Amulek’s Figure of Speech Conveys the Atonement

There is a certain Jubilee metaphor in Amulek’s words. At the Jubilee celebration, every fifty years, debts were excused, people who had sold themselves into slavery for debt were freed, and lands of inheritance were returned to their owners, at least, that was what the Mosaic law expected (see Leviticus chapter 25 for details.) Just as the Jubilee redeemed all of these debts that are owed, Jesus will redeem all mankind, on the one condition of repentance and obedience, and none of our sins will count against us anymore. Imagine the poor people from Antionum being told by Alma and Amulek that the redemption will take care of all of the spiritual debts and sins.

As far as figures of speech are concerned, there is an interesting eight-element chiasm in Alma 34:9:

Why did Amulek express the idea of the atonement using this chiastic figure of speech? The answer may be that a chiasm starts at one place, and goes to a center, where it turns around and comes back to where it started. A chiasm thus adds a sense of completion and integrated wholeness. Since the word atone etymologically means to make “at one,” there always is a kind of reunion and a reunifying that the Atonement brings about. In a literary sense, a chiasm unifies the words expressing a thought in much the same way that the feeling of atonement gives you, namely the sense of reunion with God after the transgression, after the sin, and then after being encircled.

Christ taught the people on the earth through parables. He knew that some people would understand some aspects of some of the parables, and others would understand other things. We have to keep looking and striving to understand the one great wholeness to all truth.

The ancient Egyptians dwelt on the focal point of how we will all be judged in the final judgment according to our works. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, all the deceased are brought before the judgment throne of the god Osiris. Before approaching the god, the deceased had to have their heart weighed on a set of scales against the weight of the feather of truth. If your heart was lighter than the feather, it went up, and all was well. But if your heart was heavy and hard, if you were found to be a hard-hearted person, your heart’s side of the scale would go down. If the heart was found unworthy, the jaws of the death monster, the crocodile, would be waiting beneath to eat the descending heart.

In verse 11, Amulek used image of logic to appeal to the minds of the Zoramites, who apparently agreed with one point of the law, namely that if you kill someone, you must be killed. You could not buy your way out of a homicide; and if a person killed someone, the dead person’s relatives had the obligation to avenge his death. If someone had committed a murder and was about to die for it, there was no way that someone else could substitute for the perpetrator. The person who killed had to be punished. It was non-delegable and there was no other way out of it.

Amulek raises this very point using their law as a metaphor: “Now there is not any man that can sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another. If a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother? No.” (Alma 34:11–12). The law required the life of him that murdered. Therefore, Amulek taught, there can be nothing that is short of a divine and infinite atonement that will suffice, because if Christ were only a man, then his death, as a man, could not count for our transgressions. We can see the logic of it even if we might disagree with it, since today if a man murders, we do not in all states require the capital death penalty. But the point still has force and effect. Many things we do cannot be repaired. Restitution is not always possible. Therefore, nothing short of divine help, beyond our limited human powers and resources, can fix all the damage that can be done. It is always easier to tear down than to build up.