Mormon 6 is the Most Depressing Chapter in the Book of Mormon

The award for the most depressing chapter in the Book of Mormon goes to...envelope please...Mormon

chapter 6. If you think your life is going poorly with first-world problems, it might help to read that chapter.

"I finish my record concerning the destruction of my people," Mormon writes (v 1). The Nephites knew the end was near, and their last-ditch effort at survival was to send an epistle to the king of the Lamanites asking for a reprieve so that they could gather all of their men, women, and children into one strategic place, where they "had hope to gain advantage over the Lamanites" (v 4)

Yeah, whatever, laughed the Lamanite king, like a cat playing with a mouse. Go for it.

Almost the only thing that Mormon was successful in saving was the record of his people written on plates. (v 5) But without that, we'd have never even known the terror and devastation they experienced.

Once they had made their preparation, the Nephites, "my people with their wives and their children did now behold the armies of the Lamanites," and they were gripped "with that awful fear of death which fills the breasts of all the wicked" (v 7)

Imagine yourself being among those Nephites, among whom "every soul was filled with terror" (v 8 ) because of the approaching Lamanite armies.

Mormon doesn't say how long it took the Lamanites to dispatch nearly every Nephite with "all manner of weapons of war" (v 9) but after one of those terror-stricken nights, the "twenty-four of us" who were still alive "did behold on the morrow, from the top of the hill Cumorah" the unfathomably vast extent of the devastation. (v 11)

"I dare not to give a full account" Mormon concludes, because God commanded him not to give a full account, "that you might not have too great sorrow" (Mormon 5:9) at the "awful scene of blood and carnage as was laid before mine eyes." (v 8 )

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