This is the only place in the Book of Mormon where we have two books named after one person. Why did Nephi divide his writings into two books? Likely because each had a different purpose and was poetically crafted as a distinct unit. 1 Nephi is the founding family story based in the Old World and their escape from Jerusalem, while 2 Nephi contains the basis for how to live in the New World promised land. Some have compared the two books to Exodus (the founding story of Israel coming out of the land of Egypt) and Leviticus (the law they were to live in their promised land). Both books of Nephi testify of Christ. In Hebrew chiastic literature, one looks at the center of a work to find out its main theme. The center of 1 Nephi is Nephi’s vision where he sees the condescension and birth of Christ as the manifestation of the love of God (1 Nephi 11:17). The center of 2 Nephi is the long quotation of Isaiah 2-14, where Isaiah testifies of Christ.
1 rehearsed, Lehi models the principle of ‘remembering,’ a major theme in the Book of Mormon because of how easy it is to forget. Nephi ‘rehearsed’ all through his previous book, remembering the children of Israel and how God had delivered them. Ordinances, prayer, scripture reading, journal-keeping, etc. are all rituals that helps us remember. They also help us reframe difficult experiences in order to see God’s hand in them. Through rehearsing, Lehi sees God’s tender “mercies” (v2, 3) in their difficult journeyings, whereas L&L could only see what they considered God’s harshness and cruelty.
4 Jerusalem is destroyed, see 2 Kings 25. Lehi saw the city’s destruction in vision, but it’s possible the family received some word during their years in the wilderness, as Ezekiel did (Ez 24:2).
5 land of promise, while literal here, the promise is also metaphoric of the “far better land of promise” (Alma 37:45), or heaven, as the destiny of the diligent.
5-6 led out of other countries…come into this land, scholar Brant Gardner has pointed out that these other countries that will encroach on the Lehites’ land are more likely those nations already on the continent. It’s only an artifact of LDS history that we immediately assume that “other countries” must mean from other continents, or that the “land” Lehi was promised included all of North America, or the entire hemisphere; but that assumption presumes a definition of “land” that the Book of Mormon does not support (see 1 Ne 3:18; Jacob 3:3-4; Mosiah 2:1-2). Reading this passage as describing the multitudes already existing in the New World makes Lehi’s remarks about “other nations” (2 Ne. 1:8, 11) in relation to the covenant curse more meaningful. If the nations he referred would not arrive until Columbus’s voyage, how would the covenant curse have any immediate significance? Lehi knew his people would not be alone, and he wants his sons to be sobered by that fact. An immediate expectation of other nations on the part of Nephi and Lehi, possibly even interaction with small groups of natives early on, makes the promise, and the warning, more consistent and meaningful. [SW 2]
6 none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord, really? Note this insight from Fatimeh Salleh & Margaret Hemming’s book The Book of Mormon For the Least of These:
At first reading, this verse may seem confusing…it does not seem true when so many people came to the Americas against their will. Is Nephi implying that slaves were brought by the hand of the Lord? Here, including the cross-reference is vital. In 2 Nephi 10: 22, Lehi writes, “the Lord God has led away from time to time from the house of Israel, according to his will and pleasure. And now behold, the Lord remembereth all them who have been broken off, wherefore he remembereth us also.” The ancestors of everyone in the Americas fall into four categories: they are either indigenous, immigrants, refugees, or enslaved people. All of those four categories have experienced violence in some form. But the cross-reference tells us that no one is forgotten, no matter how they arrived and how they were broken. The “new” land is a land of the broken-offs. God keeps an eye on those who are broken off. So perhaps we can read 2 Nephi 1:6 as, There shall none come into this land save they shall be remembered by the Lord.
