Source:Nibley:CW06:Ch10:5:Zoram and Transferred Loyalty

Zoram and Oaths

Zoram and The Oath of Power

Hugh Nibley observed:

What astonishes the western reader is the miraculous effect of Nephi's oath on Zoram, who upon hearing a few conventional words promptly becomes tractable, while as for the brothers, as soon as Zoram "made an oath unto us that he would tarry with us from that time forth . . . our fears did cease concerning him" (1 Nephi 4:35,37).

The reactions of both parties make sense when one realizes that the oath is the one thing that is most sacred and inviolable among the desert people and their descendants: "Hardly will an Arab break this oath, even if his life be in jeopardy,"9 for "there is nothing stronger, and nothing more sacred than the oath among the nomads,"10 and even the city Arabs, if it be exacted under special conditions. "The taking of an oath is a holy thing with the Bedouins," says one authority. "Wo to him who swears falsely; his social standing will be damaged and his reputation ruined. No one will receive his testimony, even if it is true, and he must also pay a money fine."11

But not every oath will do. To be most binding and solemn an oath should be by the life of something, even if it be but a blade of grass. The only oath more awful than that "by my life" or (less commonly) "by the life of my head" is the wa hayat Allah, "by the life of God" or "as the Lord liveth," the exact Arabic equivalent of the ancient Hebrew hai Elohim.12 Today it is glibly employed by the city riffraff, but anciently it was an awful thing, as it still is among the desert people. "I confirmed my answer in the Bedouin wise," says Doughty. "By his life . . . he said, . . . 'Well, swear By the life of Ullah' (God)! . . . I answered . . . and thus even the nomads use, in a greater occasion, but they say, By the life of thee, in a little matter."13 Among both Arabs and Jews, says Rosenblatt, "an oath without God's name is no oath," while "in both Jewish and Mohammedan sources oaths by 'the life of God' are frequent."14

So we see that the only way that Nephi could possibly have pacified the struggling Zoram in an instant was to utter the one oath that no man would dream of breaking, the most solemn of all oaths to the Semite: "As the Lord liveth, and as I live" (1 Nephi 4:32).

Zoram and Transferred Loyalty

Nibley continues:

Now Zoram was the most trusted of secretaries, as his intimacy with the most secret affairs of state, his liberty to come and go at all hours, and his possession of the keys to the treasury and archives attest. Yet in a single hour he shifted all his allegiance from the man who trusted and leaned on him to a stranger. The oath was enough to confirm such a move, but how could a man be so readily forced to take that oath? He was not forced into it at all, but talked into it, softened and persuaded by Nephi's words, in particular the promise "that he should be a free man like unto us if he would go down in the wilderness with us" (1 Nephi 4:33). Plainly with all his influence and privileges Zoram did not think of himself as a free man, and his relationship with Laban was not one of trust and affection. Zoram's behavior is an even more eloquent commentary than that of his master of the true state of things in a society that had lost its balance and its faith and sought only after power and success, "the vain things of the world."