Mosiah 8

With that King Limhi finished, though I only wrote a few squibs of a massive address. He then had Ammon go over Zarahemla’s history and King Benjamin’s now legendary speech. That done, Limhi sent the crowds home. Then he got some more plates out of the vault. Till now, no one could read them. Some languages die fast.

Limhi asked Ammon if he could interpret. Not my thing, Ammon told him.

Limhi explained: “I sent forty-three men into the wilds to find Zarahemla to get some backup so we could take on the Lamanites. They got lost, never found Zarahemla, but did find the ruins of something. A full population of bones scattered around. Some holocaust had happened.

“They picked through the wreckage and found these twenty-four ornately engraved gold plates along with brass and copper breastplates all in good condition. Swords too, though pretty beat up—hilts frayed and broken, blades rusted out. Still, major collectables. But it was those plates that made me ask if you could translate. So, if not you, do you know anyone who can translate? I think they might have some facts on a slice of our own people, now gone.”

Ammon said, “I know someone, absolutely. No schooling for it, but this weird gift where he looks through magic spectacles—though only on God’s commands—and sees any foreign words appear in his own language. It’s like speaking in tongues, but actually reading in tongues. Along those lines, anyway. Understandably, he’s called a ‘seer.’ Coincidentally, he’s also our king in Zarahemla.”

Limhi didn’t know what to say and so said the first thing that popped into his head: “A seer is greater than a prophet.”

Ammon replied: “Same difference. It’s all God working through a man. But, I’ll go with that. Most prophets aren’t seers, but all seers are prophets too. Or, think of it this way. A prophet focuses on the future, a seer a little more on the past. He sees secrets, sometimes from the future, but sometimes hidden in the past, surprises from history. All futurity is a surprise. But the past is as full of surprises as the future, if you have a seer around. So they’re hard to beat when it comes to God-talkers, as we used to call them.”

Limhi had to laugh. Ammon was clever and voluble. And what he said rang so true to what Limhi hoped. “Oh, these plates have some important mystery to them, I can just feel it,” he said. He then waxed poetic himself about how God had prepared this whole episode to thicken the world’s plot in ways that would open people’s eyes to the mystery all around them. If men are blind, he said, God sees everything. He then got a little carried away: Men are, he said, like a flock of wild sheep bleating their lungs out as they run from a shepherd into the gaping jaws of lions and bears.

By which he meant that men resist leadership from men with greater insight. In the heat of the moment, though, he overlooked any overreaching of the metaphor. In matters of faith, he thought, ecstasy always rules.