8-9 many nations would overrun the land, again, as Brant Gardner points out,
The traditional interpretation of this verse connects it to the discovery of the Americas by Columbus, a position posited by many LDS when the assumption was that the Americas were uninhabited when the Lehites arrived, but it is untenable now that we understand that the Lehites arrived in a land that had been populated for millennia. It is, however, so firmly engrained in tradition that it is difficult to understand how Lehi might have meant it differently. We must remember that Lehi’s perception of the world was much smaller than our modern understanding and that lands and nations were very localized. A “nation” could come from another part of Mesoamerica and still “overrun” their local land…In the context of Lehi’s limited perception of the land, the best reading of this verse is that his family’s righteousness would protect them from other nations that were not in the current “land,” but which were elsewhere in the same continent. All threats against the Nephites (save those from internal treason) will come from peoples already in the continent but outside the Nephite lands…the promise [of protection] comes because of the implicit reality that other nations would indeed come, and would attempt to overrun Lehi’s descendants. Lehi receives a promise that they will be protected from those other nations upon condition of their righteousness. This is a promise that is of no value unless others do come and threaten the Nephites. Therefore, it is best read as a means of continuing the fortuitous circumstances they find upon arrival, but which will not last. This is certainly the way that the Nephites understood the promise. Note how the promise appears as early as Jarom: “And thus being prepared to meet the Lamanites, they did not prosper against us. But the word of the Lord was verified, which he spake unto our fathers, saying that: Inasmuch as ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land” (Jarom 1:9; emphasis mine). Less than two hundred years after Lehi receives the promise, Jarom is reporting that it has already been verified in a conflict with the Lamanites. This use of the promise will continue throughout the Book of Mormon. The Nephites consistently applied it to conflicts with the Lamanites and consistently saw it in terms of their current conditions, not as a far-off prophecy of the coming of the Europeans.
7-11 the Lord God…will bring other nations, etc. Part of why these verses are problematic is for the same reason much of the Old Testament is problematic—what is written as prescriptive is more rightly descriptive. In other words, Lehi’s prophecies may be true as describing what will happen, but not that God is prescribing it. That God controls all things was an ancient paradigm both unhelpful and untrue. The fundamental consequence of the Fall was that God lost control as we were granted our agency. In any event, I’m going to quote again from Salleh & Hemming because what they have to say sums up well the tension between the apparent nationalism in these verses and Christian ideals of social justice:
“Lehi espouses troubling theology in these verses. The language he uses about ‘possessing’ (v. 9) the land and his repeated claim that obedience to the commandments will guarantee safety and prosperity are problematic. The biggest issue is his belief that obedience guarantees security. ‘If it so be that they shall keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of this land, and there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever’ (v. 9). Lehi’s description of God sounds like a vending machine: put obedience in, get guaranteed safety in return. Given Lehi’s life experiences, the idea that obedience to the commandments guarantees security and wealth is almost jaw-dropping. It was, after all, his own obedience to God that caused him to lose his home and wealth in Jerusalem and spend years on the point of starvation in the wilderness. He has witnessed, and repeatedly invokes in the following chapters, the suffering of his family members that has followed their commitment to their faith. His own family’s experience belies the claims about God that he makes in these verses. Using scriptural imagination, we can approach these verses in different ways. The first is to see Lehi as prophesying from the point of privilege, a somewhat surprising position, given his years spent suffering in the wilderness. But Lehi has also lived the life of a wealthy elite in Jerusalem. His words here sound more like he is looking through the lens of that life. Our childhood and young adult social locations never leave us, which means Lehi’s earlier experiences continue to affect his beliefs. It is hard to condemn him for viewing the world through the status he enjoyed in Jerusalem for so much of his life. But readers must remember that his words stem from his background and that, at this moment, he denies his own experiences of loss, poverty and hunger. Given the limited record we have of Lehi’s words, it is tragic that in this moment he teaches a theology of prosperity gospel. It would be so valuable to hear about how Lehi viewed God in the wilderness, when he struggled to survive on raw meat and keep his family from disintegration. Lehi does not speak to those experiences. He does not answer the question of what “blessed” looks like when all the material wealth has been stripped away. Readers may also consider what Lehi means when he talks about ‘prospering.’ This word appears frequently in the Book of Mormon, and this series will continue to interrogate it. Lehi does not seem to say that prospering involves having vast riches; for him, prosperity appears to be about safety and security—a defensive posture of merely being left alone, having a place of refuge, a space and time in which he and his descendants can live without fear. Given Lehi’s life experiences as an exile, safety is interwoven with exclusivity: his people can only live in safety if the land belongs solely to them. He has felt too many threats—many from his own neighbors and even family members—to believe that peace is possible otherwise. Readers can strive to empathize with the fear and sadness that caused this kind of desire, even if the theology it provokes is not on a good foundation. Lehi’s language about the land as an inheritance is also troubling. Inheritance implies ownership. Lehi has only recently arrived in the promised land, a land where other people already live. Lehi repeatedly writes of ‘possessing’ the land, which is very different from a mindset of caretaking and stewardship. Lehi seems to claim an entitlement to the land, instead of acknowledging that the land and all its wealth belongs to God. While the choice of language may seem small, it reflects a mindset about land and people that does not fully understand and show gratitude for God’s blessings. We cannot silently pass by Lehi’s words here because not naming it affects our own theology. We have to push back against Lehi here and ask ourselves why he makes these claims about God. Lehi lived most of his life with power and wealth and then spent the end of his life in suffering and destitution. That will affect how he speaks. We can simultaneously feel empathy for Lehi and let his words warn us of the blindness that may occur from a life of privilege and also trauma. In the narrative of Lehi’s family, God has shown up in loss of land, in wilderness, in wandering, and in hunger. Obedience has not guaranteed security and wealth. Do not let Lehi’s words confuse that.”
