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Aaron (son of Mosiah)

One of the four sons of king Mosiah who refused the throne for the Lamanite mission. He preached first to the Amalekites in their Jerusalem after the order of the Nehors, suffered the prison at Middoni, and — led by the Spirit to the land of Nephi — taught Lamoni’s father from the creation of Adam to the plan of redemption until the king prayed “I will give away all my sins to know thee” and was struck as if dead.

Account

One of the four sons of Mosiah

Aaron is named second in the corpus’s only roster of king Mosiah’s sons, the verse that closes the conversion narrative: “And four of them were the sons of Mosiah; and their names were Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner, and Himni; these were the names of the sons of Mosiah” (Mosiah 27:34). He is one of the company that, having gone “about secretly with the sons of Mosiah seeking to destroy the church” (Mosiah 27:10), was stopped by an angel alongside Alma the Younger. After their conversion the four sons refuse the kingdom their father would confer and ask instead to go up among the Lamanites — the mission that frames the whole of Aaron’s narrative. (The kingship refusal and the larger family story are treated on Mosiah II and Ammon (son of Mosiah).) Omner and Himni travel with Aaron throughout but barely speak in the record; they are gathered, with their cited verses, on Cited and Minor Figures.

The four separate to preach: “Now when Ammon and his brethren separated themselves in the borders of the land of the Lamanites, behold Aaron took his journey towards the land which was called by the Lamanites, Jerusalem” (Alma 21:1). From here the narrative follows Aaron’s track until it rejoins Ammon’s at the king’s palace.

Jerusalem among the Amalekites — disputation after the order of the Nehors

The city Aaron enters is a hardened one, built by “the Lamanites and the Amalekites and the people of Amulon” (Alma 21:2), and the text is exact about its religion: “he began to preach to them in their synagogues, for they had built synagogues after the order of the Nehors; for many of the Amalekites and the Amulonites were after the order of the Nehors” (Alma 21:4). Aaron’s opponent voices the order’s creed in the same breath as a demand for a sign: “Hast thou seen an angel? Why do not angels appear unto us? Behold are not this people as good as thy people?” (Alma 21:5), and “We do believe that God will save all men” (Alma 21:6).

Aaron answers not with proofs but with a question that names the doctrine at issue: “Believest thou that the Son of God shall come to redeem mankind from their sins?” (Alma 21:7). The Amalekite rejects the whole category of prophecy — “We do not believe in these foolish traditions. We do not believe that thou knowest of things to come” (Alma 21:8) — and when Aaron “began to open the scriptures unto them concerning the coming of Christ, and also concerning the resurrection of the dead, and that there could be no redemption for mankind save it were through the death and sufferings of Christ, and the atonement of his blood” (Alma 21:9), they “were angry with him, and began to mock him; and they would not hear the words which he spake” (Alma 21:10). The synagogue scene ends as the Ammonihah scenes do for Alma and Amulek: the preacher of the atonement is rejected by a people committed to the doctrine of Christ’s denial. (The Amalekite synagogue creed “We do believe that God will save all men,” 21:6, sets the universalist version of the Nehor doctrine that korihor.md and the Nehor narrative trace; the comparison work lives on those pages.)

The prison at Middoni

Rejected at Jerusalem, Aaron moves through Ani-Anti and then “into the land of Middoni. And they did preach the word unto many, and few believed” (Alma 21:12) — and there the mission costs him imprisonment: “Nevertheless, Aaron and a certain number of his brethren were taken and cast into prison” (Alma 21:13). The deliverance comes from the other branch of the mission — Ammon, warned by “the voice of the Lord” that “thy brother Aaron, and also Muloki and Ammah are in prison” at Middoni (Alma 20:2), goes with king Lamoni and wins their release from the king of Middoni.

What that imprisonment did is reported when the brothers meet again: “And when Ammon did meet them he was exceedingly sorrowful, for behold they were naked, and their skins were worn exceedingly because of being bound with strong cords. And they also had suffered hunger, thirst, and all kinds of afflictions; nevertheless they were patient in all their sufferings” (Alma 20:29). The record adds that they “had fallen into the hands of a more hardened and a more stiffnecked people” who “had smitten them, and had driven them from house to house, and from place to place” before the imprisonment (Alma 20:30). The summary back at chapter 21 marks the deliverance as a first: “they were delivered for the first time out of prison; and thus they had suffered” (Alma 21:15).

