Names of Nephite Cities

Mormon made an interesting side note when he wrote about Alma’s visit to Ammonihah.  He left us this little fact about Nephite culture, “Now it was the custom of the people of Nephi to call their lands, and their cities, and their villages, yea, even all their small villages, after the name of him who first possessed them; and thus it was with the land of Ammonihah” (Alma 8:7).  We don’t know who Ammonihah was that the city was named after.  It may be that “ihah” at the end of a name indicates a son (for example, Moronihah was the son of Moroni), and so perhaps Ammonihah the person (who first possessed the land) was named after a father named Ammon.  If that’s the case then it could have been the son of the Ammon who found the people of King Limhi. There’s no way to know, but the language to me seems to suggest that this Ammonihah who “first possessed” the land was a wicked man who started the city on a course that was leading them to destruction when Alma found them. 

               I’ve been pondering the above verse wondering whether there is not some spiritual message in this idea that the cities were named after the person who first possessed them.  Perhaps this is a stretch, but I wonder if we can’t take from it the principle that what happens first usually sticks around.  I remember once when I moved into an apartment with a new companion and we found it very dirty from the previous missionaries.  He insisted that we clean it immediately and quoted someone else who suggested that if you leave things in a certain place for more than a couple of days it will become normal to you and you will likely never change it.  In other words, if you move into a mess and don’t clean/organize it within a short time period, it’s likely that you never will because you will simply get used to it.  Just as in the Nephite society where the name of the first person who inhabited a region tended to simply stick as the name for generations, so too what we do with new situations often sets the pattern for our behavior for a long time.  I think we see this at the start of the Book of Mormon.  The attitudes of Nephi and Laman and Lemuel never really changed after the very beginning of the trip.  Nephi decided from the get go that the pattern he would have would be to “go and do” the things the Lord commanded.  He never deviated from that.  Laman and Lemuel on the other hand decided from the beginning that they did not trust their father or Nephi.  It seems that no matter what happened—seeing angles, miraculously finding food, building a ship that was way beyond their capacities to build, having the Liahona that guided them, being saved from the storm on the ship, etc.—their pattern of behavior never changed.  Despite all that happened to them, decades after their journey into the wilderness after their departure from Jerusalem, they still had the exact same attitude towards their brother and father:  The way they decided to view their father at the beginning stuck with them for their whole lives.  We have to be careful to start out spiritual things in the right way, whether that’s how we treat our spouse in a new marriage or how we start off raising children or study our scriptures or pray or a host of other things.  The patterns we develop from the beginning may stick with us for a very long time.