Abstract: There are many reasons why a narrator may choose to provide or withhold the names of various characters. This article hypothesizes that Mormon intentionally omitted the name of a key character from the book of Helaman related to the origin of the Gaddianton robbers. While it is not possible to know exactly what information Mormon and other Nephite recordkeepers had or preserved, it is at least plausible that Mormon might have intentionally omitted the name of a clandestine operative in the first two chapters of Helaman as a specific strategy to emphasize this operative’s secrecy and allow the reader to take on his identity more easily. By using this narrative strategy, Mormon can powerfully demonstrate to the reader the importance of resisting tyranny in the defense of freedom. Moreover, Mormon thrills his readers with a tale of spy vs. spy: the Gaddianton robbers versus the nameless organization that initially defeats them. This article suggests that Mormon is a careful editor capable of the rare literary magic of revealing hidden truths that can best be said through silence.

According to the online Book of Mormon Onomasticon, there are over 330 proper names in the Book of Mormon. Over 180 are unique to this ancient American record.¹ Even with so many proper names appearing in its text, many characters are referenced in the Book of Mormon without names. In addition to the possibility that these characters are unnamed due to personal biases or availability, there are literary reasons why an editor or author might not name a [Page 40]character in a text. For example, many studies propose the representational power the character Mary wields because the author of the Gospel of John chose not to use her name.² In order to explore the possibility that a Book of Mormon author may have also withheld a character’s name intentionally for literary effect, we will look at the nameless servant of Helaman referenced in Helaman 2. This paper proposes that Mormon may have left this servant and his comrades unnamed to dramatize the narrative centered around the secret society formed by Gaddianton and Kishcumen.³

The backdrop of the Gaddianton robbers is an ideal context to explore the possibility that Mormon might name and withhold names of his characters for literary utility. Kimberley Matheson has noted that the Gaddianton robbers disrupt Nephite and Lamanite societies through “their invisible, networked, and diffuse approach to power.”⁴ Matheson has also observed that the textual structure of the book of Helaman, the section under exploration in this paper, makes it possible for “virtually every character and object within the book of Helaman [to be] related to the twin themes of visibility and invisibility.”⁵ Thus, when we see that the Gaddianton robbers, who intended to be invisible, are actually rendered very visible with names and the details of their activities by an unknown organization with nameless agents, it is quite possible that we are seeing authorial intent. That is to say, Mormon may be signaling the reader to the significance of this unnamed servant and his secret cadre of co-servants which are implicitly contrasted with the not-so-secret Gaddianton robbers.

In this paper, I will explore the narrative strategies that Mormon employed to describe the secret societies that infect the book of [Page 41]Helaman and Third Nephi. First, I will introduce Mormon’s narrative art. Second, I will present a brief history of the Gaddianton robbers and suggest Mormon strategically omitted information to accentuate the suspense created by the robbers’ secrecy and to emphasize their success or failures at being secret. Last, I will explain how Mormon exploited these omissions to subtly reveal another secret society, one even better at secrecy than the Gaddianton robbers. Here, and other places within this article, I refer to secrecy as a tradecraft, or skillset, that is separate from any purpose for which one might use secrecy. The Gaddianton robbers used secrecy to gain power through murder. This second group used secrecy to defend and protect the church and a system of government. This group is so secret, in fact, that they remain nameless, serving the chief judge and prophet in silence. They are the group that reveals the existence of the Gaddianton robbers and foils their attempts to assassinate Helaman, the chief judge and prophet. In this paper, I will refer to this group, who counter the Gaddianton robbers and protect the chief judge and prophet, as the Secret Service. I must provide a name because, as a crowning ornament to his tradecraft in silence, Mormon kept this secret society nameless, allowing the reader to enter the narrative and become a character in his story. Overall, the narratives of the Gaddianton robbers were part of a warning from Mormon and Moroni to their future readers. Mormon’s art allows readers to imaginatively enter the text and join the fight against this nefarious force.

An Introduction to Mormon’s Art

Although not always praised for its literary quality, the Book of Mormon is a “structurally sophisticated” assembly of ideological narratives.⁶ These narratives are set within a self-contained and self-consistent historical framework. The dimensions of this history not only frame the ideological commentary accompanying the narratives, but also display its sometimes-under-recognized art. Mormon is the primary architect behind the tome’s organization, the rhythm of its narrative sequencing, and the tenor of its ideology. Efforts to identify Mormon’s narrative [Page 42]techniques can reward us by opening our eyes to his art, which can easily be missed. One aspect of Mormon’s editing that we may not always recognize is his use of drama to enhance his narratives.

