showing points at which their current understandings are incorrect.