13-14 awake, awake from a deep sleep…rise from the dust, Lehi is quoting Isaiah (Is 52:1-2). It’s truly beautiful language of encouragement. The metaphor of sin as sleeping is apt (see Alma’s “sleep of hell” Alma 12:10-12). I think about when I feel overwhelmed or afraid to face something, I just want to hide under my covers in my bed and hope it will all go away. To be awake to truth and reality is painful at first; but it’s the only way to truly be free from sin, or the chains of our own making. I suppose waking up is like repentance. Everyone knows how difficult it is to wake up in the morning, and waking up to ourselves, facing our own underdevelopment, can be onerous; but when we are awake, well, that’s when life really begins. The concept of arising and shaking off chains is an image that used to be modeled in the Temple when we made covenants (we don’t stand anymore). Note the footnote in Is 52:2b “arise from the dust and sit down in dignity, being redeemed at last.”
15 encircled about eternally in the arms of his love, in contrast to being encircled by the “awful chains” of v13. See also 2 Ne 4:32; Alma 5:33; Jacob 6:4-5; 2 Ne 9:14; then contrast with Alma 5:7,25,57 and finally Alma 36:18 where Alma describes his own plight of being “encircled about by the everlasting chains of death.” So we can either be:
- encircled about eternally in the arms of his love (through covenant relationship), or
- encircled about by the everlasting chains of death (trying to do it all on our own)
Also, when tied to the previous verse, one must awake and arise in order to be embraced. How difficult is it to embrace when sitting down? The encircling is atonement language. ‘Kippur’ or ‘Kaphar,’ which means to cover or to embrace, is the Hebrew word translated as atonement. I’m including here Hugh Nibley’s rambling on v15 because it’s brilliant. The quote comes from a recording of the last Book of Mormon class he ever taught at BYU. It’s heady, so skip it if you’d like ;):
Then there’s the kpr. Kippur is the Hebrew word. You all know about Yom Kippur. The root is kpr, and kippur is the “act of atoning?” That’s hilaskesthai, and it refers literally to the “covering of the Ark, covering of the mercy seat.” The kapporet, the thing that covers, is the hilasterion, where God appeared to forgive the sins of the people. It was the front curtain or the veil of the tabernacle. After the people had completed all the rites and ordinances of atonement, then the veil was parted and God (the Savior) was supposed to speak from the tabernacle and tell the people that their sins were forgiven and they were welcomed to his presence. That’s this idea of being taken back into his embrace again, “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Ne. 15 ). As I said, the word kpr is very interesting, “to atone for.” The word is kpr, kippur. We have had this before, of course. It’s cognate with our word cover, it’s pronounced kfr. So we have cover, but that is just the beginning of this very interesting word. It’s the same in Aramaic; it’s “to cover over your sins.” This is the way Jastrow’s big two-volume lexicon explains it: It means “to arch over; to bend over; to cover; to pass over with the hand, especially the palm of the hand.” The word for palm of the hand in all Semitic languages is kap. It means “to cover, hence to grasp by the hand; to wipe over, hence to cleanse, to expiate, to forgive, to renounce, to deny, to be found, to encircle.” All these in this one word. Well, this is nothing in Arabic. If you don’t have fifty totally different meanings for a word, you think your language is impoverished. But here embrace is the idea; therefore, you cover a person. And this is a very interesting thing because here the Book of Mormon casts what I would say is a rather dazzling light on the subject. Kafaf and kafar mean the same in Aramaic. I’ll put the word kafaf up here. This is the Egyptian, hpt. This is the situation vividly set forth in the Book of Mormon. I remember old Professor Popper. Imagine, in the years when I took Hebrew and Arabic at Berkeley, I was the only student taking those languages. Today, there are twenty teachers of both there. That’s how things have changed since then. I was Popper’s only student. A rabbi, he would grow quite eloquent on this particular subject of the kafata in Arabic. This was in the Arabic class. We’ve got it all down here, so let’s turn to it. The Arabic is kafata, and the Egyptian word is hpt. They all go together. Notice that the ideogram is two arms embracing somebody, hpt And, of course, you get the Coptic word from that, from which we get our word caftan. That is a long monk’s robe with a hood that covers you completely; it goes completely over your head. That’s kafata, and it’s the same word as the Latin capto, which means “to embrace, to capture, to hug around.” It’s quite universal-our word cover and the rest. And the Jews go into various interpretations. As I said, it means all these things. The basic meaning is “to arch over; to bend over; to cover; therefore, to cover your sins, to wipe them out, to forget them; to pass over with the palm of the hand, hence to wipe over; to cleanse; to expiate; therefore, to forgive, to renounce, to deny, to be found.” Then the basic meaning goes to encircle again, such as encircling a city, a town, a person, or anything else. (Hugh Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon–Semester 1: Transcripts of Lectures Presented to an Honors Book of Mormon Class at Brigham Young University, 1988–1990 [Provo: Foundation for Ancient Re 250.)