For example, before taking his readers through a contrasting pair of parallel narratives featuring the people who accept and those who reject Alma₁’s teachings, Mormon interrupts his abridgment in Mosiah 23:23 to prepare us with this statement, “I will shew unto you . . . .” Through phrases like this, Mormon prepares the reader for upcoming dramatic scenarios and also manifests that he is aware of the drama he is providing. In a later narrative (Alma 51), Mormon joins the reader by speaking in first-person plural, as he helps the reader avoid a misconception about the antagonist Amalickiah: “But behold, we shall see that his promise which he made was rash” (v. 10). There are many more examples of Mormon explicitly foreshadowing events, which manifest his clear understanding that he was delivering drama. That artful drama is especially apparent in Helaman 1 and 2.

My approach to Mormon’s literary style assumes what many scholars have shown: that the Book of Mormon is carefully constructed. For instance, Charles Swift’s close readings reveal that the text of the Book of Mormon “frequently shows signs of having been carefully crafted.”⁷ Like Swift’s, my approach differs from one traditional view: that Mormon wrote during “an extremely dangerous and unstable period,”⁸ which rendered him incapable of anything more than a hurried narrative. Although some information in the Book of Mormon provides details on the circumstances under which Mormon abridged his record, the best evidence of its sophisticated composition is the text itself. Having carefully read the text, Grant Hardy has stated:

In light of Mormon’s artistic structuring of his account with deliberate editing, parallel narratives, and specific verbal connections, Latter-day Saints may want to rethink their [Page 43]long-held assumption that the circumstances of Mormon’s life forced him to write hurriedly.⁹

In addition to Hardy, other scholars have noted the presence of narrative art that transcends hurried, unpolished history. Kylie Turley has observed:

Mormon appears not as a moralistic editor of unsophisticated stories “and thus we see” didactic conclusions, but as a skillful author and editor who can portray himself as inexperienced while simultaneously weaving depth and nuance into his stories, rounding out flat characters, and creating silences that speak louder than words.¹⁰

While the context for Mormon’s life can help us understand how the Book of Mormon was written, the best tool for understanding the Book of Mormon is the text. Even so, when a scholar such as Noel Reynolds states that the Book of Mormon is “a work of art,”¹¹ many readers might find this hard to believe because they have the wrong approach to understanding and appreciating this ancient work.

According to Roland Meynet, it has taken centuries for biblical readers and scholars to discover that the Bible had its own rhetoric and that the Western world had been applying the wrong paradigm, a Greco-Roman literary lens, to evaluate and interpret it.¹² It has only been in the second half of the twentieth century that scholars like Robert Alter and Meier Sternberg have begun piecing together appropriate literary methodologies to reveal the Bible’s own artistry. In multiple publications, Noel Reynolds has shown how these same rhetorical tools unique to Hebrew literature are manifest in the Book of Mormon.¹³ Grant Hardy has, likewise, shown how applying these literary [Page 44]tools can improve our understanding of the Book of Mormon, a literary descendant of the Hebrew Bible. In this paper I apply a Hebrew rhetorical model to the account of the Gaddianton robbers and the hypothesized Secret Service. I propose that Mormon omitted names and other information in the account to create drama and teach the reader theology.

Gaddianton Robbers: A Brief Overview

The Gaddianton robbers¹⁴ formed in response to hotly contested elections around 52 BC. Originally formed by the assassin Kishcumen, the group quickly gained a new leader, Gaddianton, after whom the subsequent bands of robbers were named. After famine eradicated the original secret society around 17 BC, the band was reconstituted in 12 BC. This second band was destroyed by an extended, costly military campaign that lasted about thirty-three years. Over 200 years after Christ’s visit to the Nephites, the Gaddianton robbers again formed and appeared to outlive the Nephite civilization (AD 384) and their records (AD 421).

To Mormon, this group was a primary cause for the destruction of Nephite society, which included Christ’s church (see Helaman 2:12–14). Mormon explicitly casts this group in religious terms as followers of Satan (Helaman 6:26–30). According to Mormon, the rise of Satanic “secret combinations” such as the Gaddianton robbers dates back to Cain’s plot to murder his brother Abel (see Helaman 6:26–31; cf. Moses 5). He explained that such murderous secret societies existed “from the beginning of man” (Helaman 6:29). Satan was their originator, teaching man to murder and steal in secret in order to get gain [Page 45]and to pass down this knowledge “from generation to generation” (Helaman 6:30). Moroni also explains that a tradition of secret combinations began with Cain and “had been handed down” from him (Ether 8:15), a tradition possibly alluded to in the story of Cain’s descendant Lamech in Genesis 4:23–24 but found in much more detail in the Book of Moses (Moses 5). In fact, the intertextuality of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses suggests that much of the language of the Book of Mormon that is related to secret combinations could derive from the brass plates if a work similar to the Book of Moses were included in it.¹⁵

This tradition of secret murder was preserved in Jaredite texts and in their excessive interest in power. In their texts, the Jaredites discovered the secret combinations and formed them, murdering to gain power. Ultimately, these secret ways led to the complete destruction of the Jaredites.¹⁶ The Nephites learned from the Jaredites the danger of secret societies and of the oaths and information that led to their formation. For this reason, the Nephite recordkeepers kept access to these oaths away from the people.

