In my last post, I offered an update to my article at the Interpreter on Janus parallelism in the Book of Mormon, suggesting that there were additional reasons to suspect that Alma 8:9-10 employed a known Janus function in which one word can mean “hedge in, fence in” and “pour out.” In pondering that this morning, I realized that I had been too quick to dismiss the first potential candidate I had noted in the Book of Mormon.

Mosiah 24:21 also uses “poured out”:

Yea, and in the valley of Alma they poured out their thanks to God because he had been merciful unto them, and eased their burdens, and had delivered them out of bondage; for they were in bondage, and none could deliver them except it were the Lord their God.

This was the first verse I identified as a potential Janus parallelism in my notes as I read Scott Noegel’s book,  Janus Parallelism in the Book of Job. But dismissed it or overlooked it after that because it didn’t seem very solid. Alma and his people had just been liberated from captivity in Helam and were now passing through the Valley of Alma and apparently holding a ritual of thanksgiving there. They weren’t really hedged in. Sloppily, I forgot about this candidate and moved on as I prepared my research note for The Interpreter.

Mosiah 24:23 provides the clue that I should have remembered that reveals why the Valley of Alma is associated with the sense of being “fenced in” or “hedged up.” After the people give thanks, the Lord speaks to Alma in Mosiah 24:23:

And now the Lord said unto Alma: Haste thee and get thou and this people out of this land, for the Lamanites have awakened and do pursue thee; therefore get thee out of this land, and I will stop the Lamanites in this valley that they come no further in pursuit of this people.

The Valley of Alma, given great emphasis and mentioned three times in short order before “poured out” in Mosiah 24:21, is the place where the enemies of Alma’s people will literally be blocked by the Lord, hedged in or fenced in. If the Book of Mormon were fiction, we’d probably have an omniscient narrator tell us how that happens. But the Book of Mormon consistently offers clear provenance about where information came from in its written record, and since no witnesses to the miracle of hedging come into the circle of Nephite writers, we never find out how it was done. But the Lord promised to “stop” them there, and we can safely trust that they were in fact stopped, or rather, hedge in, fenced in, or perhaps enclosed in some way. While the vital clue about the hedging occurs after the Janus pivot in Mosiah 24:21, the pivot read as “hedge, fence in” looks backward to the Valley of Alma in the first stich which shortly would be the place of hedging, while also looking forward to the following “Spirit” which is the natural object of the meaning of “pour out” or “annoint.”

By way of background, here is what I said of this particular form of Janus parallelism in Job in my article at the Interpreter:

On page 39, Noegel examines Job 3:23–24 and the dual meanings of וַיָּסֶךְ from the roots סָכַךְ (cakak, Strong’s H5526 ) meaning “hedged in, fenced in, enclosed, cover, covering” and the root סוּךְ (cuwk, Strong’s H5480 ) meaning “pour out, anoint.” In Job 3:23, this word plus the preceding text can be translated as “to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has fenced in.” But if given the alternate meaning of “poured out,” then “whom God has poured out” anticipates “my groans are poured out for me as water” in the last part of Job 3:24. It’s a nice example of the two-sided technique of Janus parallelism.

Mosiah 24:21 is part of a moment of pious praise to the Lord, and an appropriate time for poetical elements like Janus parallelism. The same parallelism apparently is later used, as I have previously discussed,  in Alma 8:9-10. It is possible that both were in the original records from Alma and Mormon has preserved them in his account, and that’s what I presume, but it is also possible that Mormon as editor worked them into his account. In either case, the fact that the hedged in/ pour out parallelism seems to neatly fit in a couple of places and is used meaningfully and appropriately might increase the odds that “something interesting is going on here” versus just making too much of random word patterns.