Ammonihah () is a city mentioned in the Book of Mormon that is governed by a class of lawyers and judges who lead an aristocratic and materialistic social order. When the Book of Mormon prophet Alma visits Ammonihah as part of a ministerial tour, the city becomes the setting of "one of the most disturbing episodes" of the text in which Ammonihah's governing elite imprison him, exile any men converted by his preaching, and kill women and children associated with his mission by fire.
The narrative set in Ammonihah is intertextual with the Old and New Testaments. Literary and theological scholarship treat the Ammonihah story as an exploration of suffering and a turning point in the Book of Mormon's use of the phrase "lake of fire and brimstone" as a metaphor for hell.
Artist John Held Sr. was commissioned to depict Ammonihah in two woodblock prints for George Reynolds's 1888 The Story of the Book of Mormon. These were among the first published illustrations of Book of Mormon content.
Background
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the primary religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement. In the book's narrative, a family flees Jerusalem in approximately 600 BCE, prophetically directed to escape the Babylonian captivity. Led by God, they arrive in the Americas and establish a society which, due to a deepening fraternal disputation, splits into two: the Nephites and the Lamanites. Despite preceding the advent of Jesus, the Nephites have a Christian society with prophets among them. The majority of the story is framed as the retrospective work of its principal narrator, Mormon, a Nephite who lives near the end of the chronological narrative and reflexively describes creating the text that is the Book of Mormon by abridging and quoting from Nephite history.
Book of Alma
The Book of Mormon is further divided into fifteen internal books, named after prophets in the text in a manner reminiscent of the prophetic books of the Bible. The ninth book is the book of Alma, named after Alma, a prophet who is the son of the late founder of the then-current incarnation of the Nephite church. In this sub-book, Mormon narrates Alma's ministry and that of his son Helaman during the "reign of the judges", a period in which rule by judges has replaced monarchy in Nephite society.
The book of Alma structurally divides into four quarters that alternatively parallel each other. In the first and third quarters (Alma 1–16 and 30–44), Alma encounters dissent among Nephites and responds; in the second and fourth quarters (Alma 17–29 and 45–63), Mormon narrates Nephite–Lamanite interactions.
The majority of the Ammonihah narrative is framed by an inclusio spanning Alma 9–16.
Nephite dissenters and Alma
Prior to the Ammonihah narrative, the Book of Mormon develops an ongoing plot depicting a series of dissident movements in Nephite society whose participants persecute members of the Nephite church and reject its orthodoxy on the need for a Redeemer. The first of these are called "unbelievers", and in Alma's first appearance he is an active and highly persuasive unbeliever who convinces "many of the people to do after the manner of his iniquities". Alma's life drastically changes when an angel appears and commands him to repent. In a reversal that is intertextual with the apostle Paul's story in the New Testament, Alma does repent, and his transformation is so complete he goes on to become high priest of the Nephite church.
In addition to being high priest of the church, Alma spends some time ruling as chief judge. The first case the narrative describes him overseeing is for a man named Nehor who, during a debate about religion, murders a Nephite church member. Nehor is also the founder of a new church whose teachings are similar to the ideas of the unbeliever movement Alma was part of. Despite the resemblance to his past self, Alma sentences Nehor to death for the murder.
Despite Nehor's death, his ideas gain popularity among Nephites, and the narrative describes Ammonihah as a community that accepts the teachings of Nehor.