What follows the address is as important to the narrative as the address itself. The crowd falls to the ground, professes belief, and asks to enter a covenant; the king puts them under it, has their names recorded, and gives them a name to be called by, the name of Christ, which the text says can be blotted out only by transgression. Readers within the tradition treat the passage as the founding of a covenant community rather than merely a moment of preaching, and the taking of a name on entering that community is read forward into baptism and the later covenant language of the movement.
The political sequel is sharper than the sermon suggests. Benjamin hands the kingdom to his son Mosiah, who reigns and then, near the end of his own life, proposes that the people be governed by judges chosen by their own voice instead of by kings. The argument he gives is Benjamin's argument turned against the institution: a just king is a blessing, but the office cannot be guaranteed to a just man, and the cost of an unjust one is more than a people can bear. The narrative accordingly abolishes the monarchy within two generations of its most admired holder.
Outside the tradition the discourse has attracted attention for its setting rather than its doctrine. The gathering by families in tents facing the temple has been compared to the autumn festival of the Hebrew Bible, and separately to the American camp meeting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both comparisons are readings of a scene, and neither has produced a documented line of derivation.