King Benjamin

The setting is described with unusual care. The people come up to the temple by families, pitch their tents with the doors turned toward the building, and stay in them to hear, because the assembly is too large to fit inside. A tower is raised for the king, and when even that proves insufficient the address is written out and circulated to those beyond the range of his voice. The scene runs to several days and ends in a mass covenant.

The address itself moves through three arguments. It opens with an accounting of kingship: the king declares that he has not taxed the people, has laboured with his own hands for his keep, and has not permitted slavery, and he sets that record against the burden a self-serving ruler places on those he governs. It turns from there to the position of the creature before its creator, arguing that a debt which can never be discharged is the honest description of the human situation, and that the only response available is service. The third movement reports an angelic visit and states what the angel is said to have declared about a redeemer to come, his mother, his suffering and his atonement.

Within Latter Day Saint reading the discourse is treated as the fullest statement of the movement's understanding of grace and works held together, because it insists both that the debt cannot be repaid and that service is nevertheless required. The phrase about being in the service of one's fellow beings while in the service of God is quoted more often than any other line in the Book of Mormon, and appears routinely in the movement's welfare and missionary teaching.

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.