Zeniff’s Book

Mosiah 9

Herewith, the translation of Zeniff’s book:

I am Zeniff, well-educated Nephite spy sent to infiltrate the Lamanites. Once I met them, though, I changed my mind about them.

I went back to our forces and argued: these are good people, make a truce with them, stop the killing. In turn, our leader wanted to kill me. He loved blood and gore, a textbook military stereotype. But, as it turned out, I was one of the few to survive some fierce battles with the Lamanites.

But it wasn’t that simple. I helped gather the wounded to wagon them back to Zarahemla. Disease spread among the troops and we got lost. Chalk it up to being soldiers too crass for religiosity. We kept going in circles and finally pitched tents near our last battlefield. I didn’t have any side deals with them, by the way, I swear. Just lucky. Or blessed. Who can tell? I got to go home and that’s all that mattered. I took a few of our ambulatory men back into the city and met with King Laman. We’d gotten along earlier, respected each other, and now worked out a deal to peacefully occupy Nephi-Lehi as well as Shilom. He actually sent out orders for his people—citizens and troops—to vacate to make room for us.

It was growing season and we became avid farmers: corn, wheat, barley, some less common grains, even some fruit trees. We were on our way. What we didn’t know was that King Laman had tricked us. His end game was for us to become his slaves.

He left us alone for twelve years, then saw we were getting too big to overpower if he didn’t act. In retrospect, I’ve come to see that Lamanites are lazy yet clever enough that they in effect auditioned us for slavery by seeing how well we could fare on our own. We didn’t see that coming.

Laman started to incite people to terrorism against us. This was so far out of our way of behaving that we weren’t ready for them at all. In our thirteenth year they moved to frontal assaults, attacking some shepherds south of Shilom, running them through with swords, stealing their sheep, and carting off their corn.

A few survived and walked to our city, Nephi, asking for sanctuary. We gave them that—along with conscription. We mustered them and as many as we could, arming them with bows and arrows, swords, the whole gamut of weapons, basically anything we could find or make in a short space of time.

When you go to war everyone starts by suddenly getting religious. We were no exception. We prayed a lot, then went out to kill. God must have heard us because in a 24-hour period the Lamanite death toll was 3045. We lost only 279. A great ratio, though try telling that to the widows and orphans. We all went out to bury the dead from both sides.