Alma 15: Zeezrom Asks to Be Healed and Gets a Question

Ben woke us a little after ten Monday night, hot and miserable. Melissa read the thermometer at 101.4. By Tuesday breakfast he was sitting up asking for toast as if nothing had happened. What I remember is standing in the bathroom doorway with a damp washcloth, thinking that Zeezrom's fever in Alma 15:3 arrives with its cause attached, which is more than any parent gets at that hour.

I wrote about Alma 14 on Saturday, in the post on the charge in verse 5 and Zeezrom's summary, and I'm not going back over it. Chapter 15 starts with the prison already down and runs nineteen verses, and almost none of them involve anyone doing anything dramatic. Zeezrom lies on a bed through verse 10. Three things in it kept pulling at me, so those are what I'll write about.

The fever comes with its own explanation

Verse 3 gives the cause.

And also Zeezrom lay sick at Sidom, with a burning fever, which was caused by the great tribulations of his mind on account of his wickedness, for he supposed that Alma and Amulek were no more; and he supposed that they had been slain because of his iniquity.

Watch "supposed," which appears twice. Nobody has told him they're dead. He has worked it out for himself, and the working out is making him sick, while we know from Alma 14:27-28 that they walked out of the fallen prison without a mark on them. He just hasn't heard.

When he does hear, verse 4 says his heart "began to take courage" and that he sent for them "immediately." Verse 5 says they went "immediately" too. Those two had spent many days bound, hungry and stripped of their clothes (Alma 14:22), and the first place they go afterward is the sickroom of the man Alma 10:31 calls the foremost to accuse them. Verse 5 simply says they went.

What Zeezrom asks for when they're standing there is stated plainly. He "stretched forth his hand, and besought them that they would heal him." He asks for the healing before he's said a word about what he believes.

Alma answers a request for healing with a question

Alma doesn't say yes or no. He takes Zeezrom by the hand and asks, "Believest thou in the power of Christ unto salvation?" (Alma 15:6). Zeezrom answers, "Yea, I believe all the words that thou hast taught."

The words he means are probably the ones in Alma 12, where Alma spoke to him directly after Amulek had silenced him, and where Zeezrom "began to inquire of them diligently" (Alma 12:8). I wrote about the other man in that conversation in the post on Antionah and the flaming sword. Chapter 15 is where it turns out Zeezrom had been listening the whole time, and he's saying yes to teaching he once built a trap around.

The question itself deserves a second look, because of the word "salvation." In Alma 11:34 Zeezrom asked Amulek, "Shall he save his people in their sins?", and now the same subject comes back at him from the other side, from the man he was trying to catch. He answers it without a hedge or a counter-question or a trick, which for a lawyer who spent Alma 11 building questions to catch people in their words is about the plainest thing he says in the whole account.

The exchange takes four verses. Alma says in verse 8 that the healing depends on belief in the redemption of Christ, Zeezrom answers in verse 9 that he believes "according to thy words," and then Alma prays.

O Lord our God, have mercy on this man, and heal him according to his faith which is in Christ.

The prayer is Alma's, and the measure in it is Zeezrom's. Alma doesn't ask on his own standing or on Amulek's. He asks that the healing fit what the sick man himself has just said he believes, and then verse 11 has Zeezrom on his feet.

Who was in Sidom when Zeezrom got up

In verse 1 we find out where they are. Sidom is where "all the people who had departed out of the land of Ammonihah" ended up, the ones "cast out and stoned, because they believed in the words of Alma." Verse 2 says Alma and Amulek heard from them "all that had happened unto their wives and children." Look back at Alma 14:8 and you know what that means. The wives and children were brought together and put in the fire, along with the records. The believers who are now in Sidom were the ones driven out and stoned, and they got away while their families did not.

Zeezrom was cast out in the same verse, Alma 14:7, "and also all those who believed in the words which had been spoken by Alma and Amulek." So the town where he lies sick holds people who lost their families to a crowd that Alma 14:6 says he had misled "by his lying words." He may have walked there with some of them. The text leaves the travelling to us.

In verse 11 he leaped upon his feet and began to walk, "to the great astonishment of all the people." Verse 12 has Alma baptize him and says that "he began from that time forth to preach unto the people." It says the people of Sidom, which is a land and not one room. Some of the refugees may well have been among his hearers, but verse 12 doesn't name them. What the verses do say is that the knowledge of the healing "went forth throughout all the land of Sidom" (verse 11) and that people "did flock in from all the region round about Sidom" to be baptized (verse 14).

What "checked as to the pride of their hearts" is doing in verse 17

Sidom gets its church in a single sentence, back in verse 13, where Alma "established a church in the land of Sidom, and consecrated priests and teachers in the land, to baptize unto the Lord whosoever were desirous to be baptized." That's the whole organization. No numbers, no building.

Verse 17 is one sentence that takes most of a breath to read aloud, and somewhere in the middle of it Alma sees "a great check," and the people "were checked as to the pride of their hearts, and began to humble themselves before God." Pride is what got stopped, and what followed was people gathering at their sanctuaries, "watching and praying continually." Meanwhile Ammonihah stays hard, "ascribing all the power of Alma and Amulek to the devil" (verse 15). Zeezrom has heard that accusation before. In Alma 14:7 the crowd turned it on him, asking whether he was "also possessed with the devil."

Amulek's gold in verse 16

The sentence that begins in verse 16 loses its way. It sets out to say something about Alma and Amulek, stops to note that Amulek had "forsaken all his gold, and silver, and his precious things" and been "rejected by those who were once his friends and also by his father and his kindred," and doesn't reach its verb until verse 18, where Alma finally "took Amulek."

It helps to go back to how Amulek introduced himself in Alma 10, where in verse 4 he says he has "many kindreds and friends" and has "acquired much riches by the hand of my industry." In 10:11 he says Alma's blessing rested on his house, "my women, and my children, and my father and my kinsfolk." Verse 16 lists what he lost, and the father and the kindred and the friends are all there. His wife and children aren't mentioned in 15:16 at all.

Verse 18 is the last thing the chapter does with him. Alma takes Amulek "to his own house, and did administer unto him in his tribulations, and strengthened him in the Lord." Amulek had said in Alma 10:10 that Alma "hath dwelt at my house," and in Alma 8:21 he set bread and meat in front of a hungry prophet. Now the house is Alma's and Amulek is the one being taken in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Alma heal Zeezrom by his own power?

The chapter points the other way. Alma asks a question first and then prays for the Lord to heal him "according to his faith which is in Christ" (verse 10), and Zeezrom gets up in verse 11. I'd leave it at what the verses say.

Was there a baptismal interview for Zeezrom?

The text says only that "Alma baptized Zeezrom unto the Lord." Nothing else is recorded. Moroni 6:2 describes later practice, with a "broken heart and a contrite spirit," and that's a summary of how the church worked afterward, so I wouldn't read it back into Sidom.

Is Sidom the same as the river Sidon?

No. Sidom is a land, spelled with an m. The river is Sidon, as in "the waters of Sidon" in Alma 4:4. Easy to mix up when you're skimming.

What happened to Amulek's family?

The book doesn't say. It names his friends, his father and his kindred as the ones who rejected him, and verse 18 has Alma taking him home to Zarahemla.

Verse 19 closes out the tenth year of the judges, the year Amulek says in Alma 10:6 he stopped rebelling.

— D.