Samuel Uses Alma the Younger’s Law List to Warn against Sin

John W. Welch

Moreover, Samuel’s warning to the people of Zarahemla that they must not have “great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities” (13:22), reflects Alma 4:9 and 16:18, where Alma the Younger, as chief judge and then high priest, gave two law lists of rules required of his people in the land of Zarahemla. His lists included prohibitions against contentions, envyings, strife, malice, persecutions, pride, murders, and all manner of lasciviousness. By directly alluding to the traditional law of the land, Samuel the Lamanite was perpetuating the rules of public conduct that Nephi’s great-grandfather had laid down right there in Zarahemla, and which the people there would have known well as the standard by which they should have been living.

John W. Welch Notes

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