Alma 14:8
Of related interest is the mode of execution.
Certainly the Ammonihahites did not choose fire to fulfill Abinadi’s prophecy.
Why did the deaths of Abinadi, Noah, and these believers all take that form?
The Book of Mormon text provides no firm evidence about this concept. However,
a combination of possibilities seem reasonable, given Mesoamerican
characteristics. Part of its religious culture involved human sacrifice. It is
not an obvious influence at this stage of Book of Mormon history, but even this
early text contains hints that would be compatible with a nearby culture that
included human sacrifice. For instance, in a later sermon, Alma preached: “For
it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a
sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall
not be a human sacrifice; but it must
be an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10; emphasis mine). Alma may be
making a simple contrast, but I argue that he feels the need to explain the
difference between the Atoning Messiah’s sacrifice and the more common human
sacrifices of the Lamanites. Both the Aztec and Maya sacrificed human victims
to fire (David Carrasco, City of
Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization [Boson: Beacon Press, 1999], 97. For the Maya, see Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of ings: Dynasty and Ritual in
Maya Art [New York: George Braziller, 1986], 228). Although there is no
direct textual evidence, there are intriguing connection between the local
practice of human sacrifice by fire and these particular instances. The
dominance of the order of the Nehors in Ammonihah suggests in and of itself
that Mesoamerican ideologies had already been accepted, to some degree, by
Nephites who would Nehorism appealing. (Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of
Mormon, Volume 4: Alma [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007], 234-35)
Alma 24:9-11 (cf. Alma 34:11)
For the Maya, blood was the conduit for ch’ulel, or the “inner soul or spirit” (David
Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya
Cosmos: here Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path [New York: William Morrow
and Company, 1993], 201-2). Sacrificial bloodletting became both nourishment/worship
for the gods and the substitute sacrifice that renews creation (Roberta H.
Markman and Peter Markman, The Flayed
God: The Mesoamerican Mythological Tradition, Sacred Texts and Images from
Pre-Colombian Mexico and Central America [San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1992], 179). According to anthropologist Dennis Tedlock, this
principle of creation through sacrifice appears to have great antiquity in the
Mesoamerican region: “Puz, all the
way from its Mixe-Zoque (and possibly Olmec) sources down to modern Quiche,
refers literally to the cutting of flesh with a knife, and it is the primary
term for sacrifice. If it is read as a synecdoche in the present passage [of
the Popol Vuh], it means that the
creation was accomplished (in part) through sacrifice” (Dennis Tedlock, “Creation
in the Popol Vuh: A Hermeneutical Approach,” in Symbol and Meaning beyond the Closed Community, edited by Gary Gossen
[Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at
Albany, 1986], 79). The sacrificial blood could and did come from the king and
his queen but was augmented by the blood of captives taken in war. Classic Maya
inscriptions glorify the personal conquests of the kings and the humiliation
and sacrifice of the captives. The Bonampak mural commonly known as “the arraignment”
is a graphic depiction of the torturous bloodletting inflicted upon captives
(Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The
Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art [New York: George Braziller,
1986], 217) (Ibid., 354-55)
Alma 34:10
Amulek begins at the point of commonality: a
shared understanding about the relationship between sacrifice and atonement—not
the Messiah’s atonement but communal atonement. This principle was certainly
part of the Mosaic law, where animal sacrifices were not only part of worship
but would effect the communal atonement (Ex. 29:36, Lev. 23:27, Num. 6:10-11).
Mesoamerican cultural also offered parallel examples of animal sacrifices as
part of their worship and even human sacrifice (Human sacrifice is the most
spectacular of the Mesoamerican sacrifices, but other animals might be offered
as well. It is particularly noted of Quetzalcoatl that “you shall offer him,
you shall sacrifice before him only serpents, only butterflies.” Bernardino de
Sahagún, General History of the Things of
New Spain: Florentine Codex, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles
E. Dibble, 13 vols. in 12 [Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the
University of Utah, 1975], 10:160).
Amulek explicitly states that the Messiah’s
great atonement “shall not be a human sacrifice.” Human sacrifice was known and
accepted in the general culture. In Aztec worship, some of their human
sacrifices posed as gods when they were sacrificed. These humans-as-gods
enacted primal myths where the sacrifices of the gods established the known
world. Anthropologist David Carrasco describes the impersonator of the Aztec
god Tezcatlipoca:
The captive who best approximated this
negative description of perfection was chosen and carefully trained in several
Aztec arts, including music, smoking, and flower holding. But he was not just a
stationary, imprisoned paragon of beauty and culture for “very great care was
taken that he talk graciously, that he greet people agreeably on the road if he
met anyone . . . There was an assigning of lordship; he was importuned; he was
sighed for; there was bowing before him.” At an appointed time during his
year-long public displays and contact with the populace, Tezcatlipoca was taken
before the tlatoani (overlord or
king) Moctezuma, who ceremonially “repeatedly adorned him; he gave him gifts;
he arrayed him; he arrayed him with great pomp. He had all costly things placed
on him, for verily he took him to be his beloved god.” (David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the
Role of Violence and Civilization [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999], 119-20)
Amulek is teaching that the earthly Messiah
was not a deity impersonator, a human who died for a god. Jesus was “God
himself . . . come down among the children of men” (Mosiah 15:1). The atonement
was not effected through a human sacrifice, but a divine sacrifice. (Ibid.,
477)