17 the Lord your God should come out in the fulness of his wrath upon you, again the problem of a false paradigm of God’s punishment. God does not punish. God seeks to relieve punishment that naturally comes as a consequence of our actions.
18-19 for the space of many generations, how difficult it must have been for Lehi, and Nephi, who’d both seen in vision the degeneration of their people, to yet try and encourage Laman & Lemuel to repent, and to still have hope that perhaps “these things might not come upon you.” Mormon and Moroni had the same challenge (Moro 9:6).
20 ye shall be cut off from my presence, for me, the truth here lies in the simple fact that the “commandments” are relationship-building. If I enter into covenant, strive to keep it, stay in contact with the Lord through worship of all kinds, seek to emulate him by loving and serving others, then, obviously, I will have a close, personal relationship with God; i.e. I will be in his presence continuously. And, if I do none of those things, He and I will have no relationship, i.e. I will be outside his presence. For me, that’s how it works. It’s not that if I do something wrong, God turns away from me; it’s the fact that the very thing I do (or do not) is the walking away from Him (Luke 15:13-20).
21 arise from the dust, my sons, the context of the phrase follows being “brought down…to the grave,” so the “dust” is to be seen as parallel to the “grave.” Note the parallel with the prodigal son in Lk 15— wallowing with the swine then the phrase, “I will arise and go to my father…” (then v20, “and he arose”). This seems to be the sense in which Lehi is telling his sons to arise and be men. One arises to confess and recommit (Lk 15:18-19,21) and ultimately to be reconciled (20, 22+). The putting on the “best robe” and the “shoes” after “arising” is also reminiscent of the temple. Then, after the robe is put on, which is reminiscent of a kingship ceremony, one sits down, as certainly did the prodigal, as Is 52:2 fn b notes “sit down in dignity, being redeemed at last.”
and be men, I want to give a General Conference talk on this someday (as a guest speaker obviously, and to the men, though I should probably walk the walk first :). It’s “Men of Christ” in Hel 3:29. Manhood is not what we think it is, both outside and inside the Church. We are too fraught with cultural ideas and traditions that have proven extraordinarily difficult to shed. Lehi outlines manhood in vs13-24.
23 Awake, my sons; put on the armor of righteousness, Shake off the chains with which ye are bound, and come forth out of obscurity, and arise from the dust, Wow…part of my future talk :). In symbolic imagery, the robes of the temple are the armor, as in 2 Ne 9:14, “clothed…with the robe of righteousness.”
24-27 who hath kept the commandments from the time that we left Jerusalem, reminds me of old Jacob praising his younger son Joseph by giving him his coat of many colors, and thus spawning deep jealousy in his older sons. In any event, Lehi knows L&L will again try to harm Nephi, and he also knows Nephi will survive it; however, L&L’s souls might not survive their murderous actions. Despite his own flaws as a parent, Lehi deeply loves all of his sons.
28-29 first blessing, birthright presumably—the right to rule, to have more land, etc. But it’s a vain hope. Note that Nephi is a type of Christ, and if we follow Christ, we too will receive a shared inheritance with Christ of the “first blessing.” Lehi obviously symbolizes the Father, who tells his children to follow Christ, as Lehi tells his children to follow Nephi.
30-31 Zoram, we learn for the first time that Zoram was faithful to Nephi. Unfortunately, some of his descendants will be attached to a Nephite apostate group (Alma 31-34). In any event, this is the great promise for us all—that we will be adopted into the seed of Abraham (Mt 10:41), and become the children of Christ (Mosiah 5:7).
What is not included is Nephi’s blessing. Certainly he received one. Why does he exclude it?
Holy Envy 