Although the secret works of the Gaddianton robbers have much in common with those among the Jaredites, Mormon is explicit in stating that the Nephite secret combinations did not originate from the records of the Jaredites.¹⁷

[Page 46]Now behold, it is these secret oaths and covenants which Alma commanded his son should not go forth unto the world lest they should be a means of bringing down the people unto destruction. Now behold, those secret oaths and covenants did not come forth unto Gaddianton from the records which were delivered unto Helaman. (Helaman 6:25–26)

Just as Cain did not need an ancient text to conceive the idea to kill for gain, Gaddianton did not require an ancient text. In fact, according to Moroni, no one has ever needed documents to learn about secret combinations; he said, “And now I Moroni, do not write the manner of their oaths and combinations, for it hath been made known unto me that they are had among all people” (Ether 8:20). Gaddianton, like Cain, had direct access to the father of evil, Satan himself, who inspired both murderers to kill in secret and to plot with others to keep it secret, while using their secret combination for ongoing gain and power.

Mormon’s narration features an ideological argument that righteousness, not military might or some other social program, was necessary to prevent the robbers from commandeering Nephite society.¹⁸ The narration also demonstrates that, for the most part, the robbers were an existential threat that could not be merely prayed away. The Nephites and Lamanites had to actively resist the robbers, to ferret them out of their hiding spots, whether within their society or external to it, and eradicate them (see Helaman 6). The theme of resisting the robbers is part of a larger socio-political theme¹⁹—the need to actively resist tyranny in order to maintain freedom.

[Page 47]Mormon indicated that this problem could not be solved by individuals alone. It seems organized groups were needed to curb the robbers’ growth and eradicate them. In fact, Mormon’s commentary implies that government leadership was necessary in the struggle against the robbers. As they blended into more urban areas in the forty-ninth year of the reign of the Judges, the robbers “were not known unto those which were at the head of government; therefore they were not destroyed out of the land.” (Helaman 3:23).²⁰ A reason that the government had to know about the robbers to eradicate them could be that only the government had the capacity to organize the necessary human resources.

I propose that, as a response to approximately thirty-five years of attempts to bring down the Nephite judge system (Alma 2–Helaman 1), the government organized a group of individuals trained to protect the chief judge. Evidence of this group and its training can be seen in the actions taken to apprehend participants in Paanchi’s insurrection in Helaman 1 and to prevent the attempt on Helaman’s life in Helaman 2. Because this government-supported entity was shrouded in secrecy (and, thus, not named) and because the group’s only identified member was described merely as “one of the servants of Helaman” (Helaman 2:6), I refer to the hypothesized group as the Nephite Secret Service. An organization that would have produced the highly skilled individual whose actions are narrated in Helaman 2 may have needed years to develop and pass on the craft of their trade from agent to agent. The expertise of the hypothesized Secret Service may have benefited from the success of military groups like the highly skilled men subordinate to the great captain Teancum.

Captain Teancum was a professional soldier. He was trained and experienced. In fact, the skills of Teancum and his men provided the Nephites with a critical advantage in battle, one that was desperately needed. Even against a much more numerous force, [Page 48]Teancum’s force was successful, because “every man of Teancum did exceed the Lamanites in their strength and in their skill of war” (Alma 51:31). These skills were not accidentally gained; they were trained. The Nephite generals were aware of their disadvantages in numbers, so they attempted to counter this with divine help, training (Alma 51:31), armor (Alma 44:9), fortifications (Alma 48 and 49), and stratagem (see Alma 43:28–30). This mindset of desperation may bear some similarities to that described by the chronicler of the Israeli intelligence unit, Mossad. Ronen Bergman has described this mindset this way: there was a “sense among Israel’s leaders and citizens that the country and its people [were] perpetually in danger of annihilation. . . . Because of Israel’s tiny dimensions, the attempts . . . to destroy it even before it was established, [the] continued threats to do so, and the perpetual menace of . . . terrorism, the country evolved a highly effective military and, arguably, the best intelligence community in the world.”²¹ The skills displayed by Teancum and his soldiers are examples of Nephite desperate innovation. This same desperation would be a fitting context to the creation of the Secret Service as well.

Another reason that government leadership was necessary to combat the robbers could be that the government was the main target of the robbers. These robbers, like the numerous political dissenters throughout Nephite history, intended to take over the government. They wanted to replace the free government, which established laws by the voice of the people, with tyranny. The Nephites were especially worried that a despot would destroy their freedom of religion. Mormon conveys this concern in his commentary accompanying the campaigns of Amlici (Alma 2:4), Zerahemnah (Alma 43:8–10), Amalickiah (Alma 46:10), and Moroni₁, whose Title of Liberty was intended to rally the people against the kingmen, Amalickiah, and Ammoron (Alma 46:11–16; 51:20; and 62:1–11). The struggle between religious freedom and tyranny is a dominant theme throughout the Book of Mormon.

