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Amalickiah

A “large and a strong man” and a Nephite by birth who tried to be made king by flattery, failed, fled to the Lamanites, and there — by a triple fraud of poison, proxy-murder, and marriage — made himself king of a people not his own; the record’s most elaborated antagonist, who swore to drink Moroni’s blood and died in his sleep on Teancum’s javelin.

Account

The king-bid and the flatteries

Amalickiah enters the record as the head of a faction of malcontents: “the leader of those who were wroth against their brethren was a large and a strong man; and his name was Amalickiah” (Alma 46:3). His motive is stated flatly — “And Amalickiah was desirous to be a king” (Alma 46:4) — and so is his constituency: “those people who were wroth were also desirous that he should be their king; and they were the greater part of them the lower judges of the land, and they were seeking for power” (Alma 46:4). His instrument is named at once, and named twice more before the chapter is out: flattery. “They had been led by the flatteries of Amalickiah, that if they would support him and establish him to be their king that he would make them rulers over the people” (Alma 46:5); “there were many in the church who believed in the flattering words of Amalickiah, therefore they dissented even from the church” (Alma 46:7); and, in the editor’s summary, “Amalickiah, because he was a man of cunning device and a man of many flattering words… led away the hearts of many people to do wickedly” (Alma 46:10). The aim that summary assigns him is two-fold: “to seek to destroy the church of God, and to destroy the foundation of liberty which God had granted unto them” (Alma 46:10).

The dissenters take his name: those who gather “to stand against Amalickiah and those who had dissented” are met by a faction “who were called Amalickiahites” (Alma 46:28). When Moroni’s forces prove the more numerous and Amalickiah sees “that his people were doubtful concerning the justice of the cause in which they had undertaken,” he abandons the bid and runs: “fearing that he should not gain the point, he took those of his people who would and departed into the land of Nephi” (Alma 46:29). Moroni heads off the flight and recovers most of the company — “Amalickiah fled with a small number of his men, and the remainder were delivered up into the hands of Moroni” (Alma 46:33) — but the man himself escapes north.

The editor pauses on him for a general verdict the wiki treats elsewhere as a recurring antagonist-pattern: “we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men” (Alma 46:9). The same “flattering words” charge attaches to Korihor and the Nehor line; whether the record means these figures to rhyme is taken up where that pattern is gathered (see Korihor and Cited & Minor Figures) — here it is noted as the editor’s own framing of this one man, not asserted as a designed cross-figure echo.

The triple fraud (chapter 47)

Fled to the land of Nephi, Amalickiah turns the Lamanite king’s own army into the engine of a coup. The chapter’s machinery runs in three movements.

First, the rival removed by poison. When part of the Lamanite host refuses the king’s muster and forts up at Onidah “to the place of arms” (Alma 47:5) under a leader named Lehonti, Amalickiah — given command of the obedient remnant and ordered to “compel them to arms” (Alma 47:3) — instead plots against his own master: “he being a very subtle man to do evil therefore he laid the plan in his heart to dethrone the king of the Lamanites” (Alma 47:4). He courts Lehonti with a four-times-repeated summons (the fourth time climbing the mount himself) and a bargain: he will betray his own camp into Lehonti’s hands “if he would make him (Amalickiah) a second leader over the whole army” (Alma 47:13). The custom that “if their chief leader was killed, [they would] appoint the second leader to be their chief leader” (Alma 47:17) makes the second seat a death away from the first — and Amalickiah closes that distance himself: “Amalickiah caused that one of his servants should administer poison by degrees to Lehonti, that he died” (Alma 47:18). “By degrees” is the chapter’s exact word for the patience of the method. (Lehonti is carried on Cited & Minor Figures.)

Second, the king murdered by proxy. Now “their leader and their chief commander” (Alma 47:19), Amalickiah marches to the city of Nephi, where the king “came out to meet him with his guards, for he supposed that Amalickiah had fulfilled his commands” (Alma 47:21). The killing is done at one remove: Amalickiah’s servants bow “as if to reverence him,” the king “put forth his hand to raise them, as was the custom… as a token of peace” (Alma 47:23), and “when he had raised the first from the ground, behold he stabbed the king to the heart; and he fell to the earth” (Alma 47:24). Amalickiah then frames the king’s own fleeing servants for the murder — “Amalickiah pretended to be wroth, and said: Whosoever loved the king, let him go forth, and pursue his servants that they may be slain” (Alma 47:27) — and the pursuit fails, “and thus Amalickiah, by his fraud, gained the hearts of the people” (Alma 47:30).

