Mosiah 29

Mosiah then took a national poll of who people wanted to be king. Highly unorthodox for a monarchy. A clear attempt at building a bridge to eventual democracy. The results came back. The winner was Mosiah’s son Aaron.

But Aaron had left town and already declined the offer of kingship. As I said earlier, all of Mosiah’s sons had begged off the chance to be the all-powerful ruler of a prosperous domain. Maybe they were smarter than people knew.

Mosiah sent out a new proclamation asking everyone to come up with some viable candidates, but not from his family. The potential for sibling rivalry to break out into full-scale war was too great, as they’d learned from the nation’s founding fathers, Lehi’s sons. He explained the delicacy of the situation, adding that people’s first concern in “electing” a king was to find someone who could keep peace. He agreed to remain king till death but to appoint judges for various districts, ones who would look not only to civil law but ecclesiastical law in meting out rewards and punishments. His argument: it’s better to be judged by God than by men. So since we still have to have men as judges—God’s got conflicts of interest—they should at least use the sacred plates as the law books.

If you could have kings as good as Benjamin—or even Mosiah, Mosiah argued—then kings would do fine. He then reviewed the high points of his own reign, perhaps overstating a little. But people do with all kinds of leaders they like, forgetting the lapses and remembering fondly the good times.

If all kings could be as good as he, Mosiah concluded, then monarchy would always be the best form of government. But one bad king and the whole system collapses. Because kings have no check on their power. So one unchecked all-powerful monarch could spoil generations, flattening the economy, polluting the culture, even losing all national property by reneging on the national defense.

Remember King Noah, he said, recounting Noah’s various abominations.

Had God not intervened, we’d still all be slaves because of King Noah. (He found it hard to even attach the title of “king” to this scoundrel.) We spent decades climbing out of the muck that Noah sank us in.

And you can’t unseat a bad king without massive bloodshed. Criminals network. That’s their modus operandi. They stick up for one another, avenge one another’s defeats. Get a bad king and he’ll always have more snitches and payers-back than you can predict. So while he’s tearing up the old laws and trampling God’s commandments, a bad king’s always got people around covering his tail.

He’ll make laws you can’t keep without being a moral criminal. He’ll make every sentence for lawbreaking death. He’ll use the army for personal vendettas. Trust me, you don’t want to allow any of that.

So I give you to choose by vote the men you want judging you, though they must be church men. Popular vote may be the best guarantee of the right outcome. It rarely turns out to be the worst. So this is, for now at least, the best form of choosing leaders. If it ever turns out not to be, God will fix the error. In his own severe idiom, no doubt.

As for judges judging wrongly, they too will have to submit to a higher judges—appeals courts. And even they will be responsible to ad hoc panels of judges. But we’ll worry about that when the time comes.

Remember, too, that God is also your judge, the most discerning, the fairest and most gracious as well as the most reliable.

Again, many of the wrongs that people do lie at the feet of their kings. And the punishment for that will land on the kings’ heads.

I want this land to be a land of liberty and justice for all. A nation of oneness under God.

(NB: Those are only extracts of the proclamation King Mosiah wrote. In the full text he gives more examples of the worst of kingship and details the agony of bad kings’ subjects.)

When people read the proclamation, or had it read to them, they loved it. And they gave up the monarchial election in favor of judges.

They had big assembles to debate and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of this man or that for office. These were highspirited affairs, since they’d never had a public voice like this one allowed them.

They also could not help expressing their love for Mosiah. They made checklists of all his beneficence. He had no craving for wealth, disliked taxation, hated war, made people peaceful, happy, and slavery-free. None better. No lapses they could recall.

They then elected judges,

with Alma Junior as the highest judge in the land. It made sense. He had the kind of artifacts that usually went with kingship in an undistinguished middle-sized kingdom.

Thus they began the so-called “Reign of Judges.”

Alma Senior soon died at the age of eighty-two, followed by Mosiah in the 33rd year of his reign, bringing us up to the 509th anniversary of Lehi’s ad hoc vacation.

Two great men dead: it had to come to this, of course. But the end of kings: a welcome sight.