The Secret Service

In the events of the first two chapters of Helaman, Mormon pits the newly formed Gaddianton robbers against another secret society, the Secret Service. As previously mentioned, this service is so secret that Mormon never names them collectively or individually. Even when Mormon details an act of bravery and exemplary tradecraft by an [Page 49]individual from the group, the record remains silent about the agent’s name (Helaman 2:6). The namelessness of this hero and other veiled references to the group let Mormon demonstrate in the composition of the text how this Secret Service beat the newly formed Gaddianton robbers in the perilous game of clandestine conflict. Mormon narrates his account of the Secret Service so subtly that the only real way to spot them is by their absence.

In the aftermath of the hotly contested elections in the fortieth year of the reign of the judges, Paanchi, who lost the election by the voice of the people, was angry. Paanchi “was about to flatter away” his supporters into insurrection but was apprehended and “condemned unto death” (Helaman 1:7–8)—an interesting legal situation, to be sure.²² A key part of this narrative is the phrase “was about to.” It is so important that it is repeated twice, once in verse 7 and once in verse 8. The “about to” phrase describes an unfulfilled intention. Before Paanchi could fully pitch his plan and incite an insurrection, someone else knew his intention and stopped him. This “someone else” probably penetrated Paanchi’s conspiring group, which is precisely what we would expect a Secret Service to do.

Of course, there are multiple possible explanations for this episode. For instance, one of Paanchi’s followers may have had misgivings about the insurrection and divulged Paanchi’s intention to the government. Additionally, Paanchi’s anger may have been so elevated that he discussed his intention too freely. The text says that he was attempting to “flatter away those people,” i.e., “the people that were desirous that he would be their governor.” He may have been doing this in public places where representatives of the government could observe him. But alternatively, or in addition, the government may have had clandestine agents who had infiltrated his group and were watching him. The fact that Paanchi was sharing his intention only with his followers suggests this scenario, as do the subsequent clandestine actions of Helaman’s servant. All things considered, the best explanation for the full spectrum of reported events would seem to be that someone or some group, a Secret Service, clandestinely obtained Paanchi’s plans for insurrection.

Following Paanchi’s apprehension, Kishcumen’s followers “did mingle themselves among the people, in a manner that they all could [Page 50]not be found;” however “as many as were found were condemned unto death” (Helaman 1:12). If all the conspirators covenanted with Kishcumen to tell no one about his act of assassination, how were any of them found? Although the record does not specifically say, the government’s success in finding and executing some of Kishcumen’s followers suggests that there was an organized cadre who were also consistently “mingling . . . among the people,” including among the conspirators, looking for threats to the chief judge. To have detected the conspiracy, this group had to be active before Paanchi’s insurrection, but their actions are highlighted only after the fact, first becoming apparent in the apprehension and execution of Paanchi.

According to Robert Funk, as a general rule in narratives, the more important events are narrated in detail.²³ Mormon’s choices on what to narrate or not narrate in detail thus become literarily meaningful. His choice to narrate events that almost happened, and the subsequent assassination of the newly elected chief judge, throws into relief something he did not narrate: Paanchi’s actual execution. The missing account is an oddity for Mormon, who usually meticulously describes the death of rebellious villains, e.g., Nehor, Amilici, and Amalekiah.²⁴ In Paanchi’s case, the execution is not narrated. Instead, Mormon abruptly turns the reader’s attention to Kishcumen and his deployment against Helaman. Mormon focuses more intently on the operations and frustrations of the robbers than on the justice administered to them. This focus may be a sign of authorial intent.

Mormon’s omission of Paanchi’s death may reflect his intent to emphasize the formation of the Gaddianton robbers and of the government entity that squared off against them. The fact that Mormon closes his account of the robbers in Helaman 2 with a clash between them and an unnamed entity supports the hypothesis. As previously noted, Mormon concluded that narrative with the robbers mingling “themselves among the people in a manner that they all could not be found—but as many as were found were condemned unto death” (Helaman 1:12). Again, Mormon did not describe the executions. As [Page 51]in Paanchi’s case, the struggle between the robbers and the Secret Service may have superseded the executions.

