Mosiah — Chapter 9
Zeniff’s record.
1 I, Zeniff, had been taught the Nephites’ language and learned about the land of Nephi, where our ancestors first lived in the promised land. I was sent as a spy to see if our army could defeat the Lamanites, but when I saw that some of the things the Lamanites did were good, I did not want them to be destroyed.
2 So I argued with my brothers, because I wanted our leader to make a treaty with the Lamanites. But our leader wanted to kill them, and commanded that I be killed, too. But I was saved because of a great and bloody fight between our own people which destroyed most of our army. We who were left went back to Zarahemla to tell the dead men’s wives and children what had happened.
3 But I wanted too much to own the land which had belonged to our ancestors, so I gathered together many people who wanted to go with me, and we traveled there again. We suffered from famine and many troubles, because we did not remember God as we should.
4 After many days, we set up our tents near the place our brothers had been killed, near our ancestors’ lands.
5 Then I went with four of my men to the king to find out if he would let us live in the land in peace.
6 I went in to the king, and he promised me we could live in the lands of Lehi-Nephi and Shilom.
7 He told his people to leave those lands so we could live there, so we went and lived there.
8 We built buildings and fixed the walls of the cities of Lehi-Nephi and Shilom.
9 We planted all kinds of crops — corn, wheat, barley, neas, sheum, and all kinds of fruit. We began to prosper and have lots of children.
10 King Laman had given us this land so he could trick us into being slaves.
11 After we had lived [here] twelve years, King Laman began to worry that we would become too strong for the Lamanites to make us slaves.
12 They were lazy and worshiped false gods. They wanted us to be slaves so they could eat the food we grew and have the flocks we raised without working for them.
13 So King Laman began telling his people to fight with us, and there began to be fights in the land.
14 During my thirteenth year as king, a great number of Lamanites came upon my people and began to kill them as they were feeding their flocks and farming in the south part of Shilom.
15 All of my people who escaped ran away until they came to the city of Nephi. They asked me to protect them.
16 So I gave them bows and arrows, and swords, and cimeters and slings, and all kinds of weapons, and we fought against the Lamanites.
17 We went with God’s power, because we had prayed to God to save us from our enemies, and we remembered how God had saved our ancestors.
18 God heard our prayers and gave us his power. We killed three thousand forty-three Lamanites in just one day and one night, and we chased them out of our land.
19 I helped bury our dead with my own hands. Two hundred seventy-nine of our brothers had been killed, and that made us very sad.
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