Alma 18: Ammon Starts With the Word the King Already Had

Alma 18:24 is a yes-or-no question, and the answer in verse 25 isn't the one a teacher hopes for.

And Ammon began to speak unto him with boldness, and said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God?

And he answered, and said unto him: I do not know what that meaneth.

By this point Lamoni has spent twenty verses wondering whether Ammon is the Great Spirit, so he's no man without religion. Verse 5 calls the Great Spirit his tradition, "which he had received from his father." What verse 25 shows is narrower than it first sounds: the word "God" doesn't connect to anything for him. It doesn't show that nobody had ever said the word in his hearing. In Alma 22:9 his own father asks Aaron, "Is God that Great Spirit that brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem?" So the word was somewhere in the family, and it never landed on the thing Lamoni already believed in. Ammon's next move is to leave the word alone and ask about the thing.

What the servants said, and what the king heard

I had always read the first eleven verses as a king working himself up. On a second pass I think he was handed something. In verse 2 the king puts a question to his servants: "is not this the Great Spirit who doth send such great punishments upon this people, because of their murders?" The servants answer in verse 3, and they open with what they don't have: "Whether he be the Great Spirit or a man, we know not." Then they say what they do know, that Ammon can't be slain and that the flocks are safe when he is with them. And then comes a sentence that is easy to read past: "And now, O king, we do not believe that a man has such great power, for we know he cannot be slain."

Whatever that sentence is, it isn't a claim to know, and it comes from men who had just watched the fight and weren't going to pretend otherwise. Verse 4 opens, "when the king heard these words," and he says, "Now I know that it is the Great Spirit." The servants said "we know not" and "we do not believe," and the king kept the second half of that and spoke it back as knowledge. He gives his reason in the same verse: the Great Spirit has come "that I might not slay you as I did your brethren."

Verses 5 and 6 explain who is doing the hearing, a man who had killed many servants because their brethren had scattered flocks at the place of water, and in whom "Lamoni began to fear exceedingly, with fear lest he had done wrong." By verse 11 it's "Now I surely know," and then "I would desire him that he come in unto me, but I durst not." I can't say whether the servants meant to nudge him. A king afraid of what he's done will take a lean and call it proof, and nothing in the chapter corrects him for it. The correction, when it comes, is Ammon's "I am not" in verse 19.

An hour at the king's chair

I wrote last Thursday about the seventeen verses that come before the fight, and chapter 18 is the aftermath. Ammon has been readying the horses and chariots. He comes in, sees the king's countenance changed, and is halfway out again when a servant calls him back with the title Rabbanah.

He asks what the king wants, and verse 14 says the king "answered him not for the space of an hour, according to their time, for he knew not what he should say unto him." Ammon asks again in verse 15 and gets nothing. It's the one place in the chapter where somebody simply has no words, and it's the king.

A full hour.

Ammon, "being filled with the Spirit of God," says out loud what the king has been turning over: that it's the fight, the sling and the sword and the arms of the seven men. Then he adds, in verse 17, "Behold, I am a man, and am thy servant." The king asks outright, "Art thou that Great Spirit, who knows all things?" and Ammon says four words, "I am not."

The king offers him anything, even armies to guard him, "but I know that thou art more powerful than all they." Ammon takes none of it. In verse 22 he asks for one thing, that the king hearken to him. Alma 26:12 has Ammon looking back on his mission and saying "I know that I am nothing," which makes the "I am not" in verse 19 sound less like politeness than like something he already believed.

Three questions, each built on the last

Between verses 24 and 32 Ammon asks questions small enough that the king can answer each one. God, the king doesn't know. A Great Spirit, "Yea." Then Ammon says "This is God," and asks whether this Great Spirit created all things. The king believes it for the earth and adds, "but I do not know the heavens." Ammon does not argue with the tradition, and he does not tell the king his father was wrong. He takes the word the king has and says what it points to. When the king stalls at the heavens, Ammon gives him a single sentence about where God dwells, and by verse 31 the king is asking his own question: "Is it above the earth?"

Melissa's father told a story at Easter dinner a couple of years ago, in their kitchen in St. George, about a rancher out of Veyo who hadn't sat in a dentist's chair since he was nine. Robert said he could see the man's hands going white on the armrests before he'd opened his mouth. When it was time for the needle the rancher asked what it was going to feel like, and Robert said, "Like a poke. Here comes the poke." He called it the poke for the rest of the visit and never once said anesthetic. The man came back the next spring with his wife.

The long part

Verse 36 goes back to the creation of the world and of Adam, through the fall, and lays out the records and the holy scriptures "down to the time that their father, Lehi, left Jerusalem." Verse 37 follows the fathers into the wilderness, with the hunger and thirst. Verse 38 is the one I would have been tempted to skip. Ammon relates "the rebellions of Laman and Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, yea, all their rebellions," and he does it to a Lamanite king with his servants standing in the room. Verse 36 had already called Lehi "their father," so these are the king's own people being described.

Then verse 39, "But this is not all." The plan of redemption "prepared from the foundation of the world," the coming of Christ, and "all the works of the Lord."

And it came to pass that after he had said all these things, and expounded them to the king, that the king believed all his words.

And he began to cry unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, have mercy; according to thy abundant mercy which thou hast had upon the people of Nephi, have upon me, and my people.

The phrase "the people of Nephi" is new in verse 41, so I take the phrase to be something he picked up in what he had just heard. He asks for the mercy he was told about, for himself and for his people. In verse 42 he falls to the earth "as if he were dead."

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Great Spirit in Alma 18?

It's the king's phrase, a tradition from his father according to verse 5. Ammon doesn't argue with it. In verse 28 he says "This is God," and then describes that God as the creator of all things, living in heaven with his holy angels, who knows "all the thoughts and intents of the heart." Aaron has a close parallel with Lamoni's father in Alma 22:9-10, where the father asks if God is that Great Spirit and Aaron says "Yea."

Why does Ammon say "I am not" and then "I am a man"?

The two lines answer different questions. In verse 18 the king asks if Ammon is the Great Spirit who knows all things, and he says no. In verse 33 the king asks if he was sent from God, and Ammon answers "I am a man," called by God's Holy Spirit to teach. I don't see a conflict. He turns down the king's category and gives his own.

Did Lamoni convert in Alma 18?

The chapter says he "believed all his words" in verse 40 and prays for mercy in verse 41. It says nothing about baptism, and it ends with him on a bed for two days and two nights. Alma 19 picks it up from there, and I would read that one before deciding.

What does "caught with guile" mean in verse 23?

The narrator says it right after the king agrees to believe whatever Ammon tells him. Verse 22 has just called Ammon "wise, yet harmless," so I don't think the text is accusing him of cheating. What bothers me about the phrase is below.

What I still don't like about this chapter

I don't like "caught with guile." Ammon asks permission in verse 22 and that is fair enough, but the king answers "Yea, I will believe all thy words" before he has heard one of them. The narrator's word for that is guile, and I can't make it sit comfortably next to harmless. I've read it as a man being drawn into a conversation and as a trap, and the text won't tell me which.

The other thing is how little the chapter does with the servants he killed. Verses 5 and 6 give the king's fear two sentences, and nothing afterward records Ammon saying a word about those men. It is the one place where the king has something to repent of that he already knows about, and I wish the chapter had gone back there.

— D.