In his book, The Lost 116 Pages, Don Bradley attempts to reconstruct the contents of the Book of Mormon’s lost manuscript through a variety of historical reconstruction methods. For a full account of Bradley’s methods and findings, I will refer the reader to the book itself. However, there is one story in particular from the lost manuscript that Bradley was able to reconstruct that I would like to highlight in this article.

Before we jump into recreating this lost story, however, we need to remember that that the lost 116 pages did not just contain the book of Lehi. That is a common misconception among Latter-day Saints. Rather, the lost manuscript contained about 470 years of Mormon’s abridgment, which spanned from Lehi’s day in 600 BC, to King Benjamin’s reign around 130 BC. By way of comparison, the portion of Mormon’s abridgement that we do have covers around 515 years, from 130 BC to around AD 385, which means that we lost almost half of Mormon’s abridgment if you look at the just the number of years that his record covered.[1]

The missing story from this lost Book of Mormon time period that we are interested in recreating is the story of the prophet Aminadi. But first some context.

A few years after Nephi landed in the promised land, he was warned in a dream that he should depart from the land of their first inheritance and “flee into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 5:5). Nephi and his followers did so and settled in a place which they called “Nephi” (1 Nephi 5:8). It was here where Nephi built a temple “after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things” (2 Nephi 5:16).

Nephi and his people remained in the land of Nephi for several hundred years—years of which we have little record of thanks to the lost manuscript. What we do know is that in 279 BC, the Nephites, while still in the land of Nephi, fell into apostasy and the “more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed” (Omni 1:5).

The Book of Mormon tells us that this destruction was prophesied beforehand by several Nephite prophets, who did “threaten the people of Nephi…that if they did not keep the commandments…they should be destroyed from off the face of the land” (Jarom 1:10).

According to Bradley, the best candidate for one of the prophets who prophesied of destruction in the land of Nephi prior to this 279 BC destruction was a man named Aminadi. But what is interesting is that Aminadi is not mentioned in the Book of Mormon narrative until at least four generations after he lived. When the prophet Amulek introduced himself to the wicked people of Ammonihah around 82 BC, he said that he was a descendant of Aminadi, “and it was that same Aminadi who interpreted the writing which was upon the wall of the temple, which was written by the finger of God.” (Alma 10:2-3).

When I read the Book of Mormon for the first time while in high school, I was completely baffled by this verse. Who was this man Aminadi who “interpreted the writing which was upon the wall of the temple, which was written by the finger of God” (Alma 10:2)? I remembered a story from Primary of the prophet Daniel interpreting mysterious writing that appeared in the king’s palace (see Daniel 5), but I could have sworn that story was in the Old Testament, not in the Book of Mormon. Did I miss this story of Aminadi earlier in the Book of Mormon narrative somehow? As it turns out, the reason I was confused by this story my first time through the Book of Mormon was because the original story did not appear in the text at all.

In his book, Bradley argues that Mormon rarely introduces a character, location, story, etc., without first giving us some background or backstory. So when he fails to do this, it should be a clue to us that the backstory was likely included in the lost manuscript somewhere.[2] Such is the case with Aminadi. Bradley stated that “the evidence of the text with regard to this narrative [of Aminadi] is that Mormon should have included it, would have included it, and in fact did include it.”[3]

In researching Aminadi, several LDS scholars have placed him in the city of Nephi, near the Nephite temple, prior to the 279 B.C. destruction referenced earlier, and prior to Mosiah the Elder’s exodus to Zarahemla. George Reynolds, for example, said that Aminadi “must have been in the land of Nephi before the Nephites migrated to Zarahemla as he was at least four generations separated from Amulek.”[4] And Brant Gardner said that Aminadi interpreted the writing on the wall “before Mosiah [the elder] led his people out of the city of Nephi.”[5] Bradley agrees: “Taking the average [length of a paternal generation] as our guide, an Aminadi living four or more generations before Amulek would have been born…prior to Mosiah’s exodus from Nephi to Zarahemla at about the Nephite year 400 (ca 200 BC).”[6]

If these scholars are correct, Aminadi was likely one of the prophets who warned the Nephites of the 279 BC destruction in the land of Nephi (see Jarom 1:10), and he likely did so by “interpret[ing] the writing which was upon the wall of the temple” (Alma 10:3).

​If this incident was anything like the incident recorded in Daniel 5, then the writing that Aminadi interpreted was likely a warning of judgements to come unless the Nephites repented. Bradley wrote:

“In the Aminadi event, one [reason] for writing appearing on the temple would be the temple itself. God’s writing would affirm the temple’s sacredness and might warn of the consequences that were to follow for profaning it—judgments on the wicked and the withdrawal of his presence—leading to the temple’s destruction, and the ultimate destruction of the people of the land of Nephi with their temple. Rather than condemning the people for past actions [like in the story of Daniel], in Aminadi’s case the writing on the wall could forewarn that such destruction was coming if the people, who have ignored God’s commandments and begun to pollute his temple, continued to do so.”[7]

If the writing on the temple wall that was interpreted by Aminadi was a call to repentance, as we may suppose, then unfortunately, the Nephites did not listen to it. Therefore, in 279 BC, “the more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed” (Omni 1:5). Nevertheless, this story of Aminadi remained very well know, even four (or more) generations later, and even among the non-religious people of Ammonihah (see Alma 10:1).

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Notes:

[1] See also Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, chapter 5.

[2] See Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, p. 215.

[3] Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, p. 233..

[4] Reynolds, A Dictionary of the Book of Mormon, Comprising its Biographical, Geographical and other Proper Names, p. 54.

[5] Gardner, Second Witness, 4:164.

[6] Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, p. 225.

​[7] Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, p. 229.