Английская Википедия:Ammonihah
Шаблон:Use American English Шаблон:Short description Шаблон:Infobox fictional location
Ammonihah (Шаблон:IPAc-en)[1] is a city mentioned in the Book of Mormon that is governed by a class of lawyers and judges who lead an aristocratic and materialistic social order. When the Book of Mormon prophet Alma visits Ammonihah as part of a ministerial tour, the city becomes the setting of "one of the most disturbing episodes"Шаблон:Sfn of the text in which Ammonihah's governing elite imprison him, exile any men converted by his preaching, and kill women and children associated with his mission by fire.
The narrative set in Ammonihah is intertextual with the Old and New Testaments. Literary and theological scholarship treat the Ammonihah story as an exploration of suffering and a turning point in the Book of Mormon's use of the phrase "lake of fire and brimstone" as a metaphor for hell.
Artist John Held Sr. was commissioned to depict Ammonihah in two woodblock prints for George Reynolds's 1888 The Story of the Book of Mormon. These were among the first published illustrations of Book of Mormon content.
Background
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the primary religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement.Шаблон:Sfn In the book's narrative, a family flees Jerusalem in approximately 600 BCE, prophetically directed to escape the Babylonian captivity. Led by God, they arrive in the Americas and establish a society which, due to a deepening fraternal disputation, splits into two: the Nephites and the Lamanites. Despite preceding the advent of Jesus, the Nephites have a Christian society with prophets among them. The majority of the story is framed as the retrospective work of its principal narrator, Mormon, a Nephite who lives near the end of the chronological narrative and reflexively describes creating the text that is the Book of Mormon by abridging and quoting from Nephite history.Шаблон:Sfn
Book of Alma
The Book of Mormon is further divided into fifteen internal books, named after prophets in the text in a manner reminiscent of the prophetic books of the Bible.Шаблон:Sfn The ninth book is the book of Alma, named after Alma, a prophet who is the son of the late founder of the then-current incarnation of the Nephite church. In this sub-book, Mormon narrates Alma's ministry and that of his son Helaman during the "reign of the judges", a period in which rule by judges has replaced monarchy in Nephite society.Шаблон:Sfn
The book of Alma structurally divides into four quarters that alternatively parallel each other. In the first and third quarters (Alma 1–16 and 30–44), Alma encounters dissent among Nephites and responds; in the second and fourth quarters (Alma 17–29 and 45–63), Mormon narrates Nephite–Lamanite interactions.Шаблон:Sfn
The Ammonihah narrative is framed by an inclusio spanning Alma 9–16.Шаблон:Sfn
Nephite dissenters and Alma
Prior to the Ammonihah narrative, the Book of Mormon develops an ongoing plot depicting a series of dissident movements in Nephite society whose participants reject the Nephite church's orthodoxy on the need for a Redeemer.Шаблон:Sfn The first of these are called "unbelievers", and in Alma's first appearance he is an active and highly persuasive unbeliever who convinces "many of the people to do after the manner of his iniquities".[2] Alma's life drastically changes when a divine being appears and commands him to repent, and in a reversal typologically related to the apostle Paul's story in the New Testament, Alma does repent.[3] His transformation is so complete he goes on to become high priest of the Nephite church.[4]
In addition to being high priest of the church, Alma spends some time ruling as chief judge.[5] Early into his career, the Book of Mormon describes Alma overseeing the case of a man named Nehor who, during a debate about religion, murders a Nephite church member.[6] Nehor is also the founder of a new church whose teachings are similar to the ideas of the unbeliever movement Alma was part of. Despite the resemblance to his past self, Alma sentences Nehor to death for the murder.Шаблон:Sfn Nehor's ideas spread among some Nephites, and Ammonihah is a community that accepts the teachings of Nehor.[7]
Setting
