After Captain Moroni had torn his coat, the people tore their own garments to participate individually in the covenant. In this covenant they are essentially saying, “We agree with this and we will fight.” They threw their coats on the ground right in front of Moroni—right at his feet. But why at his feet? They were agreeing to be led by him and saying in effect, “We are below you. We will follow your command.” Captain Moroni probably walked around on their coats. While the text does not say this explicitly, it is implied by the words of the covenant:
We covenant with our God, that we shall be destroyed, even as our brethren in the land northward, if we shall fall into transgression; yea, he may cast us at the feet of our enemies, even as we have cast our garments at thy feet to be trodden under foot, if we shall fall into transgression” (Alma 46:22).
This dramatic symbolism of the making of a covenant, either civilly or religiously, and then depicting the punishment that would follow if they did not keep it was a standard part of covenant-making in the ancient world. For example, there are texts from the Hittite area, which is eastern Turkey today, in which people would make a contract or a covenant and they would take a small animal, sometimes a lamb or a dog, and they would cut off the animal’s head, or slit its belly open, and as they did, they would say, “May this happen to me if I do not keep this contract.” They would invoke that curse or consequence upon themselves. It was a way of saying “I am taking this very seriously.” That kind of symbolically dramatized covenant-making, not only among these soldiers but also with God, is what is happening here among the Nephites. War in the ancient world was always seen as involving God (or the gods) in many crucial ways.
Mark J. Morrise, “Simile Curses in the Ancient Near East, Old Testament, and Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 2, no. 1 (1993): 124–138.
Stephen D. Ricks, “‘Holy War’ in the Book of Mormon and the Ancient Near East,” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon: A Decade of New Research, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992), 58.
Stephen D. Ricks, “‘Holy War’: The Sacral Ideology of War in the Book of Mormon and in the Ancient Near East,” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1990), 103–117.