Mormon was a Nephite prophet, military commander, and record keeper, born around AD 310. He was named after his father, Mormon, and after the land of Mormon, where Alma established the first church after fleeing King Noah (3 Nephi 5:12; Mosiah 18). He identified himself as a pure descendant of Lehi (3 Nephi 5:20).
About the time Ammaron hid up the Nephite records, he came to Mormon, then about ten years old, telling him he was “a sober child, and quick to observe” (Mormon 1:2). Ammaron instructed him that at age twenty-four he should go to the hill Shim, in the land Antum, and retrieve the sacred engravings deposited there (Mormon 1:3).
At fifteen Mormon was visited of the Lord and “tasted and knew of the goodness of Jesus” (Mormon 1:15). He tried to preach but was forbidden, because the people had rebelled and the Lord had taken away the beloved disciples, ending miracles and the gifts of the Holy Ghost (Mormon 1:13-16). Large in stature though young, he was appointed leader of the Nephite armies, and in his sixteenth year went out at their head against the Lamanites (Mormon 2:1-2).
Mormon led the Nephites in battle many times. When the Nephites swore oaths of vengeance rather than repenting, he utterly refused to remain their commander, stepping back to be a deliberate witness of their fall rather than a leader of it (Mormon 3:10-11). He recorded that he still loved them and prayed for them all day long, “nevertheless, it was without faith, because of the hardness of their hearts” (Mormon 3:12). He made an abridgment of the Nephite records, taken from the plates of Nephi. Finding the smaller plates of Nephi, which carried the prophecies from Jacob down to King Benjamin, he added them to his record and wrote the Words of Mormon to join them to his abridgment (Words of Mormon 1; Mormon 1-7). His son Moroni completed the record, adding the book of Ether and the book that bears his own name.
As compiler of the record, Mormon stepped outside the narrative to diagnose the recurring pattern of his people’s failure—prosperity leading to pride, pride to forgetting God, forgetting God to destruction. His own words capture this plainly: “we can behold how false, and also the unsteadiness of the hearts of the children of men” (Helaman 12:1-3).
Knowing the Nephites would be destroyed, Mormon gathered his people to the land of Cumorah and hid up the records in the hill Cumorah, keeping only a few plates, which he gave to Moroni (Mormon 6:6). In the final battle the Lamanites cut down his people; twenty-three commanders fell, each with their ten thousand, and only twenty-four Nephites survived, among them Moroni (Mormon 6:10-15). Mormon himself was wounded and survived the battle, then was killed by the Lamanites afterward, around AD 385 (Mormon 6:10; 8:3).
Mormon called the people to repent, be baptized in the name of Jesus, and accept his record alongside the record that would come from the Jews (Mormon 7:8-9).