The Book of Mormon describes Ammonihah as a city founded by (and named after) a man also called Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn Relative to the Nephite capital of Zarahemla, Ammonihah lies beyond the city of Melek,[8] and it is located in the western portion of Nephite territory.Шаблон:Sfn As a community, Ammonihah is politically and religiously separated from the rest of Nephite society, as they have their own judges and are followers of Nehor's teachings.[9] An elite class of judges and lawyers, unique in the Book of Mormon to Ammonihah,Шаблон:Efn govern the city.[10] The city's residents are called Ammonihahites.Шаблон:Sfn
Narrative
Ministry
The Ammonihah narrative begins in the Book of Mormon's tenth year of the reign of the judges[11] with Alma on a preaching tour throughout Nephite cities, having stepped down as chief judge in order to focus on spiritual ministry.Шаблон:Sfn Ammonihah is the fourth city he preaches in, after doing so in Zarahemla, Gideon, and Melek.Шаблон:Sfn When Alma arrives at Ammonihah, the people abruptly refuse to give him an audience, aggressively mock him and the Nephite church, and turn him out from the city.[12] Alma leaves, but once he is outside the city, an angel directs him to return and preach repentance to Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn The angel warns Alma that Ammonihah is not only doctrinally heterodox but also plotting political sedition, as some "study at this time that they may destroy the liberty of thy people".[13] Шаблон:Quote box When Alma reenters the city, he meets Amulek, a resident of Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn Having been commanded by an angel to host Alma,Шаблон:Sfn Amulek offers Alma food and a place to stay, which Alma accepts.Шаблон:Sfn Alma invokes a blessing on Amulek's home and family,Шаблон:Sfn and they commence preaching in Ammonihah as a duo.Шаблон:Sfn The Book of Mormon goes on to stress, eight times, Amulek's house as a setting for his hospitality, highlighting by contrast with Amulek's welcoming attitude the inhospitable reception Ammonihah initially gave to Alma.Шаблон:Sfn
Ammonihah lawyers and judges confront Alma and Amulek, accusing the pair of trying to undermine Ammonihah's aristocratic and materialistic political order.Шаблон:Sfn Among these interlocutors are the lawyer Zeezrom and the chief judge Antionah.[14] When Zeezrom addresses Amulek, he foregoes asking questions and attempts to bribe Amulek into denying the existence of God[15] by offering him six onties, an amount in the Book of Mormon monetary system that amounts to forty-two days' wages as a judge.[16] Amulek rejects the bribe and retorts that Zeezrom values money more than God.Шаблон:Sfn
Alma uses stark imagery in his sermonizing at Ammonihah. He warns that for those who fail to repent and therefore experience "spiritual death", their "torments shall be as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever".[17]
Some residents of Ammonihah respond to Alma and Amulek's preaching by repenting and reading the scriptures.Шаблон:Sfn Others, however, are outraged, and these eventually seize the pair and imprison them.Шаблон:Sfn Alma and Amulek's are accused of having "reviled against the law [in Ammonihah], and their lawyers and judges", and threatening to undermine Ammonihah's government.[18] The plot escalates into a mass persecution as the Ammonihah majority drive male Christian converts out of the city (despite Amulek having specifically warned the Ammonihahites that God "will come out against you" if they "cast out the righteous"), arrest their wives and children, and seize any scripture in their possession.[19]
Martyrdoms
After gathering Christian scriptures and prisoners, the people of Ammonihah create a fire in which they destroy scriptures and burn women and children alive as an intentional and distorted reference to Alma's sermon.Шаблон:Sfn Any who believed Alma and Amulek's teachings or listened to them at all become victims in Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn A chief judge brings Amulek and Alma to the "place of martyrdom" and forces them to watch, and he asks, "After what ye have seen, will ye preach again unto this people, that they shall be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone?"[20] Kylie Nielson Turley explains, the judge "ensures that Alma understands the brutal irony at the heart of this horror. Alma's unfortunate gospel metaphor about a lake of fire and brimstone prompts the literal lake of fire and brimstone that burns before his eyes".Шаблон:Sfn
