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Chastity & Marriage

The second count of Jacob’s temple sermon (Jacob 2:22–35): a “grosser crime” the people excused by appeal to David and Solomon, answered in the Lord’s own quoted voice with a one-wife commandment (“there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none,” Jacob 2:27) and its stated ground (“I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women,” Jacob 2:28). Jacob 3 reports the commandment kept — by the Lamanites. In Mosiah the record supplies the rule’s first narrated breaker: King Noah, who “had many wives and concubines” (Mosiah 11:2).

What it is

Jacob’s temple sermon (Jacob 2–3) prosecutes two sins. The first — riches and pride (Jacob 2:12–21) — is treated on Riches & Pride. The second is introduced as worse: “And now I make an end of speaking unto you concerning this pride. And were it not that I must speak unto you concerning a grosser crime, my heart would rejoice exceedingly because of you” (Jacob 2:22). The narrator’s frame in chapter 1 has already named the practice: the people “began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son” (Jacob 1:15).

A textual fact worth stating up front: nearly the whole second count is delivered as first-person divine speech, not Jacob’s own words. Jacob reports his commission — “declare the word which I shall give thee unto this people” (Jacob 2:11) — and then verses 2:23–2:33 are marked throughout as the Lord’s voice (“thus saith the Lord,” 2:23, 2:25; “saith the Lord of Hosts,” 2:28–2:33; “I, the Lord,” 2:31). The commandment, its ground, its conditional, and the description of the wounded are all presented as quotation.

The second count: “a grosser crime” (Jacob 2:22–26)

The Lord’s indictment opens with the people’s own defense — they were reading scripture to license themselves: “This people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the scriptures, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son” (Jacob 2:23). (Which written record they appealed to is not named here; for the scriptures the colony carried, see Brass Plates.) The narrator’s setup and the sermon’s answer share their phrasing ():

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing.

  • Jacob 1:15: “…indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son.”
  • Jacob 2:24: “Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.”

The narrator names the practice in chapter 1; the Lord’s sermon-voice names the same two kings and the same “many wives and concubines” in chapter 2 — and rejects the precedent the people had drawn from them.

The excuse is answered head-on: the precedent is conceded as historical (“truly had”) and condemned in the same sentence (“which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord,” Jacob 2:24). The Lord then states His own purpose for the colony: “Wherefore, thus saith the Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph” (Jacob 2:25) — on the Joseph lineage, see Joseph of Egypt. And the conclusion: “Wherefore, I the Lord God will not suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old” (Jacob 2:26).

The rule and its stated ground (Jacob 2:27–29)

[Textual] Jacob 2:27: “Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none;”

The ground given for the rule is stated in the next verse, in the divine first person:

[Textual] Jacob 2:28: “For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me; thus saith the Lord of Hosts.”

A sanction follows: “Wherefore, this people shall keep my commandments, saith the Lord of Hosts, or cursed be the land for their sakes” (Jacob 2:29).

The verse 30 conditional

The commandment carries one conditional clause, which the wiki reports exactly and does not interpret:

[Textual] Jacob 2:30: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.”

That is the whole verse. It is a conditional — “if I will … I will command my people; otherwise …” — and the text does not elaborate it: it does not specify what would be commanded in such a case, and it does not fix the referent of “these things.” The verse’s syntax admits more than one reading, and nothing elsewhere in this record expands on it. The wiki reports the words and stops there. How this verse relates to any practice outside this text is an external question outside this wiki’s scope (compare the wiki’s standing rule on external questions).

”Given to our father, Lehi” (Jacob 2:34)

Jacob closes the count by giving the commandment a provenance: “And now behold, my brethren, ye know that these commandments were given to our father, Lehi; wherefore, ye have known them before; and ye have come unto great condemnation; for ye have done these things which ye ought not to have done” (Jacob 2:34). Chapter 3 repeats the attribution in nearly the same words — “the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our father” (Jacob 3:5).

An honest negative the reader should know: the surviving small-plates record of Lehi’s words (1 Nephi, 2 Nephi) does not itself contain this commandment. A search of the record’s marriage vocabulary (“wife,” “wives,” “concubine,” “whoredom,” “chastity”) turns up no verse in which Lehi receives or teaches a one-wife rule. Jacob’s attribution stands as Jacob’s statement, twice made; the record of its giving, if it was written, is not in this record.

The nearest the small plates come is a different marriage direction given to Lehi: “the Lord spake unto him again, saying that … his sons should take daughters to wife, that they might raise up seed unto the Lord in the land of promise” (1 Nephi 7:1). Its purpose clause and Jacob 2:30’s conditional share a phrase found nowhere else in the corpus ():

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing.

