So My Brother's a Sword Murderer

Sorry to leave you all hanging for a couple of days. We’re back in the Valley of Me, and I’m trying to decide where I should even start. Uhhh, Nephi straight up killed a guy. How’s that for a starting place? But let’s do the background first.

So if you recall a few days ago when I last posted, I left you all hanging while we waited outside the city walls, and Nephi was trying to get the plates. Shortly after I published that post, Sam spotted two guys headed toward us. Laman was the first to recognize who they were (or so we thought). He yell/whispered, “It’s Laban! Run!” All three of us took off only to hear Nephi yell at us to stop. We turned around, and suddenly realized it’s Nephi, dressed like Laban, wrestling some dude to the ground.

At this point in the story, I have no idea what's going on, but figured I better go help keep this guy down because whatever crap Nephi just got into would probably get way worse if the guy escaped. As I got to Nephi, I heard him explaining something about God commanding us to do this, and trying to convince the guy to go with us back to the Valley of Me. That’s kind of a tough sell, so I was surprised when the guy agreed, but I guess when you’re pinned down by your abductor and surrounded by his three brothers, you don’t have much of a choice. Also, the brass plates were on the ground next to the two. I was thinking, “I have no idea how you pulled this off, but I’ll bet it’s a good story.” And yeah, we’ll get to that in a bit. The guy is one of Laban's servants, Zoram, and over the last couple days chatting with him, I decided he’s a pretty nice guy.

Once Zoram agreed to go with us, Nephi wouldn’t immediately tell the story of how he accomplished everything because he was pretty sure we needed to get moving right away. So we walked for a couple hours then stopped for a super late night dinner where Nephi explained it all.

As you might recall, Nephi’s plan was to “follow the Spirit.” And so whatever that means, he was basically doing it, and ran right into Laban out in the street. Laban was passed out drunk and Nephi said the Spirit “constrained [him] that he should kill Laban.” Nephi said it was justified because Laban robbed us and tried to kill us. And I get that, but, I think it’s generally the role of the proper authorities to punish people for crimes. Otherwise, if everyone was their own judge, jury, and executioner, then we'd have chaos. Nephi also said the Spirit told him that he had to slay Laban so that we could have the records for our posterity. So he killed Laban, dressed in his clothes, tricked Zoram into giving him the plates, and brought Zoram out to meet the family.

What I don’t get is this: getting the records was necessary, but killing Laban wasn’t. Nephi could’ve done all of those things and left Laban alive, passed out, and naked in the street. We would’ve had a big enough head start on Laban that he wouldn’t have found us once he realized the plates were gone.

I mentioned this last point to Nephi, and asked him why he didn’t just leave Laman alive. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was basically along the lines of, “Huh, that’s an interesting point. I wonder why the Spirit didn’t tell me to do that. I’ll have to ask the Lord about that.” So yeah, not really sure where to go with it from here.

Zoram painted this picture to commemorate our return.
He's pretty good, but he barely included me!

The point is we’re all alive and back with the family. Mom and Dad were pretty happy to see us. I guess Mom thought we all died (at least one of my parents still cares). She said this experience taught her a lesson and she now knows that our family is doing as the Lord commands. But I’m still not to that point yet. All I know is that I used to find Nephi a bit abrasive, but now he’s jumped into a new category: scary.

Dad was so excited to get the records, that as soon as we finished offering sacrifices he grabbed the plates and started reading them. He found some shade just outside of camp and has been over there for hours reading. Anyway, dinner time. I gotta see if I can pull him away from his new book.