After switching to a narration of Coriantumr’s invasion of the Nephite lands and his murder of the Chief Judge Pacumeni (see Helaman 1:14–34), Mormon brings the reader back to another contested election. He writes, “There began to be a contention again among the people concerning who should fill the judgment-seat” (Helaman 2:1). Mormon has prepared us for another political contest, but this time he does not directly inform us about the contestants other than Helaman. Mormon does, however, indirectly reveal who lost to Helaman and how this person planned to ultimately gain the judgment-seat. This may be a situation where the use of Biblical rhetoric frames events that follow. Unlike authors in the Graeco-Roman world, who, according to Meynet, led their readers in “a straight line . . . to a conclusion which ought to compel them to agree,” Mormon, like Biblical authors, is often “content to show the way which one wishing to understand may take.”²⁵

Mormon implies that this second contest for the judgment-seat is between Helaman and Gaddianton. That Gaddianton was a candidate is apparent in what he proffers Kishcumen’s followers: “If they would place [Gaddianton] in the judgment-seat he would grant unto those who belonged to his band that they should be placed in power and authority among the people” (Helaman 2:5). Placing Gaddianton on the judgment-seat required the death of Helaman. In the competition between the three sons of Parhoron₁,²⁶ after the murder of Parhoron₂ and the disqualification of Paanchi, Pacumeni was the obvious choice for chief judge. This may have been a precedent Gaddianton counted on. Gaddianton, Kishcumen, and their followers were confident that if [Page 52]Helaman were murdered, the judgment-seat would automatically fall to Gaddianton. This suggests that Gaddianton was the popular and well-known runner-up for the chief judge position. Having lost the election, he now seeks to eliminate Helaman, the one person who stands between him and the chief judgeship. But unlike his predecessors, Amlici, Zerahemnah, and Amalickiah, who sought to seize leadership through force of arms and, thus, alienated the mass of the people from themselves, Gaddianton tries to take power by the voice of the people. Doing so would provide a strong political base for his subsequent actions. But to do so, he could leave no fingerprints on the elimination of his rival. A murder committed by the secret society would allow him to remain popular with the people because no one would know he was an accomplice to the assassination.

Regardless of the actual situation, the Gaddianton robbers wanted to kill Helaman and gain power and authority over the people. In this, they fail. Although Mormon foreshadows the doom that the robbers forebode for the people of Nephi (Helaman 2:12–14), here he narrates their defeat at the hands of the Secret Service. He does this through an innovative mix of telling and showing.²⁷ He tells the reader the robbers’ intent: they wanted to assassinate the newly elected chief judge, Helaman, and put Gaddianton on the judgment seat. He reveals that Kishcumen was the assassin, who “did lay wait to destroy Helaman” (Helaman 2:3). He uncovers much of the robbers’ tradecraft (secret skills). He tells us that when Kishcumen killed Parhoron, he was “in disguise” and therefore was able to “mingle . . . among the people” without detection after his mission (Helaman 1:12). He informs us of covenants the robbers used to cover their dark acts in secrecy and, specifically, to harbor Kishcumen after he killed Parhoron and before he killed Helaman (see Helaman 1:12 and 3:3–4). Part of their cloak of secrecy, Mormon tells us, was the use of signs to identify other covenant-makers (see Helaman 3:6–9). Through telling us all these details, Mormon equips or privileges²⁸ the reader with information the conspirators wanted to keep private. By narrating these details, Mormon reveals that the robbers have been infiltrated. Were it not so, neither Mormon nor we would know what happened.

[Page 53]Mormon creates suspense by disclosing more information to the reader than the characters possess. He then reveals how we know such secret information. He introduces a Secret Service agent, identified only as “one of the servants of Helaman” (Helaman 2:6). This agent dons a disguise to infiltrate the robbers, discovers their intent to kill Helaman, intercepts Kishcumen on his way to assassinate Helaman, and then deceives him with a clandestinely obtained sign. He, thus, discovers Kishcumen’s intent and kills him without a sound (see Helaman 2:6–9).

The densely packed action ascribed to this agent contrasts with what Mormon tells us about the robbers. Mormon discloses the name of the group of robbers (the Gaddianton robbers), names their leader (Gaddianton), and names their assassin (Kishcumen). In contrast, he does not name the Secret Service or its agent or even identify it as a formal organization. Helaman is their leader, but his interactions with his agents, unlike those among the Gaddiantons, are not described, just as the name of his agent, unlike that of Kishcumen, is not disclosed. All this reporting of the robbers’ actions while withholding information about the Secret Service reveals to the reader that the Secret Service was actually secret while the robbers were not, or at least the robbers were not as secret as they hoped to be.

There may also have been a difference in difficulty and tradecraft/skills. It seems likely that the disguise of the unnamed servant was different from that of Kishcumen when he killed Parhoron. Kishcumen donned a disguise, maybe as simple as covering his face with ash, to hide who he was.²⁹ The agent probably used a disguise to fit in with the robbers. To be sure, Helaman’s agent had to hide who he was, but he probably also needed to be a specific person. In order to infiltrate the robbers, an intrinsically exclusive group, the agent likely had to create a new persona and gain the robbers’ trust over time. Alternatively, he could have needed to impersonate someone else already known to the robbers. The robbers were a group that had to know its members in order to survive.³⁰ Therefore, this agent would need to habitually don a persona as well as disguise his true allegiance to Helaman.