The people of Ammonihah keep Alma and Amulek imprisoned. The jailers take away their clothing, mock them, starve them, and even beat them.Шаблон:Sfn After days spent in this manner, Alma and Amulek finally escape through miraculous deliverance when the prison, in response to a prayer by Alma, spontaneously collapses without harming them. They leave Ammonihah and reunite with survivors in a place called Sidom,Шаблон:Sfn where a community of Nephites are sheltering surviving refugees from Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn This is the first occurrence in the Book of Mormon of a community taking in religious refugees, which goes on to become a recurring trope for the rest of the book.Шаблон:Sfn
In Sidom, Alma and Amulek encounter an ailing Zeezrom, who has survived and repented, and Alma miraculously heals him.Шаблон:Sfn Amulek is no longer in possession of any of the wealth he had while living in Ammonihah,Шаблон:Sfn and he has implicitly lost his immediate family to the fires.Шаблон:Efn The story closes with Alma taking Amulek into his home where he "did administer unto him in his tribulations".[21]
Aftermath
Some time after Alma and Amulek leave Ammonihah, Lamanites attack the city and destroy it.[22] As the narrator of the book and the compiler in the framing narrative, Mormon places Ammonihah's destruction in the context of an unexpected Nephite–Lamanite war, casting the leveling of the city and its people as divine retribution for the violence committed in the narrative.Шаблон:Sfn The Nephites repel the Lamanite invasion, but Ammonihah is destroyed, with the scale of death so immense the resulting odor discourages reoccupation of the area for years.Шаблон:Sfn Because the Ammonihahites were followers of Nehor, the city's ruins are called the "Desolation of Nehors".[23]
In the rest of the Book of Mormon, Ammonihah briefly reappears twice. The first time is in Alma 25, when Mormon recapitulates its destruction as part of an overlapping plot involving war and politics, portraying Ammoniha's destruction earlier in the book as not wholly sudden but the result of other Nephite–Lamanite tensions.[24] The last appearance is set ten years later in Alma 49, in which the city of Ammonihah—described as having been rebuilt with fortifications under the direction of Nephite military leader Captain Moroni—repels a Lamanite attack.[25]
Intertextuality
The Utah Monthly compares Alma's departure from and immediate return to Ammonihah to the Book of Mormon's later plot involving a Lamanite prophet named Samuel who attempts to preach in the Nephite capital of Zarahemla, leaves after being rebuffed, and receives a divine command to return to the city and again attempt to preach.[26] Samuel's reception in Zarahemla thus alludes to Alma's encounter in Ammonihah, implying Zarahemla had become, like Ammonihah, less committed to egalitarian Christian society.[26]
Amulek's hosting of Alma at the command of an angel resembles the story of Lot hosting angels in Sodom: for both Amulek and Lot, providing hospitality to divinely sent messengers (a prophet in Amulek's case and angels in Lots) against the grain of the inhospitable surrounding community (Ammonihah or Sodom) comes at a terrible cost to them and their families, as the mob of Sodom attacks Lot's daughters while Ammonihah kills Amulek's family.Шаблон:Sfn
The martyrdoms at Ammonihah may parody the instructions for sacrifices given in Leviticus 16 (part of the Acharei Mot), in which God instructs Aaron and Moses to release one goat as "a scapegoat into the wilderness" and to take another as a "sin offering" to "burn in the fire".[27] The men cast out from Ammonihah parallel the scapegoat while the women and children "serv[e] as a grotesque sin offering", G. St. John Stott explains.Шаблон:Sfn Alma's statement about the martyrdom that "the blood of the innocent" will "cry mightily against" the murderers to God alludes to Genesis 4:10.[28]
When Alma justifies God not intervening to save the martys at Ammonihah, he says "the Lord receiveth them [the martyrs] up unto himself, in glory", and Stott connects this statement to the words of the martyr Thomas Bilney as given in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, who said that although martyrdom entailed "pain for a time", there followed "joy unspeakable".[29]
Alma's and Amulek's divinely-enabled escape from the Ammonihah prison resembles the New Testament's prison deliverance stories: the liberation of Peter in Acts 12 and that of Paul and Silas in Acts 16.Шаблон:Sfn The prayer Alma gives that precipitates his and Amulek's deliverance alludes to Samson's prayer in Judges 16.Шаблон:Sfn
Interpretation
