1 Nephi: Headnote, Part II

“The Lord warns Lehi to depart out of the land of Jerusalem….”

Over the years, I’ve had plenty of run-ins with those who would seek to destroy the Church. Some call them “anti-Mormons”; others, avoiding that colloquialism, use “contra-LDS” (as in Michael Ash’s Shaken Faith Syndrome) or simply “critics.” Regardless of what they be called, these people often come back to an argument that they think proves the falseness of the Book of Mormon: that Alma 7:10 states Jesus shall be born in or at Jerusalem.

While we’re obviously a few thousand verses away from Alma 7:10, it occurs to me that right here in the headnote to the First Book of Nephi, we see just why Alma would reference “Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers”: that’s what Lehi did—and with good reason.

The late Hugh Nibley points out that:

Though he “dwelt at Jerusalem,” Lehi did not live in the city, for it was after they had failed to get the plates in Jerusalem that his sons decided to “go down to the land of our father’s inheritance” (1 Nephi 3:16), and there gather enough wealth to buy the plates from Laban. Loaded with the stuff, they “went up again unto the house of Laban” in Jerusalem (1 Nephi 3:23).

This is why Nephi mentions “the land of Jerusalem” in his headnote: it was the land of Jerusalem that they were from, and thus the land of Jerusalem that constituted the Nephites’ ancestral home.

So now, an application to my life: from what land have I been “warn[ed] to depart”? Have I done so? And if so, am I pressing forward towards my proverbial Promised Land or, like Lot’s wife of old, looking back towards the land I was commanded to depart?