Wives and Children pt II

Thanks to the felicities of the LDS website’s ever-improving search function, I messed up last time in counting the references to ‘wives and children’ in the Book of Mormon.

The phrase ‘wives and children’* appears 32 times in the Book of Mormon.  25 times in what I call Nephite Modernity, or the Nephite Warring States period, the books of Mosiah and Alma.

The great majority of those are references to defending wives and children as a justification for warfare.

Outside of Nephite Modernity, the two ‘wives and children’ references that refer to defense are Mormon 2:23, where Mormon uses wives and children rhetoric to inspire this soldiers.  It kinda works–“and my words did arouse them somewhat to vigor.”  And Ether 14:2, where each Jaredite man has to sleep with his word to defend what is his during the night, including wife and children.  Its pretty clear that fighting to defend their homes was a huge part of Nephite ideology during the Mosiah-Alma period.  The other two references are, I suspect, Mormon being a Captain Moroni fanboy.  The first one is clearly Mormon modeling his speech on what worked during the Nephite glory days and the Ether chapter could be a Mormon summary where he inserted his own concept of what the Jaredites were fighting for, though I don’t know for sure.

*or some variant thereon, such as ‘our wives and our children’.