The Six Hundred Year Prophecy

When Alma was preaching to the people of Ammonihah, he said this about the coming of the Savior, “And now we only wait to hear the joyful news declared unto us by the mouth of angels, of his coming; for the time cometh, we know not how soon. Would to God that it might be in my day; but let it be sooner or later, in it I will rejoice” (Alma 13:25).  He said this about 82 years before the sign of the Savior’s birth was given to the Nephites, and what is surprising to me is that he didn’t know when the Savior was to come.  Lehi and Nephi had prophesied very specifically about when the Savior would come many years before: “Yea, even six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem, a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews—even a Messiah, or, in other words, a Savior of the world” (1 Nephi 10:4).  He wrote again in a later passage, “And behold he cometh, according to the words of the angel, in six hundred years from the time my father left Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 19:8).  And then towards the end of his record he said again, “according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh in six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem” (2 Nephi 25:19).  So if the Nephites had known from the beginning exactly when the Savior would come among them, why didn’t Alma know this when he was teaching the people of Ammonihah 518 years later?    

                 One possible answer to this question is that they may not have kept record of the chronology well enough to know how many years it was from the time Lehi left Jerusalem.  In the small plates, we Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, and Amaron all kept a record of how long it had been since Lehi left Jerusalem, with Amaron giving the last small plate number that “three hundred and twenty years had passed away” (see 2 Nephi 5:28, Jacob 1:1, Enos 1:25, Jarom 1:5, Omni 1:3, 5).  On the large plates, though, the references aren’t as common and are only given by Mormon as the abridger (and not when quoting someone such as King Benjamin or Helaman).  It may be that after Mosiah left the land of Nephi, the accounting from the time of Lehi stopped and the people lost track.  Mormon told us that Mosiah began to reign “about four and seventy-six years from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem,” and then that the same Mosiah died “five hundred and nine years from the time Lehi left Jerusalem” (Mosiah 6:4, 29:46).  From then on up until the Savior came the people kept track of their time based on the start of the reign of the judges (i.e. about 91 BC), and the accounting back to the time Lehi left Jerusalem was not mentioned again until the time of Christ’s birth when Mormon wrote, “Now it came to pass that the ninety and first year had passed away and it was six hundred years from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem” (3 Nephi 1:1).  When Mormon wrote the abridgement with all the records in front of him he was able to figure out the chronology as it relates to the time Lehi left Jerusalem, but it’s not clear whether the Nephite prophets, such as Alma, also had a precise understanding of how long it had been since Lehi left Jerusalem.  So, assuming Alma had the six-hundred-year prophecy, that could explain why he still didn’t know when the Savior would come into mortality.    

                 Another possibility, and in my mind a bit more likely, is that the prophecy itself was unknown to the Nephite prophets at the time of Alma.  The prophecy is only recorded on the small plates in our text, and so it may be that Nephi did not write it on the large plates which, Nephi said, had “the more part of the reign of the kings and the wars and contentions of my people” (1 Nephi 9:4).  Since this was a spiritual prophecy, it may not have been recorded there on the large plates.  The small plates were passed to King Benjamin by Amaleki and then “he took them and put them with the other plates, which contained records which had been handed down by the kings, from generation to generation until the days of king Benjamin.”  Mormon said simply that these small plates were then “handed down from king Benjamin, from generation to generation until they have fallen into my hands.”  But it’s not clear that they were actually read or noticed much by subsequent prophets, for by the time Mormon came along, he said that he “searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates” (Words of Mormon 1:3, 10-11).  These small plates clearly were not a prominent well-known text if Mormon didn’t even discover them until after he was far into his abridgement.  The small plates may have simply gotten overlooked among the enormous quantity of other plates (Mormon said he couldn’t write one hundredeth of the record for us) and so Alma and his contemporaries wouldn’t have known the prophecies on the small plates.  Another indication that this may be what happened is that Mormon’s reason for including the small plates in his record was this: “The things which are upon these plates pleasing me, because of the prophecies of the coming of Christ” (Words of Mormon 1:4).  That suggests that there were prophecies about the coming of Christ on the small plates (e.g. that he would come exactly 600 years after Lehi left Jerusalem) that they didn’t have anywhere else in the records.  And so, as Alma taught the people of Ammonihah and expressed his uncertainty about when the Savior would come, he may have simply been unaware that hundreds of years before his ancestors had already been told by the Lord the exact date.