  • 1 Nephi 7:1: “…his sons should take daughters to wife, that they might raise up seed unto the Lord in the land of promise.”
  • Jacob 2:30: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people…”

These are the only two occurrences of “raise up seed unto” in the 1 Nephi–Jacob corpus; both stand in divine speech concerning marriage in this family line.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. The one passage where the small plates show the Lord directing this family’s marriages (1 Nephi 7:1) states its purpose as raising up “seed unto the Lord,” and Jacob 2:30’s conditional turns on the Lord’s will to “raise up seed unto me.” A reader may weigh whether the two passages state a single governing principle — that the Lord’s directions concerning marriage in this record are tied, in both places, to His stated purpose of raising up seed. The shared phrase is a textual fact (above); the claim that the verses articulate one principle is an interpretive reading — neither verse cites the other, and Jacob 2:34’s “commandments … given to our father, Lehi” is not said to refer to 1 Nephi 7:1. Offered to weigh, not asserted.

The Lamanite reversal (Jacob 3:5–10)

Chapter 3 turns the indictment around: the commandment the Nephites broke is being kept by the Lamanites. (The broader Nephite–Lamanite reversal narrative belongs to Laman & Lemuel; this page keeps to the marriage and family content.) The commandment is restated in the keeping ():

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing.

  • Jacob 2:27: “…there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none;”
  • Jacob 3:5: “…they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our father—that they should have save it were one wife, and concubines they should have none, and there should not be whoredoms committed among them.”

The consequence of the observance is stated: “this commandment they observe to keep; wherefore, because of this observance, in keeping this commandment, the Lord God will not destroy them, but will be merciful unto them; and one day they shall become a blessed people” (Jacob 3:6). And the family picture that follows is the sermon’s only portrait of marriage working:

[Textual] Jacob 3:7: “Behold, their husbands love their wives, and their wives love their husbands; and their husbands and their wives love their children; and their unbelief and their hatred towards you is because of the iniquity of their fathers; wherefore, how much better are you than they, in the sight of your great Creator?”

The warning is driven home in 3:8–10: “I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skins will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God” (Jacob 3:8); a commandment “that ye revile no more against them” (Jacob 3:9); and a final turn back to the hearers’ own households (Jacob 3:10, quoted below). The narrator’s coda extends the subject past the sermon: Jacob “spake many more things unto the people of Nephi, warning them against fornication and lasciviousness, and every kind of sin” (Jacob 3:12).

The wounded: wives, children, and the daughters of Jerusalem

The sermon’s audience includes its victims. Jacob says so before he begins: “it grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you, before your wives and your children, many of whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste and delicate before God” (Jacob 2:7) — they “have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul” (Jacob 2:8), and instead “have daggers placed to pierce their souls and wound their delicate minds” (Jacob 2:9).

The divine speech makes the wound the stated reason for intervention, reaching back to Jerusalem and forward to the colony:

Jacob’s own summation names the damage already done: “Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. And because of the strictness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds” (Jacob 2:35). The children return at the close of the count: “ye shall remember your children, how that ye have grieved their hearts because of the example that ye have set before them; and also, remember that ye may, because of your filthiness, bring your children unto destruction, and their sins be heaped upon your heads at the last day” (Jacob 3:10).

The first narrated violation: Noah’s court (Mosiah 11–12)

After Jacob 3:5, the word “concubines” does not occur again in the record until Mosiah 11. When it returns, it is as the opening item in the catalog of King Noah’s reign: “And he had many wives and concubines. And he did cause his people to commit sin, and do that which was abominable in the sight of the Lord. Yea, and they did commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness” (Mosiah 11:2). The verse does what Jacob 2:24 did — it pairs “many wives and concubines” with “abominable” (“David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me,” Jacob 2:24). That two-ended match is registered as and quoted in full on King Noah; what matters for this page is its place in the commandment’s story: Noah is the record’s first narrated breaker of the one-wife rule, described in the very words the rule’s sermon used for the condemned precedent.

The practice is institutional, not private. Noah’s fifth-part tax (Mosiah 11:3) is taken “to support himself, and his wives and his concubines; and also his priests, and their wives and their concubines” (Mosiah 11:4); the new priests he consecrated “were supported in their laziness, and in their idolatry, and in their whoredoms, by the taxes which king Noah had put upon his people” (Mosiah 11:6); and the summary of the court’s life reads: “he spent his time in riotous living with his wives and his concubines; and so did also his priests spend their time with harlots” (Mosiah 11:14). (The riches half of the same reign — the tax, the buildings, the heart “upon his riches” — is treated on Riches & Pride.)

