Mormon now returns to his story, including the crucial element of “much contention and many dissensions.” The division is so acute that many Zarahemlaites leave and move northward. They are most likely dissenters, since faithful Nephite believers are still in the land of Zarahemla and, for the moment, still in control. The faithful have the greatest motivation to stay, the dissenters to leave.
This exodus of dissenters is different from earlier schisms. Amalakiah, for instance, had led his supporters south into Lamanite territory, not north. Unlike when Morianton attempted this same northward migration, no one tries to stop them (Alma 50:33–36). Morianton’s thwarted effort had been no more than twenty-one years earlier. In other words, in two decades the Nephite government had lost either the ability or the will to stop dissidents from migrating northward. The risk of having dissidents in possession of the northern land was just as great now as it had been when Moroni instructed Teancum to intercept Morianton, but in this case, the exodus is allowed. Hagoth had earlier sailed north (Alma 63:4–9), but Mormon gives us no indication of whether we should consider them righteous or unrighteous. Historically, they were likely faithful. It is only in Mormon’s constructed history that the implication must be that those who are moving north are dissident Nephites who can symbolically carry Gadiantonism to the north from which it will return to destroy the Nephites in Mormon’s day. I read this episode as an escalation of the internal dissent among the Nephites, dissent that will have disastrous effects before the end of the book of Helaman.
F. Richard Hauck, archaeologist with the Archaeological Research Institute of Bountiful, Utah, sees the northward expansion as motivated by curiosity about the Jaredite lands resulting either from Mosiah’s translation of Ether’s twenty-four gold plates or from the aftermath of the last major Lamanite/Nephite war. But translating the plates occurred much earlier and their story was apparently kept from the people—certainly from Mormon’s record—until Moroni abridged and included them. Thus, this cause seems unlikely; and whatever interest had been sparked by finding the plates had died down long since. Furthermore, the Limhite exploring party who would have told about the discovery would also have described the scene of ruin, desolation, and great slaughter. It might have aroused curiosity, pity, and abhorrence, but not emigration.
The most recent Lamanite-Nephite war seems more likely; but Morianton’s abortive flight northward seems to have been caused more by dissent with the dominant Nephite group than an external cause such as population pressure. As I have already argued, internal disruptions in the Nephite polity allow this group to leave when Morianton’s had been intercepted.