Abish () is a figure in the Book of Mormon who plays a pivotal role in a missionary narrative. She is one of only three named women unique to the Book of Mormon. Abish appears for the first and last time in the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Alma from the Book of Mormon. During the dramatic narrative of the conversion of King Lamoni and the teaching of the Nephite missionary Ammon, Abish plays a pivotal role in publicizing a miraculous spiritual outpouring and then performing another miracle by lifting the Lamanite queen from a death-like trance. Literary and theological interpretations have read Abish and her narrative as a significant hinge point for the Book of Alma's broader plot, as an element of the book's self-reflexive critique of misogyny, as a divine subversion of human hierarchies, and as a messianic parallel to Jesus Christ's role in Christianity. Background Abish's narrative appears in the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Alma, a part of the Book of Mormon. Book of Mormon Since its publication in 1830, the Book of Mormon has been the central religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Joseph Smith alleged that he translated an ancient record by miraculous revelation from God to dictate the text of the book, which in his account narrates the actual history of a family who left Jerusalem around 600 BCE, before Babylon's invasion, and established a Christian society in the ancient Americas. This society eventually splits along fraternal lines into two separate and warring peoples, called Nephites and Lamanites. The Lamanites reject Christianity and hate the Nephites, blaming the Nephites for deprivations they suffer as part of their people's founding myth. The Nephites in turn denigrate and racialize the Lamanites, indulging throughout the book in self-destructive ethnocentric pride. Although they temporarily form a harmonious utopia following a post-resurrection visitation from Jesus Christ late in the book, they eventually divide again, and by the end of the book the Nephites are destroyed in the ensuing war. The Book of Mormon is narrated by Nephite prophets internal to its narrative, principally Mormon, who in the course of their narration reflexively describe their creation of the text as a record of their people, the very record Smith claimed to translate. In the Book of Mormon story, Mormon is a historian living near the end of the chronological narrative, and from this temporal vantage