Abstract: The accounts of the Anti-Christ, Korihor, and of Alma’s mission to the Zoramites raise a variety of apparently unanswered questions. These involve Korihor’s origins, the reason for the similarity of his beliefs to those of the Zoramites, and why he switched so quickly from an atheistic attack to an agnostic plea. Another intriguing question is whether it was actually the devil himself who taught him what to say and sent him on a mission to the land of Zarahemla — or was it a surrogate of the devil or a human “devil” such as, perhaps, Zoram? Final questions are how Korihor ended up in Antionum, why the Zoramites would kill a disabled beggar, and why nobody seemed to have mourned his violent death or possibly unrighteous execution. There are several hints from the text that suggest possible answers to these intriguing questions. Some are supported by viewing the text from a parallelistic or chiastic perspective.

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Two of the most gripping stories within the Book of Mormon are first, the account of Korihor and second, Alma’s mission to the Zoramites. These stories have been discussed in many forums, and many authors have supplied commentary on them. However, there remain at least seven significant questions in these accounts — “holes,” if you will. John Welch has called at least some of these lacunae or gaps, “omissions.”1

While answers to these questions cannot currently be proven definitively, the text offers several hints that, like an accumulation of circumstantial evidence in a legal case, can be amassed to provide speculative but credible answers. Some of this circumstantial evidence is new, coming from the relatively recent discovery of underlying parallelistic structures within the Book of Mormon text. John Welch expressed this idea when he wrote: “The design and depth of the [Page 50]Book of Mormon often comes to light only when the book is studied with chiastic and other ancient literary principles in mind.”2 Such parallelistic considerations seem particularly helpful in the case of Korihor and of the Zoramites, as I will attempt to demonstrate.

This article will consider how important themes are presented: 1) in the current verse and chapter format, 2) by parallelistic structures (usually chiasms), and 3) in the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. The latter point is important since the modern chapter and verse divisions were not revealed by inspiration to Joseph Smith and were not a part of the first printing. They were provided by Orson Pratt and not published until 1879.