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Mormon 1:18 · 4 Nephi 1:42

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Book of Mormon Mormon 1:18
"these Gadianton robbers, who were among the Lamanites, did infest the land"
Book of Mormon 4 Nephi 1:42
"began again to build up the secret oaths and combinations of Gadianton"

Institutional-continuity reading (weigh this): Mormon's 'these Gadianton robbers' — the anaphoric 'these' presupposes the reader already knows the order — are the order whose 'secret oaths and combinations of Gadianton' 4 Nephi 1:42 says the wicked 'began again to build up'; the connecting tissue is 4 Nephi 1:46 ('the robbers of Gadianton did spread over all the face of the land'). It is interpretive because the only shared literal between these two verses is the eponym 'Gadianton', which is recurring ('Gadianton robbers' is an 8-hit corpus phrase: 3 Nephi 1:27, 1:29, 2:11, 2:12, 2:18, 3:15, Helaman 7:4, Mormon 1:18). Note the referential shift: in Helaman the Nephites built the order up; in Mormon 1:18 the robbers are 'among the Lamanites'. Collapse-arc legs: Mormon 2:8 ('the land was filled with robbers and with Lamanites'), Mormon 2:27 and 2:28 (Mormon's armies fight and then treaty 'with the Lamanites and the robbers of Gadianton'). Alternative far-end disclosed: Helaman 6:26 (the deeper charter/origin). The tightest textual partner for Mormon 1:18's clause is 3 Nephi 1:27 ('the Gadianton robbers, who dwelt upon the mountains, who did infest the land'), a near-identical clause (also 4 Nephi 1:46 'did spread over all the face of the land').

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