“What astonishes the western reader is the miraculous effect of Nephi’s oath on Zoram. … The reactions of both parties make sense when one realizes that the oath is the one thing that is most sacred and inviolable among the desert people and their descendants … .
“So we see that the only way that Nephi could possibly have pacified the struggling Zoram in an instant was to utter the one oath that no man would dream of breaking, the most solemn of all oaths to the Semite: ‘As the Lord liveth, and as I live’ (1 Nephi 4:32)” (Nibley, Approach to the Book of Mormon, 128–29).