Literary scholar Kylie Nielson Turley writes that the Ammonihah story is "one of the most disturbing episodes in the Book of Mormon" on account of its abruptly graphic violence and the twisted, personal motives behind that violence.Шаблон:Sfn Professor of scripture Charles Swift considers the story "one of the most poignant in all of scripture", observing that what starts as an uplifting story about Alma and Amulek becoming friends and colleagues "ends with the horrible death of innocent women and children and Amulek's having lost everything".Шаблон:Sfn
Suffering
The narrative set in Ammonihah invites readers to ponder why a god capable of miracles seemingly allows suffering and evil to exist. In the story, God delivers Alma and Amulek from prison but does not stop women and children from being burned at Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn While watching the mass killing, Alma tells Amulek that God forbids him and Amulek from invoking a miracle to intervene, and Alma concludes that the deaths are willed by God so that he can receive them into heavenly paradise and visit just punishment on Ammonihah.Шаблон:Sfn In a commentary, Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming consider this an unsatisfactory theology of suffering, stating that "Alma's response does not stand up to the scrutiny of the people's pain in front of him".Шаблон:Sfn Religious studies scholar Grant Hardy calls Alma's justification "a troubling interpretation of theodicy, in which God allows terrible suffering to be inflicted on the innocent in order to condemn the wicked perpetrators".Шаблон:Sfn Within the Book of Mormon's framing narrative, Alma's theological exposition may be read as a lapse on Alma's part, caused by shock from the carnage, or as a case of Mormon as narrator-editor inserting an attempted explanation for inexplicable horror.Шаблон:Sfn Ultimately, the Ammonihah narrative, Salleh and Olsen Hemming explain, "does not necessarily answer the question" of suffering in a world with God and instead "it simply invites us to sit with it."Шаблон:Sfn
Fire imagery
Ammonihah marks a turning point in the Book of Mormon's vocabulary. In the Book of Mormon before and during the Ammonihah arc, "lake of fire and brimstone" is a relatively common metaphor for hell and spiritual death.Шаблон:Sfn However, after Alma and Amulek escape Ammonihah, the phrase "lake of fire and brimstone" is never repeated for the remainder of the book.[30] This can be read as a Nephite cultural response to the tragedy.Шаблон:Sfn Alternatively, in the context of the framing narrative it can be read part of Mormon's character as the internal editor-historian, responding to his own experience of reading the Ammonihah story.Шаблон:Sfn
Artistic depictions
Artistic depictions of scenes of Ammonihah appear in George Reynolds's 1888 The Story of the Book of Mormon, a book containing what Noel Carmack identifies as "the first published attempt at illustrating the Book of Mormon".Шаблон:Sfn John Held Sr., an engraver and the father of cartoonist John Held Jr.,Шаблон:Sfn created The Martyrdoms at Ammonihah and The Deliverance of Alma and Amulek (both pictured above) as woodblock prints. Carmack calls Martyrdoms Held's "strongest, most skillful piece" created for Story of the Book of Mormon and considers its "complex, action-filled" scene rare even in contemporary Book of Mormon art.Шаблон:Sfn
See also
Notes
Citations
Sources
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
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- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite journal
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Refend
External links
- Chapter 24 of The Story of the Book of Mormon which depicts Ammonihah in prose and with John Held Sr.'s accompanying prints, on the Internet Archive
- Шаблон:Sourcetext, the chapter of Ammonihah's first appearance in the Book of Mormon, on Wikisource Шаблон:Bots
- ↑ churchofjesuschrist.org: "Book of Mormon Pronunciation Guide" (retrieved 2012-02-25), IPA-ified from «ăm-a-nī´hä»
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ For Zarahemla as the Nephites' capital city, see Шаблон:Harvnb; for Ammonihah's location in the setting relative Zarahemla, see Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ For Amulek's warning, see Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotations are Шаблон:Sourcetext. For the mass persecution, see Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb.
- ↑ 26,0 26,1 Шаблон:Cite magazine.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. The Book of Mormon quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb. Book of Mormon quotation is Шаблон:Sourcetext.
- ↑ Шаблон:Harvnb; Шаблон:Harvnb.