Teaching Lamoni’s father — from the creation of Adam to the plan of redemption

The chapter turns from Ammon’s labors back to Aaron: “we will return to the account of Aaron and his brethren; for after he departed from the land of Middoni he was led by the Spirit to the land of Nephi, even to the house of the king which was over all the land save it were the land of Ishmael; and he was the father of Lamoni” (Alma 22:1). This is the king whom Ammon had earlier disarmed on the road and who had granted Lamoni his kingdom (Alma 20:8–27); he is troubled “because of the generosity and the greatness of the words of thy brother Ammon” (Alma 22:3) and wants to understand what trouble him most — “What is this that ye have said concerning the Spirit of the Lord?” (Alma 22:5).

Aaron’s teaching proceeds by steps from the king’s own starting point. The king already grants a God of sorts — “I know that the Amalekites say that there is a God” (Alma 22:7) — and frames him in Lamanite terms: “Is God that Great Spirit that brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem?” (Alma 22:9). Aaron accepts the identification and corrects its content: “Yea, he is that Great Spirit, and he created all things both in heaven and in earth” (Alma 22:10). Then comes the recital, scripture in hand: “he began from the creation of Adam, reading the scriptures unto the king—how God created man after his own image, and that God gave him commandments, and that because of transgression, man had fallen” (Alma 22:12); and onward, “laying the fall of man before him, and their carnal state and also the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the world, through Christ” (Alma 22:13). The recital closes on the resurrection in a formula the second generation carries from Abinadi:

[Textual] — shared phrasing: the grave’s victory and death’s sting. Aaron’s closing summary to the king reproduces the distinctive victory-and-sting pairing Abinadi used at Noah’s court:

  • Alma 22:14: “that the grave shall have no victory, and that the sting of death should be swallowed up”
  • Mosiah 16:7: “the grave should have no victory, and that death should have no sting”

Both ends pair the grave shall/should have no victory with the sting of death in a single clause; Aaron’s verse adds the “swallowed up” verb that Abinadi places in the next verse — “the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ” (Mosiah 16:8). The image is one piece of the Abinadi diction that the converted sons carry into the Lamanite mission (treated as a chain on Abinadi); the people of Ammon later state the same victory in narrative form — “death was swallowed up to them by the victory of Christ over it” (Alma 27:28). Whether the corpus draws here on a wider scriptural formula about death’s sting is an external question left to the log; the in-text pairing is the fact reported.

Aaron’s recital also supplies, at Alma 22:12, the image-of-God clause (“how God created man after his own image”) that supports the creed Ammon gives Lamoni — that connection is registered on Ammon (son of Mosiah) and is only cross-linked here, not re-registered.

”I will give away all my sins to know thee”

The king’s response is the page’s center. He asks the question of his own salvation — “What shall I do that I may have this eternal life of which thou hast spoken? Yea, what shall I do that I may be born of God…?” (Alma 22:15) — and offers his whole estate: “I will give up all that I possess, yea, I will forsake my kingdom, that I may receive this great joy” (Alma 22:15). Aaron names the condition as repentance and faith, not abdication: “if thou wilt repent of all thy sins, and will bow down before God, and call on his name in faith, believing that ye shall receive, then shalt thou receive the hope which thou desirest” (Alma 22:16). The king then prays — prostrate, “and cried mightily” (Alma 22:17) — the sentence the page is named for:

“O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day.” (Alma 22:18)

“And now when the king had said these words, he was struck as if he were dead” (Alma 22:18) — the same collapse that overtook Lamoni and Alma the Younger at their conversions.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. The king’s first prayer is staged like the conversion-prayer scenes elsewhere in the record: a plea uttered from a standing-point of ignorance (“if there is a God, and if thou art God”), the surrender of all the petitioner has, and an immediate physical collapse. Benjamin’s people, at the moment of their conversion, “had viewed themselves in their own carnal state, even less than the dust of the earth. And they all cried aloud with one voice, saying: O have mercy, and apply the atoning blood of Christ that we may receive forgiveness of our sins” (Mosiah 4:2) — and the king cries “I will give away all my sins to know thee” (Alma 22:18). Both are first prayers at conversion, both move from self-emptying to a surrender concerning sins — Benjamin’s people pleading “that we may receive forgiveness of our sins,” the king offering to “give away all my sins” to know God — and the king’s is followed by the same as-if-dead collapse that marks his son Lamoni’s conversion four chapters earlier (Alma 18:42). The shared structure (address from ignorance or nothingness → plea for forgiveness → spiritual collapse) is real and the text stages it deliberately; but the two prayers share no distinctive wording, and the parallel is a reader’s pattern, not a quotation. Offered for weighing, not asserted as the text’s claim.

