He is the most powerful man in the Book of Alma, and the record never gives us his name. What it gives us instead is one sentence he prayed — and that one sentence may be the most complete act of repentance anywhere in scripture.
The Sword on the Road
We meet him trying to commit a murder.
Ammon and the newly-converted Lamoni are riding toward Middoni to free Aaron from prison when they meet Lamoni's father on the road — the king over all the land, Lamoni's overlord and the most powerful man among the Lamanites. He sees his son in the company of a Nephite, and he is enraged. Why did ye not come to the feast? he demands, and then, not waiting for an answer, commands Lamoni to kill Ammon on the spot. When Lamoni refuses, the old king draws his own sword to slay his own son (Alma 20:14).
Hold that image. This is a man so jealous of his authority and so contemptuous of the Nephites that he will run his own child through in the road for keeping the wrong company. Whatever else is true of him, he begins the story as a tyrant whose first instinct, when crossed, is the blade. He is his son's old self written larger — the same rule-by-death that Lamoni had only just been delivered from.
Ammon steps in, withstands him, and disarms him — and at the point of the sword does the thing that breaks the king open. He does not kill him. He bargains only for his brothers' freedom (Alma 20:23–24). And the king, who has spent his life among people who take what they can when they have the advantage, is astonished. He had just watched a Nephite spare the man who held a sword over him, out of nothing but love for Lamoni. Because this is all that thou hast desired, that I would release thy brethren … I will grant unto thee that my son may retain his kingdom (Alma 20:26). The mercy he was shown is the first crack of light. He cannot account for love that asks nothing for itself, and the inability to account for it is the beginning of his conversion.
The Question He Could Not Shake
He let it go at that — for a while. But the memory of it worked on him. By the time Aaron came to his court (the very brother whose release the king had just granted), the old king was no longer a tyrant looking for a reason to kill. He was a man with a question he could not put down. He told Aaron plainly that Ammon's words about a Great Spirit, and the things he had felt since that day on the road, had unsettled everything: What is this that Ammon said concerning … if ye will repent ye shall be saved, and if ye will not repent, ye shall be cast off at the last day? (Alma 22:6). He wanted to know. He had felt enough to be troubled and not enough to be at peace.
So Aaron began where his brother had begun with Lamoni — Believest thou that there is a God? — and then took him further back than that, all the way to the creation of Adam, the fall, and the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the world (Alma 22:13). The most powerful man in the land sat and listened to a thin missionary, lately his prisoner, lay out the entire mercy of God from the first man forward. And when Aaron finished, the king did not negotiate, did not hedge, did not ask what it would cost him politically. He fell to his knees.
The Sentence
And then he prayed the prayer. Read it slowly, because every clause is load-bearing:
O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day. (Alma 22:18)
I will give away all my sins to know thee.
There may not be a more complete sentence of repentance in all of scripture. Notice what he does not bargain with. He is a king; he could have offered gold, kingdoms, armies, temples, sacrifices — the currency kings deal in. He offers none of it. He understands, somehow, all at once, that the only thing he actually owns — the only thing that is truly his to give — is his sins. Everything else was inherited or seized or borrowed. His sins are the one possession no one handed him. And he lays the whole estate of them down on the floor in exchange for one thing: to know thee.
The Hebrew underneath know is yādaʿ (ידע) — not the cool knowing of facts but the deep, covenantal, intimate knowing, the word used for the closest bonds between persons and between a soul and God. He is not asking to know about God. He is asking to be let in — to be known and to know in return. And the price he names for that intimacy is the surrender of everything that has ever stood between him and it. All my sins. Not the convenient ones, not a representative sample, not the sins he is ready to part with. All of them, given away, the moment he understands what they are costing him.
Then, like his son before him, he was struck as if he were dead (Alma 22:18) — the same death-sleep, the same passage through the grave of the old self — and rose converted, and all his household … were converted unto the Lord (Alma 22:23).
The King Who Opened the Door
What he did next is the reason this single conversion mattered more than any other in the Lamanite mission. He was not just a soul saved; he was the king over all the land, and he used the one thing his sins had been bound up with — his power — for the first time in the service of the God he now knew. He sent out a proclamation throughout all the land, amongst all his people who were in all his land … that the missionaries should not be bound, nor taken, nor cast into prison, but should have free access to every house and synagogue and people in his kingdom (Alma 22:27, 23:1–2).
With one decree the man who had drawn a sword on a Nephite in the road threw the gates of an entire empire open to the Nephite gospel. Every city Aaron and Ammon and the others would labor in, every Lamanite who would bury his weapons, every Anti-Nephi-Lehi who would die rather than fight — all of it ran through the door this one converted king unlocked. He had given away all his sins to know God; and then he spent the power those sins had corrupted on clearing the road for everyone else to know Him too.
He ended his reign as he could never have begun it. He conferred the kingdom on a son he named Anti-Nephi-Lehi (Alma 24:3), and his people took a new name and laid their swords in the earth. The man who began the story drawing a blade ended it as the father of a nation of people who would not lift one.
The most powerful man in the land, and the record withholds his name — as if to make sure we remember him for the only thing he ever truly owned and freely gave. He drew a sword on his own son in the road; weeks later he was on his knees offering God the entire ledger of his sins in exchange for nothing but to be known. "I will give away all my sins to know thee." He meant all of them, and he gave them, and then he opened a kingdom.