Under
the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts
The narrative
inscribed on the golden plates, translated by Joseph Smith as The Book of
Mormon, is the history of an ancient Hebrew tribe, headed by a virtuous man
named Lehi. In raising his large brood, Lehi drummed into the heads of his
offspring that the most important thing in life is to earn God’s love, and the
one and only way to do that, he explained, is to obey the Lord’s every
commandment.
Lehi and his
followers abandoned Jerusalem six hundred years before the birth of Christ,
just ahead of the last Babylonian conquest, and journeyed to North America by
boat. In the New World, alas, long-simmering family jealousies flared. Lehi had
always favored his youngest and most exemplary son, Nephi, so it shouldn’t have
surprised anybody when the old man bequeathed leadership of the tribe to him.
But this infuriated Nephi’s miscreant brother Laman, causing the tribe to split
into two rival clans after Lehi’s passing: the righteous, fair-skinned Nephites,
led by Nephi, and their bitter adversaries, the Lamanites, as the followers of
Laman were known. The Lamanites were “an idle people, full of mischief and
subtlety, whose behavior was so annoying to God that He cursed the whole lot of
them with dark skin to punish them for their impiety.
Shortly after the
resurrection of Christ, according to The Book of Mormon, Jesus visited North
America to share His new gospel with the Nephites and Lamanites and to persuade
the two clans to quit squabbling.
Tensions continued to
build, eventually sparking a full-blown was that culminated, around A.D. 400,
with a brutal campaign in which the reprobate Lamanites slaughtered all 230,000
of the Nephites [which explains why Columbus encountered no Caucasians when he
landed in the New World in 1492]. The victorious Lamanites survived to become
the ancestors of the modern American Indians, although eventually these “red
sons of Israel” lost all memory of both the Nephites and their Judaic heritage.
The leader of the
Nephites during their final, doomed battles had been a heroic figure of
uncommon wisdom named Mormon; the last Nephite to survive genocidal wrath of
the Lamanites was Mormon’s son Moroni, whose account of the Nephites’ demise
makes up the final chapters of The Book of Mormon. This same Moroni would
return as an angel fourteen centuries later to deliver the golden plates to
Joseph Smith, so that the blood-soaked history of his people could be shared
with the world, and thereby effect the salvation of mankind.
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