It is easy to view the non-specific time descriptor “by night” [Page 54](Helaman 2:6)³¹ as a singular time reference, something akin to “that night.” However, it is also possible to read “at night” as a habitual time descriptor. Although this time reference is contextualized by a singular occurrence, the information gained by the Secret Service operative about Kishcumen’s attempt to kill Helaman was probably acquired over the course of many nights. It could have required a long time for this agent to blend in with the robbers and gain their trust.³² To successfully execute an operation such as the one Mormon describes, Helaman’s Secret Service would have needed to be strategically sophisticated. Also, to keep the operation effective, Alma’s family, the recordkeepers for this part of Nephite history, may have needed to be circumspect about what they said about the organization as they recorded the history of their governance.

The skills shown by Helaman’s unnamed agent are powerful evidence for the existence of an organized Secret Service security force. The skills that exist in this narrative could come only from training and, specifically, the kind of training provided in a group and practiced as a profession or trade. To support this proposition more fully, consider Brant Gardner’s argument about Nephi. He suggests that Nephi’s exceptional ability as a writer of the books of First and Second Nephi provide evidence of his training as a scribe.³³ Gardner notes, “The length and complexity of Nephi’s two texts point to the work of a trained scribe. An untrained, semiliterate person would not have been sufficiently competent to attempt such a record.”³⁴ Ascribing scribal training to Nephi presupposes a certain curriculum known to have been used in other Near Eastern cultures around Israel and years of [Page 55]training under a scholar in a master-disciple relationship. Similarly, the exceptional tradecraft exhibited by the unnamed servant of Helaman suggests that the servant was part of a trained profession as well.

The utility of comparing Helaman’s unnamed servant with Nephi is limited in two ways. First, there is much more information about Nephi than there is about the unnamed servant. Second, there is more information about Nephi’s scribal background than a hypothetical background for the trade proposed for the unnamed operative. Based on the available information, the unnamed servant of Helaman seems to possess skills from the trade of a warrior and a spy. For the espionage or intelligence profession, historical information is limited. Historian Christopher Andrew lamented, “it was more difficult to learn the historical lessons of intelligence than of any other profession mainly because there was so little record of most of its past experience.”³⁵ For example, Andrews observed that “for centuries before the Second World War, educated British people knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about the role of intelligence at any moment in their own history.”³⁶ Andrews further observed that “the first major figure in world literature to emphasize the importance of good intelligence was God,” when “God told Moses to send spies to reconnoiter ‘the land of Canaan.’”³⁷

The activities that the narrator describes the unnamed servant performing in order to protect Helaman would have required years of training. For example, although removed by over a thousand years from the time of Moses and Lehi, in their formative years, modern Israeli intelligence organizations found that proper training was absolutely necessary for successful operations. Some sort of training would have also been necessary for Helaman’s unnamed servant. [Page 56]The journalist Ronen Bergman noted that for early modern Israel, “one of the critical weaknesses in th[e] early operations in the 1940’s was the poor training.” Bergman further observed that the only successful early operations “were all carried out by . . . the militia’s only well-trained and fairly well-armed corps.”³⁸ Helaman’s servant being trained implies the existence of a supporting organization with trainers and trainees. Accordingly, when Mormon describes this unnamed servant as “one of the servants of Helaman” (Helaman 2:6), he implies that there was a cadre of servants, in other words, an organization aptly described as the Secret Service. I am not suggesting that they were like the U.S. Secret Service, part of a modern state bureaucracy. I am merely proposing that this group had some sort of structure and the purpose of protecting the Nephite judgeship, a clear need given the history of insurrections outlined previously. They would be analogous to Teancum’s advanced-skilled fighting force. And more specifically, the unnamed servant’s trained skills are analogous to those used by Teancum to assassinate Amalickiah and Ammoron.

As mentioned previously, Captain Teancum was a professional soldier. He successfully infiltrated two camps to kill two related tyrants. It is fair to assume that his use of stealth was a practiced skill. We see this especially in the operation to kill Amalickiah, where Teancum “stole privily into the tent of the king and put a javelin to his heart” (Alma 51:34). The narration of Teancum’s covert operations is sparse, so we do not know how long he had been planning his assassinations. The terseness of the narrative may make the effort seem like it was done on a whim, but within the rhetorical silence there is room to propose the likelihood of an organized effort requiring specific training. The success of this difficult operation alone is evidence that there was a background of training. This same premise is also possible for the unnamed servant. That is, the unnamed servant and his fellow servants trained their precise tradecraft.

Teancum’s covert operation to kill Amalickiah and later to kill Ammoron, could also be termed in modern parlance, a targeted killing. According to Bergman, “targeted killing” refers to “killing a specific individual in order to achieve a specific goal—saving the lives of people the target intends to kill, averting a dangerous act that he is about to perpetrate, and sometimes removing a leader in order to change [Page 57]the course of history.”³⁹ Bergman further observed that “of all the means that democracies use to protect their security, there is none more fraught and controversial than ‘killing the driver’” or targeted killings. One can see this reasoning for killing, saving the lives of many at the expense of the few,⁴⁰ in the narratives of the Book of Mormon and the controversial moral struggles its characters face starting in its first chapters.⁴¹ Although Mormon did not know or did not provide the actual orders the unnamed servant who killed Kishcumen had, what the unnamed servant did could be termed a targeted killing.

