Four years later, in the forty-sixth year of the judges, there were many groups of people migrating into the land northward—especially from among the Ammonites. These were the sons and possibly the grandsons of the pacifists who had sworn the oath to resist taking up arms. They had prospered, partly because fewer of them in their population group had died. They may have felt that they did not really belong in the Land of Nephi. In some ways, they were still Lamanites—they had their own history and traditions. They may have realized that they had been a cause of much of the continuing conflict between the Lamanites and the Nephites. The Lamanites were still trying to reclaim parts of the Nephite land to get the Ammonites back. As pacifists committed by righteous conversion and covenant, the Ammonites decided to move through the narrow neck of land and to relocate in the land northward.
Helaman2 probably approved and politically allowed this extraordinary migration, in the same spirit that his father had taken the extraordinary step of marching at the head of the young Ammonite soldiers. There must have been a good relationship between Helaman2 and the Ammonite people personally. This was probably the case because of the debt owed by the Ammonites to Helaman1, even though Helaman2 may not have spent very much time with his father, who was out in the battlefield for much of his son’s youth.