John Sorenson’s third chapter of his monumental new work, Mormon’s Codex, spans just over 36 pages. It looks at the entire Book of Mormon record, both the culture of the Jaredites and the culture of the Nephite-Mulekite-Lamanite conglomerate, through the lens of what he calls “Culture History.” Think of it as a presentation of how I imagine Sorenson would deliver a scholarly paper on “An Introduction to the Culture of Book of Mormon Peoples” to a non-LDS audience of professional anthropologists. I found this chapter singularly riveting and learned some new things I had missed before, including some minutiae on the nature of Lamanite political structure. Here are Sorenson’s comments in footnote 14: “Lamoni was a descendant of Ishmael, progenitor of one of the original component tribes of the Lamanite conglomerate, yet his father, the overall king, puzzlingly is nowhere spoken of as an Ishmaelite. Rulership among the Lamanites was implied to have been a privilege of the descendants of Nephi’s brother Laman (Mosiah 10:6). Yet another subking (over the land of Middoni) was not said to be Lamoni’s ‘brother’ but only his ‘friend’ whom Lamoni thought he could influence by flattery. How descent actually was involved in the governance of the Lamanite kingdom(s) is thus a mystery.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 05:19:22 +0000
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