As I was preparing to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had an interesting discussion with my uncle.
Somehow we ended up discussing Jacob 7:27, where the verse ends with the phrase "Brethren, adieu."
It struck me as odd that this French word would appear randomly in the text.
The explanation my uncle offered, who served his mission in Brazil, is that when translating, sometimes there are not phrases or words adequate to convey the meaning, so you must find another way.
For example, there is a common proverb in Brazil that says "Son of a fish, is a little fish."
This sounds like nonsense initially, but for those who speak English in America natively, you might've heard the phrase "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," or the much more straight forward version "like father, like son."
Adieu, in French, or even Adios, in Spanish, literally mean "Go with God," or "to God." Joseph Smith could have translated that literally but for some reason did not. Adieu was actually commonly said in America at the time, so it came out translated that way. In proper British English, you might've said "God be with ye."
So the point of all this is to say that sometimes words are funny, and you end up in French.
In all my readings of the Book of Mormon, I've yet to hear a good explanation of what is meant by the word "slippery." Every time I read these scriptures, I'd wonder about it but it never really clicked. It sounded random and I attributed it perhaps to theft, that society decayed to a point where people could not trust anyone. It does appear that theft becomes more an issue when there is rampant inflation in a society.
While that might be true to some degree, Bitcoin has opened my eyes to new ideas on this subject.
I recently had listened to Mike Duncan's "The History of Rome" podcast and learned about the coin clipping and inflation that took place in the Roman Empire, starting with Nero, with Diocletion attempting to unsuccessfully fix it by restoring silver content in coins and imposing price controls.
Pliny the Younger even noticed something was off with land prices near Rome, writing "Have you heard that the price of land has gone up, particularly in the neighborhood of Rome?"
While this is not exactly a complaint about bread costs, it has the same anxious undertone of a man watching numbers move in ways that feel wrong.
Writing sometime during the reign of Trajan, around the turn of the second century AD, he attributed the increase land prices to a Senate crackdown on corrupt election spending. Wealthy Romans were suddenly barred from pouring money into political campaigns, and apparently redirected that capital into real estate instead.
It's a politically mundane explanation on its surface, but the underlying pattern is familiar: money has to go somewhere, and when it does, prices follow. What Pliny couldn't fully see or at least didn't say, was that Nero's coin clipping a generation earlier may have already set the table. Inflation rarely announces itself with a single cause, but creeps in gradually and then suddenly.
The clearest ancient voice on the subject is Diocletian himself, in his Edict on Maximum Prices from 301 AD. The preamble is remarkable. He doesn't say prices have crept up over years. He says they're rising almost by the hour. He's furious at what he calls greedy sellers, men who drain a soldier's entire pay with a single transaction. His solution was to cap the price of everything. It backfired spectacularly, causing shortages and worse. Lactantius, writing not long after, described blood in the markets.
But the real story isn't told in words, it's told in the coins themselves. It started under Nero. The silver content of Roman currency, once nearly pure, was quietly diluted decade after decade. By the third century it was essentially zero. No announcement. No acknowledgment. Just emperors printing money the old-fashioned way; by putting less metal in each coin and minting more of them. Every Roman carrying a denarius was being robbed in slow motion and most of them probably couldn't articulate exactly why everything kept getting more expensive.
Which brings me back to the word slippery mentioned several times in Helaman 13:31-36
This concept, as best I can understand it, isn't primarily about theft in the pickpocket sense. It's about wealth that won't stay put. You have it, and then you don't. Not necessarily because someone took it, but because the value drained out of it. The ground shifted. What you held became worth less than what you paid for it.
Sound familiar?
Bitcoin forced me to actually think about what money is for the first time in my life. When you learn about hard money that can't be quietly debased by whoever's in charge, you start reading history differently. The Roman debasement wasn't just an economic event. It was a betrayal of trust at the foundation of society. When the money gets slippery, everything downstream gets slippery too. Contracts. Savings. Plans. The future itself becomes harder to hold and plan for.
I don't think Mormon was writing about pickpockets. I think he was describing something much more systemic; a civilization that lost its grip on value, and with it, its grip on everything else.