Cover image via Gospel Media Library. 

With conference concluding, we can once again appreciate the importance of listening to the words of apostles and prophets. There is a particularly good story in the Book of Mormon about this very topic. This is the story of a good man named Zeniff who became the exact opposite of who he wanted to be because he didn’t listen to the prophet.

Amaleki ends the book of Omni and the Small Plates with Zeniff’s story and ends the Book of Omni with this implied question: are you, like, me, Amaleki, going to stay here and enjoy the blessings of peace and get to hear King Benjmain’s great sermon and have no disposition to do evil but to do good continually? Or are you, like my brother and like Zeniff, going to reject the guidance of the prophet and metaphorically go back to the land of Nephi where you were before and reap the consequences of having rejected guidance from God that came to you from God’s prophet?

The story of Zeniff is about how this good man, Zeniff, became the exact opposite of who he wanted to be because he chose to not listen to the prophet. The Nephites were living in the Land of Nephi where they had been for 400 years, and things were bad and had been bad for a long time. Omni wrote that he spent all his time killing Lamanites, and that he himself had become a “wicked man” (Omini 1:2).

Omni’s grandson, Abinadom, was doing the same thing. He wrote: “I, with my own sword, have taken the lives of many of the Lamanites in the defense of my brethren,” then added, “I know of no revelation or prophesy” (Omni 1:10-11). In between those two, Omni’s son Amoron wrote this—and note the many negatives—”the Lord would NOT suffer…, yea, he would NOT suffer that the words should NOT be verified, which he spake unto our fathers, saying that: Inasmuch as ye will NOT keep my commandments ye shall NOT prosper in the land” (Omni 1:6). The NOT’s pile up, then Amaron adds, “the more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed” (Omni 1:5). So war is constant, and both Nephites and Lamanites are dying. In the midst of this mayhem, the Lord calls a prophet, Mosiah1, to put an end to it. Mosiah1 invites all those “who would hearken unto the voice of the Lord” (Omni 1:12) to leave the Land of Nephi. Through his prophet, Mosiah1, the Lord leads those who will listen to the land of Zarahemla, where they join the Mulekites. Amaleki, Amaleki’s brother, and Zeniff all followed Mosiah1 to Zarahemla.

In Zarahemla, they found peace, but some missed the land of Nephi. The culture was different. The food was probably different. The Mulekites spoke a different language. So, several Nephite men, led by a man whom Zeniff describes as being “austere” and “blood-thirsty” (Mosiah 9:2), decide to go back and start killing Lamanites again. The austere and bloodthirsty leader sends Zeniff to spy on the Lamanites and figure out the best way to kill them. But while spying, Zeniff says, “I saw that which was good among them [and] was desirous that they should not be destroyed” (Mosiah 9:1). Zeniff must have seen things like parents embracing their children, friends helping each other out–various acts of decency and love among the Lamanites. Since he’s a good man, this stirs up his compassion. He goes back to camp and argues that they should try to make peace with the Lamanites. The austere and bloodthirsty man disagrees. They all start to fight among themselves, and more than half of them are killed (Mosiah 9:1-2; Omni 1:28). The survivors head back to Zarahemla.

There, Zeniff recruits a new group that includes women and children and with what seems to be the good plan of good man heads back to Land of Nephi with the objective of making peace with the Lamanites (Mosiah 9:3; cf. Omni 1:29). This trip back to the Land of Nephi proves to be a difficult one. When Mosiah led the people from the land of Nephi to Zarahemla, they were blessed by the Lord and “led by the power of his arm” (Omni 1:13). One this return trip, Zeniff tells us, they are “smitten with famine and sore afflictions; for we were slow to remember the Lord our God” (Mosiah 9:3). Zeniff’s plan may seem like a good plan, but it’s not.

Still, when they arrive, Zeniff successfully negotiates a treaty with King Laman, who gives to Zeniff and his people the land of Nephi. King Laman also gives them the land of Shilom, which sounds like Shalom, meaning peace. Prospects seem good that Zeniff and his people can live in peace with the Lamanites (Mosiah 9:6). For twelve years, they do. But then, according to Zeniff, without warning, King Laman initiates an unprovoked attack on the Nephites in the land of Shilom that destroys the peace (Mosiah 9:14). Zeniff is forced to refound his people as an armed camp. He supplies his followers “with bows, and with arrows, with swords, and with cimeters, and with clubs, and with slings, and with all manner of weapons which we could invent” (Mosiah 9:16).

To prepare for battle, Zeniff says, “I and my people did cry mightily to the Lord that he would deliver us out of the hands of our enemies” (Mosiah 9:17). Now this prayer is ironic because God had already delivered Zeniff and his people from their enemies by inspiring Mosiah1 to lead them out of the Land of Nephi. The Lord could have replied, “Yeah, I already did that. You voluntarily returned to the peril that now inspires you to cry to me for deliverance from your enemies.” The Lord doesn’t say that, and we’re lucky he doesn’t because in this respect Zeniff is so typically human. Many, perhaps most, of the difficulties all of us find ourselves entangled in happen to us because we didn’t follow some commandment from God we received through prophets. Our prayers for deliverance from our problems are often just as ironic as Zeniff’s prayer is here.

