The Book of the New Covenants

The Book of the New Covenants is Ervil LeBaron’s posthumous catalog of perceived disloyalty, a text that turned his personal judgments into a practical target list for followers. Written shortly before his death in 1981, its accusations outlasted its author: members of the Lambs of God used the names in the book to justify a campaign of killings as blood atonement.

Composition and Contents

Ervil LeBaron died in his cell in August 1981, aged fifty-six, after an apparent heart attack. Before his death, he had written the rambling, 400-page manuscript. Its central purpose was to identify people whom he considered disloyal and therefore deserving of death. The list was accompanied by bitter, partly incoherent accounts of what he regarded as each person’s betrayal. Rather than a systematic exposition, the book was a sprawling record of grievance organized around punishment.

About twenty copies were published, and most came into the hands of Ervil’s most devoted followers. This limited circulation did not confine the text’s effects: its names and accusations gave followers a durable document they could invoke after its author was gone.

From Grievance to Mandate

The followers who embraced the book called themselves the Lambs of God. Many were among Ervil’s fifty-four children, and they remained devoted to him after his death. Led by his son Aaron LeBaron, who was thirteen when Ervil died, this group included children and young adults, many of whom had experienced abuse by older sect members and then been abandoned. A prosecutor later called them the LeBaron clan’s Lord of the Flies generation.

The book’s accusations became an organizing rationale for revenge. The Lambs resolved to kill people named in its pages, treating the targets’ deaths as blood atonement and claiming that this made the killings justifiable in the eyes of the Lord. The text thus carried the authority of Ervil’s personal verdicts into the actions of followers who outlived him.

Killings and Aftermath

Two people named in the book were assassinated in 1987. On June 27, 1988, the 144th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, three more people on the list and the eight-year-old daughter of one of them were killed in coordinated attacks in Texas. The four murders occurred at separate sites about three hundred miles apart, within five minutes of one another, and were planned for nearly the same hour as the fatal shooting of Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail. The anniversary and timing linked the killings to the movement’s history of martyrdom, while the Lambs’ stated rationale linked them directly to the book’s doctrine of blood atonement.

Afterward, members of the Lambs of God claimed responsibility for seventeen deaths in all. In 1993, two of Ervil’s sons and one daughter received life sentences for involvement in some of the crimes. Aaron LeBaron, identified as the gang’s mastermind, was captured in Mexico, extradited to Utah, and sentenced to forty-five years in prison in 1997. Several other LeBaron offspring who played lesser roles remained unlocated.

Significance

The Book of the New Covenants matters not only as a record of Ervil’s accusations but as an instrument through which those accusations continued to act. Its list transformed a leader’s definition of betrayal into a basis for selecting targets, and its followers converted that selection into violence. The sequence—from manuscript, to circulation among devoted adherents, to murders justified as religiously sanctioned—shows how the book’s authority depended on readers who treated its judgments as commands. Ervil’s death did not end the force of his words; copies in his followers’ hands carried his grievances into a campaign that continued for years.