Third, the throne secured by marriage. Amalickiah sends the queen a false report, then visits her with “the same servant that slew the king” to swear the lie to her face: “they all testified unto her that the king was slain by his own servants” (Alma 47:34). The chapter’s close names the whole apparatus: “Amalickiah sought the favor of the queen, and took her unto him to wife; and thus by his fraud, and by the assistance of his cunning servants, he obtained the kingdom; yea, he was acknowledged king throughout all the land” (Alma 47:35). The same servants who did the murder furnish the testimony that legitimizes it — the fraud is self-witnessing.

The editor steps out of the narrative at this point for a comment on what kind of men do this — the dissenters “having been instructed in the same knowledge of the Lord, nevertheless… became more hardened and impenitent, and more wild, wicked and ferocious than the Lamanites” (Alma 47:36). That observation — that the apostate out-hardens the people he joins — is the editor Mormon’s, and it is the same verdict he passes on the people of Ammon’s would-be destroyers at Alma 24:30; the pairing of those two passages is hosted on Mormon, not registered here.

The towers of proclamation

With the kingdom won by fraud, the next chapter opens on Amalickiah weaponizing speech in the other direction — no longer flattery to gain a throne, but propaganda to move a nation to war: “as soon as Amalickiah had obtained the kingdom he began to inspire the hearts of the Lamanites against the people of Nephi; yea, he did appoint men to speak unto the Lamanites from their towers, against the Nephites” (Alma 48:1). The method works: “he had hardened the hearts of the Lamanites and blinded their minds, and stirred them up to anger, insomuch that he had gathered together a numerous host” (Alma 48:3), and his appetite grows past the Lamanites — “he sought also to reign over all the land… the Nephites as well as the Lamanites” (Alma 48:2). He staffs his command from the dissenting expert class: “he did appoint chief captains of the Zoramites, they being the most acquainted with the strength of the Nephites, and their places of resort, and the weakest parts of their cities” (Alma 48:5; see Zoramites).

[Textual] — the editor’s stated antithesis: Amalickiah’s fraud vs. Moroni’s preparation. Alma 48:7 sets the two men against each other inside a single sentence: “Now it came to pass that while Amalickiah had thus been obtaining power by fraud and deceit, Moroni, on the other hand, had been preparing the minds of the people to be faithful unto the Lord their God.” The “fraud and deceit” / “preparing the minds” opposition is stated by the record itself — the wiki reports the contrast as the text’s own structure, not as a parallel it has constructed. The chapter then spends the verses that follow developing each side of that one sentence: Moroni’s fortifications and faith (48:8–16) against the towers-propaganda just described (48:1–3). What the contrast means — whether the chapter is built as a deliberate diptych of the two men — is the interpretive question below; that the verse states the opposition is the textual fact.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. Chapters 47–48 can be read as a paired portrait: the antagonist who “obtain[s] power by fraud and deceit” set, by the editor’s own “on the other hand” (Alma 48:7), against the protagonist who wins by “preparing the minds of the people.” The encomium on Moroni that immediately follows — “if all men had been… like unto Moroni… the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever” (Alma 48:17) — reads as the deliberate counter-weight to the editor’s earlier verdict on Amalickiah, “the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause” (Alma 46:9): one man’s wickedness against one man’s righteousness, each said to be capable of moving a whole people. The single-sentence antithesis at 48:7 is textual; the broader claim — that the surrounding chapters are composed as a matched two-man study, the worst man and the best man of the war set side by side — is an editorial-design reading offered for weighing, not a claim the text states outright.

The oath to drink Moroni’s blood

Amalickiah’s first campaign fails at Moroni’s fortifications. He does not lead it himself — “Amalickiah did not come down himself to battle” (Alma 49:11), and the record notes pointedly that had he come, “he would have caused the Lamanites to have attacked… for behold, he did care not for the blood of his people” (Alma 49:10). When his chief captains are all slain at the rebuilt cities of Ammonihah and Noah and the survivors bring word of “their great loss” (Alma 49:25), his rage produces the oath the record will keep returning to: “he did curse God, and also Moroni, swearing with an oath that he would drink his blood; and this because Moroni had kept the commandments of God in preparing for the safety of his people” (Alma 49:27). The record flags the oath as doomed even as it reports the renewed war: “he had sworn to drink the blood of Moroni” (Alma 51:9); “we shall see that his promise which he made was rash” (Alma 51:10). It is the one personal vow attributed to him, and the narrative is built to break it.

This is also the verse that fixes his origin: the captains return “to inform their king, Amalickiah, who was a Nephite by birth” (Alma 49:25). The man who made himself king of the Lamanites by fraud is, by the record’s own parenthesis, a Nephite ruling a people not his own.

