The Last Years of Moroni

Moroni final years must have been incredibly lonely.  The last date that we know that Mormon was alive was 385 AD, since he wrote that the battle of Cumorah was “when three hundred and eighty and four years had passed away” (Mormon 6:5).  Moroni took over the writing in Mormon 8, and he told us, “My father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people.”  As if to emphasize how much he missed his father and loved ones, he said again only two verses later, “My father hath been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolk, and I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not” (Mormon 8:3, 5).  The next date that we have comes from the next verse in which Moroni wrote that “four hundred years have passed away since the coming of our Lord and Savior” (Mormon 8:6).  So Mormon died sometime between 385-400 AD, and we have one more date that Moroni gave us in the very last chapter: “Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ” (Moroni 10:1).  So Moroni lived at least until 421 AD and was alone for at least two decades and probably more than three.  What did he do during that time? 

                Clearly the main mission that we know about Moroni was his responsibility to write on the plates, and Mormon 8 through Moroni 10 we have Moroni’s writing.  He alone gave us the story of the Jaredites, but he actually wrote much more than those fifty pages that we have in the current English edition.  We read the following in Moroni’s account of the Jaredites: “Behold, I have written upon these plates the very things which the brother of Jared saw; and there never were greater things made manifest than those which were made manifest unto the brother of Jared.  Wherefore the Lord hath commanded me to write them; and I have written them. And he commanded me that I should seal them up” (Ether 4:4-5).  So that suggests that the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon was all written by Moroni.  Elder Orson Pratt said that 2/3 of the plates were sealed; David Whitmer said half of them were sealed; and George Q. Cannon said that 1/3 of the plates were sealed (see here).  So that puts the writings in the sealed portion at somewhere between 265 and 1062 pages as measured by the current text.  Whatever the length, clearly it was long and a monumental task for Moroni to make his record of the account of the Brother of Jared’s vision. 

                Apparently there is one other thing that we know about Moroni’s life during his final years.  In an Ensign article about the Manti temple is recorded the following: “Brigham Young announced the temple site 25 June 1875 and dedicated the site on 25 April 1877. Earlier that same morning, he had taken Warren S. Snow with him to the southeast corner of the temple site and told him, ‘Here is the spot where the Prophet Moroni stood and dedicated this piece of land for a Temple site, and that is the reason why the location is made here, and we can’t move it from this spot’” (see here).  So Moroni apparently traveled a long ways across North America, but he certainly had a long time to do it in.  What’s also interesting is that apparently there exists a map in the “Archives Division of the Historical Department of the Church” that shows a drawing of Moroni’s journeys across North America and stopping at various locations now important to the Saints (see here, same as above).  Whether the origins of that map really are from Joseph Smith or not we’ll probably never know in this life, but it is interesting nonetheless.  Either way, what a man to devote his life to bringing us the Book of Mormon, and if Moroni walked alone across all of North America to put it where Joseph Smith could find it, then how much more reason have we to praise that last prophet of the Nephites for his faithfulness!