Two Questions
1. How old
was Chief Captain Moroni when he died?
Answer: (From Doctrinal
Commentary on the Book of Mormon Volume 3, by Robert Millet and Joseph
Fielding McConkie, page 328). “Moroni
died at a rather young age, approximately forty-four
years old.” (See Alma 43:17 and
compare with Alma 63:3) (Bro. Ray’s
comment: Perhaps battle weary?)
2. Who was
the father of the Polynesians?
Answer:
(From same reference as above, this time from pages 328 to 329). “In the Church it is generally held that
Hagoth (Alma 63:5) was the father of the Polynesians, that his expeditions to
the isles of the sea were a part of the foreordained plan whereby the
descendants of father Lehi, as children of Abraham, might be spread to all
nations and thus fulfill God’s covenant with the father of the faithful. (Abraham 2:8-11)
In speaking
to the Saints in Samoa, President Spencer W. Kimball said: “I thought to read
to you a sacred scripture, which pertains especially to you, the islanders of
the Pacific. It is in the 63rd
Chapter of Alma. (He then read Alma 63:4, 7-10)
And so it seems to me rather clear that your ancestors moved northward
and crossed a part of the South Pacific.
You did not bring your records with you, but you brought much food and
provisions. And so we have a great
congregation of people in the South Seas who came from the land southward and
went to the land northward, which could have been Hawaii.
Then the
further settlement could have been a move southward again to all of these
islands and even to New Zealand. The
Lord knows what he is doing when he sends his people from one place to another. That was the scattering of Israel. Some of them remained in America and went
from Alaska to the southern point.
Others of you came this direction.” (Samoa Area Conference Report,
February 1976, page 15)
To another
group of Saints in the South Seas, President Kimball observed: “President Joseph F. Smith, the 6th
president of the Church reported, ‘You brothers and sisters from New
Zealand, I want you to know that you are from the people of Hagoth.’ For New
Zealand Saints, that was that. A prophet
of the Lord had spoken…It is reasonable to conclude that Hagoth and
his associates were about nineteen centuries on the islands from about 55 B.C.
to 1854 before the gospel began to reach them.
They had lost all the plain and precious things which the Savior brought
to the earth, for they were likely on the islands when Christ was born in
Jerusalem.” (Temple View Area Conference
Report, Feb. 1976, page 3)
In Alma 63:8
it tells us: “we suppose that they were drowned in the depths of the sea.” “This is one of the subtle testimonies of
the truthfulness of this record. Had
Joseph Smith simply been creating the Book of Mormon, fabricating it, rather
than translating it, he probably would not have inserted such ideas into the
narrative. Here we see that
Mormon, a powerful prophet-editor, was simply unaware of what became of Hagoth
and his followers. Living almost five
centuries after their departure from the promised land, Mormon could have
inquired as to their whereabouts, but presumably he had not done so, or if he
had, he had not learned by revelation what become of those people.”