Ether 9

Back to my story. Akish and his co-conspirators overthrew Omer’s kingdom.

But God had a soft spot for Omer and his loyal family members (i.e., not including Jared). He told Omer in a dream to get out of town. Omer did, travelling with his good kids past Shim Hill to an abandoned seaside resort called Ablom. They pitched tents there.

Jared, meanwhile, became king and as a consolation prize gave Akish his daughter for yet another trophy wife. Akish got together his ritual buddies and decapitated his father-in-law Jared while he was visiting with guests in the throne room. So Akish took over.

He got jealous of his son, though, and had him locked up in prison and then starved to death. Another son, though, Nimrah, set his jaw against his dad for killing his brother. He got some cronies and hooked up with Omer.

Akish kept having children through additional wives. As they grew up, they learned more and more the ropes of popular appeal, which included kickbacks, favoritism, and insider trading. Akish’s subjects were as hot for money as he was for power. His sons knew that and funneled money to influence peddlers who stoked up public sentiment on behalf of Akish’s sons.

A civil war broke out, limited in scope but seemingly endless in duration:

Akish vs. Akish’s sons. Through the vengeful years, the tit-for-tat reprisals annihilated both sides, with thirty who tried to stay out of the fray aligning with Omer.

With Akish and the Akishites dead or fled, Omer once again took over the kingship. Omer got old, but had more wives and kids, including Emer, to whom he designated the crown.

After anointing Emer king, Omer saw two years of peace—his last two years on earth. God started neutralizing the curse the land had acquired. People got richer, and leaner. They ate better and spent smarter. Sixty-two years of this.

Here’s an inventory of the kinds of wealth people had or were trying to get:

—exotic and obscure fruits and grains

—fine cloth and textiles

—gold, silver, and other precious metals

—livestock that included cattle, oxen, sheep, pigs, goats, and various other edible animals

—horses, donkeys, elephants, cureloms and cumoms.

So obviously God had blessed them. He enjoyed this locale and paid for his enjoyment by stocking up goods for his earthly friends.

But always the obligatory threat: landowners, if you sin, God will strike you dead. It always seemed formulaic overkill. But it helped people reason in themselves, consider how others (including God) saw them. It’s a brutal enterprise, but essential to gospel doctrine.

Emer judged well. And given the monarchial preference for an array of wives, he had many sons and daughters, one of whom was Coriantum, whom he anointed his successor. Emer lived four years past that, four really good years, which included a vision of God’s son, which pepped him up yet soothed him till his calm death.

Coriantum not only judged well, he had a building streak that raised a few whole cities up from bare earth. The people loved him. He could perhaps attribute his success to having no children to distract or try to kill him as was the tradition. His one hundred and two-year-old first wife died and freed him to marry a teenage girl. It became clear that first wife was the infertile one in the relationship: the teenager started having kids immediately, lots of them, till he died at age 142.

His successor was Com, who reigned forty-nine years, during which time he had Heth, who—you know the drill—eventually started plotting to kill his father. Heth learned the ancient secret conspiracy theories and practices, but in the end just ran a sword through his dad and that was that.

Wickedness breeds prophets—why cry repentance to good people? How bad people were getting could be seen not only in their unquestioning acceptance of familial coups, but in the exponential breeding of prophets telling them they were going to hell. The theme of this round of prophets was famine. God would send one soon unless people improved.

Notification of an imminent curse should, in theory, motivate behavioral revision. In practice it usually leads to the death of the messengers. The modus operandi of their deaths was now mostly the digging of deep holes, throwing the prophets in, and walking away. Heth preferred this as an ironic statement: you tell us nothing we plant will grow, eh? Then let’s plant you, Mr. Prophet.

The rainy season arrived and no rain. People had not even hedged their bets by storing up food in case the pit-dwelling prophets were right. Mass starvation set in.

For some reason the drought increased the fertility of deadly snakes. They startled people and snapped their jaws on them all through the territory. A plague of snakebite not only left heaps of bodies on the coroners’ porches but triggered mass exoduses of the sheep population, who seemed particularly afraid of snakes.

The sheep, along with a chunk of the surviving population, trotted southward (to what is now known as Zarahemla). But their passage was blocked by—more snakes, who seemed organized like anthills, unified in their basic project of injecting venom through their teeth into humans.

The blocking of travel led to cannibalism, the would-be migrants feasting on the corpses of snake victims just to survive. This was dicey, knowing how much venom had probably coursed through the bloodstream of the dead. Repentance did eventually set in. Desperate prayers ensued. Particularly when the survivors ran out of corpses-as-meals.

When they humbled themselves enough to placate the God of meteorology, rain resumed and the growing season with it. They thanked Yahweh for his mercies.