The indictment comes through Abinadi, twice. The Lord’s word names the sin among the people’s abominations: “I have seen their abominations, and their wickedness, and their whoredoms” (Mosiah 11:20). And before the priests themselves Abinadi puts it as a question about the law they claim to teach: “If ye teach the law of Moses why do ye not keep it? Why do ye set your hearts upon riches? Why do ye commit whoredoms and spend your strength with harlots…?” (Mosiah 12:29). The paired questions run riches first, whoredoms second — the same order as the two counts of Jacob’s sermon, though the text draws no such comparison itself; the riches clause is treated on Riches & Pride.

The priests and the daughters of the Lamanites (Mosiah 20; 23)

The marriage thread of the Noah narrative does not end with the court’s fall. The priests who fled with Noah, “being ashamed to return to the city of Nephi” and fearing for their lives, “durst not return to their wives and their children” (Mosiah 20:3). Having found “a place in Shemlon where the daughters of the Lamanites did gather themselves together to sing, and to dance” (Mosiah 20:1), “they laid and watched them” (Mosiah 20:4), and then “took them and carried them into the wilderness; yea, twenty and four of the daughters of the Lamanites they carried into the wilderness” (Mosiah 20:5). The act ignites a war on the innocent: the Lamanite king breaks his oath of peace “because thy people did carry away the daughters of my people” (Mosiah 20:15), and destruction is averted only when Gideon names the culprits (“are not they the ones who have stolen the daughters of the Lamanites?”, Mosiah 20:18) and Limhi discloses it to the king (Mosiah 20:23). That narrative is told on Limhi and Gideon; this page keeps to what the episode says about marriage.

The aftermath is reported in Mosiah 23. The fugitive priests, found settled in a land they called Amulon after their leader Amulon (Mosiah 23:31–32), are spared by the Lamanite army when Amulon “sent forth their wives, who were the daughters of the Lamanites, to plead with their brethren, that they should not destroy their husbands” (Mosiah 23:33); “the Lamanites had compassion on Amulon and his brethren, and did not destroy them, because of their wives” (Mosiah 23:34). The text now calls the carried-away daughters “their wives” and reports their intercession as the reason their husbands live; it attaches no further comment, and neither does the wiki.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. () Jacob’s sermon closes its whoredoms count with a warning whose wording the Mosiah 20 narrative comes strikingly near:

  • Jacob 2:33: “For they shall not lead away captive the daughters of my people because of their tenderness, save I shall visit them with a sore curse, even unto destruction; for they shall not commit whoredoms, like unto them of old, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
  • Mosiah 20:15: “I have broken the oath because thy people did carry away the daughters of my people; therefore, in my anger I did cause my people to come up to war against thy people.”

The men who carry away the daughters are Noah’s priests, whose whoredoms are on the record’s surface (Mosiah 11:14, 12:29); and “the daughters of my people” occurs in this wiki’s corpus (1 Nephi through Mosiah) only at Jacob 2:31, 2:33, and Mosiah 20:15. A reader may weigh whether Mosiah 20 stands as a narrative enactment of Jacob 2:33’s warning — whoredom-committing men of Nephite stock carrying away daughters, with destruction following. The counterweights are real: in Jacob the speaker is the Lord and “my people” is the Nephite colony, while in Mosiah the speaker is the Lamanite king and “my people” are Lamanites; the verbs differ (“lead away captive” / “carry away”); and no verse in Mosiah cites Jacob’s sermon. The verbal echo is a textual fact; the enactment reading is offered to weigh, not asserted.

The harlot Isabel and the gravity scale (Alma 39)

In Alma, the chastity thread surfaces again — this time not in a sermon to a nation but in a father’s private counsel to a son. Alma the Younger charges his son Corianton with having abandoned his mission: “thou didst forsake the ministry, and did go over into the land of Siron among the borders of the Lamanites, after the harlot Isabel” (Alma 39:3). Of Isabel the text says only: “Yea, she did steal away the hearts of many; but this was no excuse for thee, my son. Thou shouldst have tended to the ministry wherewith thou wast entrusted” (Alma 39:4). Isabel is named once and described once; her person-entry is kept on cited-and-minor-figures.md.

The verse that has drawn the most attention is the rebuke’s gravity scale. Alma ranks the sin:

[Textual] Alma 39:5: “Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?”

What “these things” refers to is supplied by the immediate context — Corianton’s going “after the harlot Isabel” (39:3–4). The next verse defines the two exceptions: denying the Holy Ghost is “a sin which is unpardonable,” and “whosoever murdereth against the light and knowledge of God, it is not easy for him to obtain forgiveness” (Alma 39:6). The counsel closes with a call to repent — “go no more after the lusts of your eyes, but cross yourself in all these things” (Alma 39:9) — and a warning against being led “away your heart again after those wicked harlots” (Alma 39:11).