After their failure to kill Helaman, unfortunately, this first group of robbers learn their lesson from this experience and remained in relative secrecy afterwards. After Helaman 2, the reader transitions from having a plethora of details about the robbers to a veiled and cryptic account. In these later chapters in Helaman, Mormon maximized the drama of the reading as he continued to not only tell of the robbers’ successful infiltration of the Nephites, but also presented it through obscuring details concerning their movements.

A few decades after the assassination of Parhoron₂ and the attempt on Helaman, another chief judge, Cezoram, “[is] murdered by an unknown hand as he sat upon the judgment seat” (Helaman 6:15). In that same year, the next elected chief judge, Cezoram’s unnamed son, “[is] also murdered” (Helaman 6:15). Mormon’s bare-bones narration of these events emphasized the secrecy of the robbers. Mormon’s statement that it was done by an unknown hand is intended for the reader.⁴² Mormon knew who did it. After giving the reader some suspense, he finally tells us that it was the Gaddianton robbers (see Helaman 6:17–19). Delaying the identity of the assassins not only creates suspense but also puts us in the place of the Nephites, who likely only learned who the assassins were after the assassination occurred.

The suspense Mormon creates in this series of pericopes reveals his awareness of a future reader and that he was providing drama for that reader. Mormon’s representation of the robbers suggests that he was carefully considering how he would present this narrative to us. It is narratives like this that justify closer readings of Mormon’s rhetoric [Page 58]in order to identify authorial intent and layers of possible meaning. Ultimately, these action-packed sequences, and the way they are presented, may belie a specific goal from Mormon; that is, Mormon may have been teaching us, his future readers, how to defeat secret combinations. He wanted us to root out our Gaddianton robbers before they wreaked havoc on us in the same way they did to his people.

Mormon’s Use of Silence

Mormon used silence to loudly applaud this hero’s achievements in resisting evil. Mormon’s direct and wordy praise that he applied to the great captain Moroni (Alma 48:17) is the opposite approach he used here, but possibly with a similar effect. Mormon may have wanted us to see this agent as a hero and allows us to step into his shoes to encourage us to resist tyranny. Instead of telling us how good he thought this agent was, he showed us. He convincingly presented to the reader that even though he was pitted against the very group that eventually brought the whole Nephite civilization down, this agent beat them in their own game of secrecy. He was nameless, faceless, and silent, so much so that even in killing Kishcumen, he did it in a way that Kishcumen died without a sound. It is an exciting and dramatic story made more so by this agent’s lack of a name.

Names are essential in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Playing on the meaning of these names is a common rhetorical device in both traditions. For example, Moshe Garsiel and Herbert Marks have demonstrated that Biblical puns are not merely ornamental but are designed to contribute to the substance of the dramatic tapestry that is the Bible’s conglomerate narrative.⁴³ Amanda Colleen Brown-Mather observed that “in the endeavor to sacralize the act of scripture reading, specific details like names and their meanings can invigorate one’s understanding of the narrative and its theology.”⁴⁴ Matthew Bowen has highlighted multiple occasions where Mormon creatively [Page 59]employs the meaning of names to enhance his ideological themes.⁴⁵ I am suggesting the absence of a name for the “servant of Helaman,” [Page 60]who heroically protected Helaman, may have been purposeful. Further, Mormon may have just as carefully and purposefully withheld some names in his narrative to fill his stories more fully with meaning and rhetorical power.

It is possible that the Nephite recordkeepers deliberately withheld names of their Secret Service agents to reduce the risk of their names being leaked and their work being compromised. Many ancient craftsmen, including scribes, were part of elite families with skills passed from father to son, so identifying one person could undermine the secrecy of the group in subsequent generations. This scenario suggests that Mormon did not have access to the names of the Nephite Secret Service members, and that would be why they remain unnamed. Although there was always the fear that the plates could fall into the wrong hands, the recordkeepers also had promises that God would preserve their records.⁴⁶ Therefore, Alma and his posterity may have been concerned about divulging some information, like the oaths from the Jaredites and the Gaddianton robbers, they did record them.⁴⁷ I would assume that including the names of the hypothesized Secret Service members might be similarly handled—recorded but not further disseminated to the populace. I suggest, then, that Mormon had access to these names, but withheld them for litrary purposes.

