“These plates are full.”

Why did Enos, Jarom, Omni, and others only give us what amounts to about 8 pages of writing in our Book of Mormon?. Between Enos and Ameleki (the final author in the book of Omni) a period of about 300 years elapsed. Were they lazy? Were they lacking in revelation, spiritual experiences, and testimonies of Jesus Christ? My cursory reading of those chapters had led me to wonder that. But I was wrong.

During that period, the political leadership of the Nephites was taken up by someone who was not a descendant of Jacob, leaving Jacob and his descendants with the legacy of maintaining only a small set of plates that ultimately became all filled up. Likely because of this split in record keeping, Jarom points out that his father Enos told him to use these “small” plates for keeping their family genealogy (Jarom 1:1-2), something that their grand-uncle Nephi had not needed to do, because Lehi and Nephi had kept a genealogy in the Large Plates (1 Nephi 19:2) to match the genealogical pattern that they learned from the Brass Plates (1 Nephi 5:14). 

 As Nephi realized that he was soon to die, he appointed someone else to be king over the Nephites. (Jacob 1:9) It was perhaps at this time that the custody of the large plates (often referred to as “other plates”) fell into different hands. Jacob implies at the end of his record that he was not keeping that record of the kings. “I conclude this record (the small plates) [and] the record of this people [is] kept on the other plates (the large plates),” he wrote. (Jacob 7:26) Hundreds of years later, Mormon clarified that keeping the record on the large plates had indeed been the responsibility to be “handed down by the kings”. (Words of Mormon 1:10) 

 “These plates are small,” writes Jarom at the beginning of the book that bears his name. That is the reason that they didn’t write much during those 300 years. Amaleki, the last writer in the book called Omni even went so far as to say that “these plates are full”. (Omni 1:30) Amaleki then took the filled-up small plates and gave them to the current king, named Benjamin “to put them with the other plates”. (Words of Mormon 1:10) From that point, there seems to have been only one set of records kept by the Nephites. 

 It was not because they didn’t have anything spiritual to write about that Jacob’s posterity wrote so little. It was because the only plates that they had custody over were very limited in capacity, and eventually became completely filled up. Various writers, from Enos to Amaleki, spoke of the continuation of grand spiritual experiences which, unfortunately, there was not enough room on the small plates to write down. Amaleki spoke of his witness of Jesus Christ, along with the prophesying, revelations, and ministering of angels that they continued to experience (Omni 1:25). Jarom noted that “there are many among us who have many revelations”. (Jarom 1:4) 

 So, no. Jacob and his descendant record keepers weren’t lazy. They weren’t lacking in experience with things of the spirit. Ultimately they kept a record of the doings of the Nephites that Nephi, 400 years earlier, had begun recording “for a wise purpose” really only known unto God (1 Nephi 9:5). For the same wise purpose, “the spirit whisper[ed]” to Mormon (Words of Mormon 1:7) to “finish [his] record” (Words of Mormon 1:5) by including those small plates at the end of the unsealed portion of the book that his son, Moroni, delivered to Joseph Smith in 1827.