The Record Passes From Generation To Generation
(This first portion is found previous to the Book of Omni.) Nephi, who wrote First and Second Nephi forged the record, a book written on sheets, or plates of gold. Nephi passed them to his brother Jacob,
Jacob passed them to his son Enos,
Enos passed them to his son Jarom,
Jarom passes them to his son Omni.
In the Book of Omni, we find that:
Omni passes them to his son Amaron, (Omni 1:3)
Amaron passes them to his brother Chemish, (Omni 1:8)
Chemish passes them to his son Abinadom, (Omni 1:10)
Abinadom passes them to his son Amaleki (Omni 1:12).
The moral and general civilizational decline of the Nephites is reflected in the fact that with the exception of Abinadom who writes slightly more than his father Chemish, each successive author from Nephi to Abinadom writes less than his predecessor. The final author of the Book of Omni and the Small Plates of Nephi, Amaleki, breaks this general rule. Much like Mormon (who may have taken Amaleki as his model), this last historian of the civilization that lasted for 400 years in the land of Nephi rose to the occasion and, filled with a sense of longing for what has been lost, eloquently recounted the last days of the Nephite people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Nephi.
Read more about this topic: Book Of Omni
Famous quotes containing the words record, passes and/or generation:
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that “obscure inner necessity” of which Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“You are truly the generation in the middle! You have at once aging parents as well as maturing children to cope with, and you are not granted the deference accorded age, or the indulgence given the young.”
—Helene S. Arnstein (20th century)