The Gospel According to Jeffrey

“The course of their travels. They come to the large waters.” So once again we come to the question of “why.” If the headnote features the most important points of his book, why are “the course of their travels” and their arrival at “the large waters” so important to him, especially when, at least in our modern minds, the former is barely mentioned (see  1 Nephi 16:13 ) in the text itself? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here: it’s important to him . Nephi was a living, breathing, very human human being. As a product of his time and society, the way he writes is as indicative of his life’s experience as the way you or I write, today. When he says, for example, that the Liahona led Lehi’s party “in the more fertile parts of the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 16:16 ), it’s second nature to him. He knows where those “more fertile parts” are, so he doesn’t need to explain it to himself; and his audience—who, at this point, is still his own family and descendants—would either alr...

“He taketh three days’ journey into the wilderness with his family.” It’s so funny that I would get to this sentence, this morning. Last night I was researching something related to the Bible and discovered a web site that mocks the Book of Mormon. Such sites are, of course, a dime a dozen, but this one was different: never before have I seen such inaccurate information as this. I mean, it’s one thing to take issue with the doctrines or even the historical narrative; it’s quite another to come up with such incredibly obvious straw man arguments. Such is the statement that is brought to mind by this passage: “It only took Nephi and his family three days to travel from Jerusalem to the Red Sea. (A distance of 250 miles)” Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that this author couldn’t even manage grammatical accuracy in his argument. Where on Earth did s/he get this idea? Lehi didn’t start from the city of Jerusalem; he started from “the land of Jerusalem” (see “ Headnote, Part II ”). J...