Having prayed and put his trust in the Lord because he’s basically a good man, Zeniff leads his people into battle, and they kill 3,043 Lamanites while losing only 279 Nephites (Mosiah 9:18-19). Zeniff expresses great sorrow and lamentation for those 279 Nephites who have lost their lives but now seems to feel no sorrow for the 3,043 Lamanites who have died because he led his people back to the land of Nephi. Those Lamanites will never again have the chance to do the good things Zeniff saw them do when he spied on them. In total, 3,322 people have died because Zeniff and his followers rejected the guidance from the Lord that came to them though the prophet Mosiah1. And the killing is far from over.

After this battle, Zeniff’s views of the Lamanites change. He now sees King Laman as a cunning and crafty man and the Lamanites as “an idolatrous people; … desirous to bring us into bondage, that they might glut themselves with the labors of our hands” (Mosiah 9:12). When King Laman dies and his son takes over, the Lamanites again break the peace by attacking Zeniff and his people in the land of Shilom. But like his bloodthirsty predecessor, Zeniff has sent out spies (Mosiah 10:7) to be prepared for battle. He arms all males who can bear a weapon and, in his old age, leads his people as they kill Lamanites “with a great slaughter, even so many that we did not number them” (Mosiah 10:20).

Again, Zeniff expresses no sorrow at the loss of these countless lives. Like his former leader, Zeniff now regards the Lamanites as implacable enemies with whom there can never be any peace. They are “a wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people” (Mosiah 10:12).  They are wrongly “wroth … wroth … wroth … wroth” with the Nephites—he keeps repeating that word–because of their false traditions (Mosiah 10:14-16). “And they have taught their children that they should hate [Nephites], and that they should murder them, and plunder them, and do all they could to destroy them; therefore, they have an eternal hatred towards the children of Nephi” (Mosiah 10:17). Zeniff has now fully become the austere and bloodthirsty person he previously decried (Mosiah 9:2), a man who perceives no good in the Lamanites, no possibility of peace with them, who seemingly without remorse organizes his people to massively slaughter them.

Zeniff tells this whole story in his own words. And as he recounts these events shortly before his death, Zeniff seems to perceive the ironic tragedy of his life and of the exodus he led. All this information is given in his personal account of events. It is he who criticizes the austere, bloodthirsty man, who attests that he himself saw much good among the Lamanites as he spied on them. And it is he who then catalogs his own subsequent personal involvement in remorselessly slaughtering them.

In writing his account, Zeniff seems to have assessed his life objectively, to have maintained some emotional distance from the events he describes and to have perceived his own fatal flaw. The good man that is still in him describes his original desire to return to the land of his fathers as, in his own words, “over-zealous” (Mosiah 9:3). He implicitly acknowledges that he was wrong to have rejected the leadership of the prophet Mosiah, for the consequence of going his own way is that he and his people “have suffered these many years in the land” (Mosiah 10:18), again his words. But the fact that Zeniff recognizes in the end his folly in not following the guidance of God that came to him through a prophet does not save his children and grandchildren from the consequences of his actions.

The bloody wars continue. Many thousands more die on both sides. Instead of having King Benjamin as their king like the people in Zarahemla, Zeniff’s people get wicked King Noah. Things won’t go right for them until they repent and go back to Zarahemla to live with the second Mosiah as their prophet and king, and they couldn’t have done that if Mosiah2 hadn’t been inspired to send them help.

When Mosiah2’s messenger, Ammon1 (not to be confused with Ammon2, the son of Mosiah2) finds Zeniff’s people, now led by his grandson, Limhi, they are in abject misery, slaves of the Lamanites, wishing they could be back in Zarahemla, even if only as slaves of the Nephites (Mosiah 7:15). And in the ingenious way Mormon wrote the Book of Mosiah, we see how Zeniff’s people are living before we read his account of how they came to live that way. So just before Zeniff’s record starts, Limhi and Ammon1 express how valuable it is to have a prophet and seer among the people (Mosiah 8:15-16). Limhi says the following about what happens if the people do not listen to the shepherd, the prophet, the Lord has sent them.

“O how marvelous are the works of the Lord, and how long doth he suffer with his people; yea, and how blind and impenetrable are the understandings of the children of men; for they will not seek wisdom, neither do they desire that she should rule over them! Yea, they are as a wild flock which fleeth from the shepherd, and scattereth, and are driven, and are devoured by the beasts of the forest.” (Mosiah 8:20-21).

Now that statement is meant to describe Zeniff and his people, a scattered wild flock that has left its shepherd and is driven and devoured by beasts. In so many ways, it also describes our increasingly unchurched, irreligious culture. We Latter-day Saints are fortunate to have a prophet and apostles as shepherds. We are fortunate that they speak to us in our homes during General Conference. But if we do not listen and do not hearken to what the Lord tells us through them, we might become like Zeniff and his people, in time and eternity, the opposite of what we hope to be. So, let’s listen and hearken to a prophet’s voice.