When Aaron raises the king up — “he put forth his hand and raised the king from the earth, and said unto him: Stand. And he stood upon his feet, receiving his strength” (Alma 22:22) — the conversion spreads: the king “stood forth, and began to minister unto them,” and “his whole household were converted unto the Lord” (Alma 22:23).

The proclamation and the Zoramite mission

After pacifying the multitude the queen had assembled, the king “sent a proclamation throughout all the land” (Alma 22:27) opening it to the brethren’s preaching — the decree that, in the same long verse, becomes the text’s set-piece geographical description of the Nephite and Lamanite lands. The narrative then sets Aaron’s mission back among “Ammon and Aaron, Omner and Himni, and their brethren” (Alma 22:35) and follows that work to its fruit: the converts who become the people of Ammon.

Aaron’s last appearance is on a second mission. When Alma the Younger sets out to recover the apostate Zoramites, Aaron is one he takes: “he took Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner; and Himni he did leave in the church in Zarahemla; but the former three he took with him” (Alma 31:6). Alma’s prayer over the company names him among the fellow-laborers — “Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner, and also Amulek and Zeezrom, and also my two sons” (Alma 31:32) — and there the record’s notice of Aaron ends.

Significance

Aaron is the brother who works by the scriptures. Where Ammon’s mission turns on a sign of power (the defense of the king’s flocks at Sebus) and a Great-Spirit exchange, Aaron’s turns on reading: he “began to open the scriptures” to the Amalekites (Alma 21:9) and “began from the creation of Adam, reading the scriptures unto the king” (Alma 22:12). His teaching of Lamoni’s father is the corpus’s fullest single example of the gospel taught as a sequence — creation, commandment, fall, carnal state, the plan of redemption “prepared from the foundation of the world, through Christ” (Alma 22:13), and resurrection — and it is taught to a man who begins outside the covenant’s vocabulary entirely, knowing only “that Great Spirit that brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem” (Alma 22:9).

The page’s two ends — the rejection at Jerusalem and the conversion at the land of Nephi — frame the mission’s actual range. The same doctrine of a coming Christ that the Amalekites “would not hear” (Alma 21:10) is the doctrine the king receives so completely that he offers to “forsake my kingdom” (Alma 22:15) for it. And the formula Aaron uses to close the resurrection — the grave’s defeated victory and death’s swallowed-up sting (Alma 22:14) — is Abinadi’s: words spoken at king Noah’s court, written down by Alma the elder (“he… did write all the words which Abinadi had spoken,” Mosiah 17:4), and now carried two generations on and across the Lamanite border by Aaron, a son of Mosiah.

Key references

Ammon (son of Mosiah) · Alma the Younger · Mosiah II · People of Ammon · Abinadi · Atonement · Doctrine of Christ · Cited & Minor Figures · Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (Alma 20–22, 31 for the mission narrative; Mosiah 27 for the sons-of-Mosiah roster; Mosiah 16 and Alma 27 for the resurrection-formula cross-reference ends).

Every quote on this page is lifted verbatim from raw/ (Alma 20, 21, 22, 27, 31, 50; Mosiah 16, 27; Mosiah 4 for the interpretive cross-reference). Textual facts are cited to their verse. The one [interpretive] callout (the first-prayer-scene parallel, Alma 22:18 ↔ Mosiah 4:2) is flagged as a new claim requiring a disprove-check and is offered for weighing, not asserted as settled. The “city of Aaron” (Alma 50:14) — a Nephite city near the city of Moroni — is a different referent and is not this man; it is named here only to mark the distinction. Omner and Himni travel with Aaron throughout (Alma 21–22, 31) but barely speak in the record and are gathered on Cited and Minor Figures; external historicity is out of scope.