This verse and Jacob’s sermon both call sexual sin an abomination before the Lord — Jacob: “whoredoms are an abomination before me” (Jacob 2:28); Alma: “these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord” (Alma 39:5). But “abomination” is one of the most widely-distributed words in the record (it appears in twenty of the raw files), so the shared word is corpus-wide vocabulary, not the distinctive phrasing that would ground a registered [textual] pair. The two passages are kept side-by-side here as a thematic observation, not a connection.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. Jacob’s sermon frames whoredoms as a “grosser crime” than pride (Jacob 2:22) and an “abomination” (Jacob 2:28); Alma’s counsel goes further and gives sexual sin an explicit rank — “most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost” (Alma 39:5). A reader may weigh whether the two passages express a single escalating estimate of the sin’s seriousness across the record. The counterweights are real: the two texts share only the root word “abomination” (corpus-wide vocabulary), neither cites the other, Jacob’s relative ranking is within his own two-count sermon (worse than pride) while Alma’s is absolute (second only to two named sins), and Alma 39 is private fatherly counsel rather than covenant sermon. Both verses calling the sin an abomination is a textual fact; reading them as one continuous doctrine of gravity is an interpretive synthesis, offered to weigh, not asserted.

Korihor’s licensed conduct (Alma 30)

The Alma record also supplies a second narrated channel by which whoredoms spread: not a court’s example (as with King Noah) but a teaching that removed the restraint. Korihor, the anti-Christ, taught “that whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17), and the narrator reports the moral consequence:

[Textual] Alma 30:18: “And thus he did preach unto them, leading away the hearts of many, causing them to lift up their heads in their wickedness, yea, leading away many women, and also men, to commit whoredoms—telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof.”

The text makes the doctrine the cause: deny the afterlife (“when a man was dead, that was the end thereof”) and deny that any act is a crime (30:17), and whoredoms follow as the licensed conduct. That is the whole of what Alma 30 says about marriage and chastity; the Korihor confrontation itself — Alma’s reply, the sign, the death — is told on Korihor, and this page keeps to the one verse that touches the chastity thread.

Here too the only verbal contact with the page’s earlier material is the corpus-wide word “whoredoms” (Jacob 2:23, 2:28; Mosiah 11:2, and elsewhere — eighteen occurrences across the raw corpus; count updated at the Helaman build), so Alma 30:18 is noted as a parallel instance of the same vocabulary and the same social effect, not registered as a pairwise connection.

Key references / appearances

People: Jacob (the preacher) · Lehi (to whom the commandments are attributed, 2:34) · Laman & Lemuel (the Lamanite reversal) · Joseph of Egypt (“the loins of Joseph,” 2:25) · King Noah (the first narrated breaker, Mosiah 11:2) · Abinadi (the indictment, Mosiah 12:29) · Limhi and Gideon (the daughters-of-the-Lamanites crisis) · Amulon (leader of the fugitive priests, Mosiah 23:32) · Alma the Younger (the gravity-scale counsel, Alma 39:5) · Corianton (the son charged with going “after the harlot Isabel,” Alma 39:3) · Korihor (whose doctrine licensed whoredoms, Alma 30:18) · Isabel (the harlot, Alma 39:3–4)

Concepts: Riches & Pride (the sermon’s first count; Noah’s riches and Abinadi’s riches question) · Brass Plates (the colony’s scriptures; the record “written concerning David, and Solomon” is not named in Jacob 2)

Connections: · · · · (cross-ref: , hosted on King Noah)

Pages: Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (1 Nephi, Jacob, Mosiah, Alma).

All quotes are lifted verbatim from the frozen source files in raw/. [Textual] connections are machine-verified two-ended quotes. The ⚖️ Interpretation callouts show their evidence, are offered to weigh rather than asserted, and are flagged for disprove-checks. Jacob 2:30 is reported exactly and left uninterpreted: it is a conditional the text does not elaborate, and its syntax admits more than one reading. “Whoredoms” recurs as corpus-wide vocabulary beyond this sermon (2 Nephi 9:36 — Jacob’s own earlier sermon: “Wo unto them who commit whoredoms, for they shall be thrust down to hell” — also 2 Nephi 26:32, 28:14–15; in Mosiah the word clusters around Noah’s court, 11:2, 11:6, 11:20, 12:29, and reappears in Mosiah’s catalog of a wicked king’s costs, 29:36; in Alma it appears at 1:32 and 50:21 in vice-catalogs, and at 30:18 for Korihor’s licensed conduct) and is noted as shared vocabulary, not registered as a pairwise connection. The Alma material (30:18; 39:3–9) is carried as prose plus one ⚖️ Interpretation callout: its only verbal contact with the page’s Jacob/Mosiah material is the corpus-wide words “abomination” and “whoredoms,” so it yields no new registered two-ended connection.