The seaboard campaign and the javelin

The second campaign Amalickiah leads in person. His army is smaller — “not so great as they had hitherto been, because of the many thousands who had been slain” (Alma 51:11) — but he comes down the east seaboard while the Nephites are distracted by the king-men crisis (see Kings & Judges), and the cities fall in a list: “the city of Nephihah, and the city of Lehi, and the city of Morianton, and the city of Omner, and the city of Gid, and the city of Mulek, all of which were on the east borders by the seashore” (Alma 51:26). The record credits the run to him by name: “thus had the Lamanites obtained, by the cunning of Amalickiah, so many cities” (Alma 51:27) — the cunning that built the throne now taking the coast, using the Nephites’ own captured fortifications against them (51:27).

He is stopped at Bountiful by Teancum, who “headed Amalickiah… as he was marching forth with his numerous army that he might take possession of the land Bountiful, and also the land northward” (Alma 51:30). The day’s fighting drives the Lamanites to pitch on the beach, and the night settles the oath: “Teancum and his servant stole forth… into the camp of Amalickiah; and behold, sleep had overpowered them” (Alma 51:33); “Teancum stole privily into the tent of the king, and put a javelin to his heart; and he did cause the death of the king immediately that he did not awake his servants” (Alma 51:34). The chapter closes on him in one clause: “and thus endeth the days of Amalickiah” (Alma 51:37). The man who killed a rival by slow poison and a trusting king by a proxy’s hand dies asleep by another man’s hand in the night. The deed is Teancum’s, and the record of it is carried on his page (Teancum).

The dynastic coda: Ammoron

The death does not end the war, because the kingship passes inside the family the same day. The Lamanites wake to find “Amalickiah was dead in his own tent” (Alma 52:1), and “the brother of Amalickiah was appointed king over the people; and his name was Ammoron; thus king Ammoron, the brother of king Amalickiah, was appointed to reign in his stead” (Alma 52:3). Ammoron prosecutes the same war — “this war which… thy brother hath waged against them, and which ye are still determined to carry on after his death,” as Moroni’s epistle puts it (Alma 54:5) — and his own letter claims the cause as blood-vengeance: “I am Ammoron, the king of the Lamanites; I am the brother of Amalickiah whom ye have murdered. Behold, I will avenge his blood upon you” (Alma 54:16). Ammoron stays a cited-and-minor figure; the analysis of his letters — including his “descendant of Zoram” claim (Alma 54:23) and the dissenters’ counter-history of “your fathers did wrong their brethren” (Alma 54:17) — is hosted on Zoram and Cited & Minor Figures, not here. The dynasty he opens is Amalickiah’s true successor: the war does not stop at the javelin.

Significance

Amalickiah is the most fully drawn antagonist in the record — the only enemy whose method is traced step by step across six chapters, from the flatteries that nearly bought him a Nephite crown to the fraud that won him a Lamanite one. The through-line the text itself supplies is the word for his method: he is “a man of cunning device and a man of many flattering words” (Alma 46:10), “a very subtle man to do evil” (Alma 47:4), who wins “by his fraud” (Alma 47:30, 47:35) and takes the coast “by the cunning of Amalickiah” (Alma 51:27). Where other enemies in the war chapters fight, Amalickiah manipulates — his weapons are the false message, the staged reverence, the poisoned cup administered “by degrees,” and the propaganda spoken “from their towers.”

Two structural facts the record states in its own voice are worth keeping separate from any reading built on them. First, the editor’s single-sentence antithesis at Alma 48:7 — Amalickiah “obtaining power by fraud and deceit” against Moroni “preparing the minds of the people” — is the text setting the two men in explicit opposition, not a parallel the wiki constructs. Second, the record arranges the man’s death as an inverse of his crimes: he killed a rival by slow poison (Alma 47:18) and a trusting king by a proxy’s hand, and he himself dies asleep and unguarded on a single javelin-thrust (Alma 51:34), his one personal oath — to drink Moroni’s blood (Alma 49:27) — left unkept and flagged “rash” (Alma 51:10) before the night that breaks it. What design to read into either arrangement is left to the reader; that the text states the antithesis and reports the reversal is the fact.

Key references

Captain Moroni · Teancum · Title of Liberty · Zoramites · Korihor · Kings & Judges · Mormon · Zoram · Riches and Pride · Cited & Minor Figures · Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (Alma 46–49, 51–52; Alma 54 for the Ammoron coda).

Every quote on this page is lifted verbatim, case-preserving, from raw/ (Alma 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54). Textual facts are cited to their verse. The one [interpretive] callout (the two-man editorial-design reading) is flagged as a new claim requiring a disprove-check and is offered for weighing, not asserted as settled. The 48:7 antithesis is reported as the text’s own stated contrast, not a constructed parallel. The editor’s moral on the dissenters (47:36) and Teancum’s deed (51:33–37) are cross-linked to the pages that host them (Mormon, Teancum); Ammoron stays a cited-and-minor figure. External historicity — whether Onidah, Nephi, or the seaboard cities correspond to real places — is out of scope.