Alma

Alma is the longest book in the Book of Mormon, covering several decades of Nephite history under the judges. Its early chapters follow Alma the Younger, son of the Alma who founded the church in Mosiah, from a rebellious youth struck down by a vision and dramatically converted to a leading prophet and, briefly, chief judge before he steps down to devote himself entirely to preaching. Alongside his ministry the book narrates extended military conflict, driven first by the dissenter Amlici and later by the Lamanite king Amalickiah, whose manipulations are opposed by the Nephite military leader Captain Moroni, a figure closely associated in the text with the title of liberty he raises to rally his people.

A separate strand follows the sons of Mosiah, who give up any claim to the throne to serve as missionaries among the Lamanites. Their most celebrated success is Ammon's service in the court of King Lamoni, which leads to Lamoni's conversion and, eventually, to a large-scale Lamanite conversion; the converts, later called the people of Ammon or Anti-Nephi-Lehies, bury their weapons and adopt a vow of nonviolence that plays directly into the wars narrated elsewhere in the book.

Nephite military organization in this stretch is described with unusual specificity, including armor, defensive earthworks and rotating garrisons, details later readers have used, without settling the matter either way, to argue for or against locating the narrative in a specific real world setting.

Alma's length reflects how much narrative material Mormon had to compress from the large plates for this stretch of Nephite history, and the book alternates between sustained sermon, such as Alma's discourse to the poor of the Zoramites comparing faith to a seed that must be planted and nurtured before it can be judged, and extended battlefield narrative describing fortifications, troop movements and casualty counts in more procedural detail than almost anywhere else in the Book of Mormon.

The book's combination of intense violence and intense religious conversion, often within the same chapters, has made it a frequent focus of both devotional reading, for its teachings on faith, repentance and personal transformation, and critical discussion, for how it frames warfare, ethnicity and the moral status of the peoples the Nephites fight. Captain Moroni in particular has become one of the most referenced figures in later Latter-day Saint discussion of civic and military virtue, based almost entirely on his portrayal within this one book.

Editions of the Book of Mormon in wide circulation divide Alma into sixty three chapters under the standard versification most modern printings use, more than any other book in the collection, which is itself a rough index of how much narrative ground Mormon compresses into this single stretch of his abridgment.