Bowen has pointed to a very fitting example of Mormon’s artistry with names in Mormon’s placement of the name of Paanchi during the pericope of the formation of the Gaddianton robbers in Helaman 1. Bowen and John Gee have remarked that Paanchi⁴⁸ is “a form of the common Egyptian name p3 ʿnḫ, most plausibly denot[ing] the living one.”⁴⁹ Bowen further elucidated “that the Egyptian lexeme ʿnḫ [Page 61](vb. ‘live,’ n. ‘life’) had additional derived meanings. Perhaps the most important secondary meaning of ʿnḫ as a verb was to ‘swear’ and as a noun it also meant ‘oath.’”⁵⁰ It is within the context of Paanchi’s arrest and Parhoron’s assassination that Mormon narrates these first oaths that the Gaddianton robbers make: “they all entered into a covenant—yea, swearing by their everlasting Maker—that they would tell no man that Kishcumen had murdered Parhoron” (Helaman 1:11).

The importance of names in the Bible and Book of Mormon are accentuated by the namelessness of other characters like Helaman’s unnamed servant. As mentioned previously, R. Alan Culpepper notes that Mary, the mother of Jesus, “is not even named” in the gospel of John. The absence of her name does not suggest that John or Jesus did not care for her or for women in general. The narratives in John demonstrate just the opposite. Culpepper observes that this general “paucity of description has not hindered, and indeed probably has stimulated, a variety of symbolic interpretations” for Mary.⁵¹

Perhaps an even closer parallel to the nameless servant of Helaman is the servant of Abraham, who is without a name in the Genesis 24 account. Abraham has a servant Eliezar named in a previous narrative in Genesis 15, but this name is not used for the servant in Genesis 24, the vignette of finding Rebecca and bringing her to Canaan to marry Isaac. He may have been Eliezar, but this name is not used in the later account. Judith Newman has commented that this nameless nature does not make Abraham’s servant a nobody, but that “his identity is revealed only through his actions.”⁵² Accordingly, the namelessness of [Page 62]Helaman’s servant endows him with representational power. Instead of being identified by a proper name, this servant’s identity is given in his actions to protect Helaman. Because he is “one of the servants of Helaman,” his actions point back to Helaman’s position as the elected judge to protect the freedoms of the people and point back to a group, an organization like the Secret Service. Of particular interest here, the servant’s namelessness stands out in contrast to the named Gaddianton robbers, who were trying to avoid identification.

Mormon possibly removed the identity of the Secret Service and the agent so that we more readily identify with them. He deliberately left the space literarily unoccupied so it could be easier for the reader to enter that point of view. He then causes us to experience those things at the same time that the Secret Service and agent perform them. He does so to demonstrate the need for some form of direct action by righteous people and invites us to be those people. Mormon implies in Helaman 3:23 that the leaders of the government were capable and responsible for combating the threat from secret combinations. Mormon may be directing the reader to the general concept that democracy is vulnerable to the power-hungry and politically ambitious among us. The “among us” part seems especially relevant because, from the perspective of the text’s implied reader,⁵³ the worst threat the Nephites faced was not from without, but from within. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Gaddianton, the Nephite’s greatest threat, may have even been popular to the Nephites. It seems that Mormon was warning the reader to be vigilant.

Moroni also handles the topic of secret combinations but takes a different approach, directly warning the reader about the threat they pose. Within his commentary on secret combinations in Ether 8, Moroni reveals to the reader that God had commanded him to write [Page 63]about them (Ether 8:26). Furthermore, Moroni uses the second-person pronoun you to extend a command from the Lord directly to the reader to be vigilant (Ether 8:24). He pleads with us to repent and to not “suffer . . . that these murderous combinations sh[ould] get above [us]” (Ether 8:23). Moroni calls on us to be vigilant, but not vigilantes—there is a distinction. It is important to point out that the nameless Secret Service agent as narrated by Mormon was not a vigilante. He was a servant of the state and of the church. He was the servant of Helaman, who was both the chief judge and prophet.

Conclusion

Mormon, who has demonstrated a propensity for making the most out of names through plays on their meanings, seems also willing to withhold them at times for thematic reasons. Without access to the full records Mormon used to compose his abridgment, we cannot be sure, but it seems possible that Mormon might intentionally have omitted a name to make a point in a similar fashion as he did by playing on a name’s etymology or repeating a name. The same recordkeepers who preserved the deeds of the agent who saved Helaman might have preserved his name, but Mormon may have deliberately withheld it as a specific strategy to emphasize his secrecy and allow the reader to take on his identity more easily. By using this narrative strategy, Mormon could powerfully teach the reader the importance of resisting tyranny and the suppression of the people’s voice. Mormon’s narrative art displayed in this thrilling episode of espionage and murder identifies Mormon as a careful editor capable of the rare literary magic of revealing hidden truths through silence.

[Author’s Note: Thank you to my brother David for his guidance and constant encouragement, to my friend Katherine for her initial guidance on this idea and subsequent reviews of my drafts, to my brother Devin and the Rozeskis for helping me acquire references, to my friend Craig Blake for his editorial suggestions, and to Godfrey Ellis and Jeff Lindsay as well as the unnamed reviewers of Interpreter. All of these individuals, named and nameless, helped improve this paper.]