The Gospel According to Jeffrey

“This is according to the account of Nephi; or in other words, I, Nephi, wrote this record.” Dr. Hugh Nibley, arguably the father of Latter-day Saint apologetics, points out that the First Book of Nephi “starts out with a colophon telling us whose hand wrote it, what his sources were, and what it is about” ( Since Cumorah , 170-171). This is far from unique in scripture ( e.g. the Jerusalem Colophon ), but the statement is important. Latter-day Saints understand that while the scriptures are indeed the word of God, they are the word of God filtered through the minds of His prophets. The level of perfection to which any scripture can attain is only to the extent that its author was willing and able to write His words in the way that He intended, and to the extent that the reader ( e.g. us) is willing and able to understand them in the way that He intended. By opening his record in this way, Nephi is stating, “This is scripture, but I’m totally responsible for the way it’s written. If...

“Nephi’s brethren rebel against him. He confoundeth them, and buildeth a ship. They call the name of the place Bountiful. They cross the large waters into the promised land, and so forth.” So now we get to the next big conflict: the ship. So why is this significant enough to merit inclusion in the headnote? I believe the significance is twofold. First, we have the contrast that Nephi is working so hard to show us: that between himself and his brothers; and secondly, the necessary backstory for how they “cross[ed] the large waters.” But why in such proximity? I believe that, too, has a dual significance. The first significance of this arguable conjugate is the obvious one, that of temporal proximity. The “rebellion” Nephi here cites occurs in 1 Nephi 17 , immediately following the Lord’s commandment that he build a ship ( v.8 ). So of course, these two things go together. However, these is a greater significance of these two items, especially when coupled with the seemingly out of pla...

“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...

“Their sufferings and afflictions in the wilderness.” Nephi has already mentioned “sufferings” once in his headnote, with respect to his first trip back to Jerusalem (see 1 Nephi: Headnote, Part V ). The sufferings mentioned here are different, though: these are the sufferings of his entire extended family—wife and children, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, etc.—while “in the wilderness.” In fact, we know from 1 Nephi 17:4 that they spent “eight years in the wilderness,” so that’s a pretty good chunk of time for some pretty intense “sufferings” to occur. What happened to the families while in the wilderness? 1 Nephi 16 gives us some clue—hunger and even death were definitely part of their travails—but I suspect it was a lot more than that. Discomfort was probably the rule of the day, even in the city of Jerusalem. They didn’t have climate-controlled homes as do we, nor even electricity. They didn’t have running water in their homes. They didn’t have cars to hop over to Wal...

“They take their families and depart into the wilderness.” So let’s think about this for a minute. We’ve already established that Nephi and his brothers are married. Those of us who have read the book previously realize that this happened as a result of their second return to the land of Jerusalem, so it would seem that none of them were married before they left. On the other hand, it would seem that at least some of them also had children by that time, else why the use of the word “families”? Everything between chapter 7 (the second journey) and chapter 16 (when they “[take] of the daughters of Ishmael to wife”) seems to have preceded the weddings, which is not tremendously surprising since those chapters consist almost exclusively of Lehi’s vision and Nephi’s reprise thereof, with only chapter 16 relating a different series of events. Thus, they probably spent much of their “sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 17:4 ) as married ...

“They take the daughters of Ishmael to wife.” I suppose we’ll deal with this in more detail when I get to 1 Nephi 7, but I think it bears mentioning that Nephi found this tiny little detail—his marriage—important enough to mention in his headnote. With very few exceptions, women are never mentioned in the scriptures unless they are essential to the story or chronology. So by even mentioning it, we can see that Nephi views his marriage as a major event in his life and history. So what can we learn from this? Although Nephi’s parting commandment to his brother Jacob did allow him to “touch… lightly [upon] the history of this people” ( Jacob 1:2 ), the commandment that Nephi had himself received from God (ostensibly just before writing the headnote!) was that he “should make these plates, for the special purpose that there should be an account engraven of the ministry of [his] people” ( 1 Nephi 9:3 ). Furthermore, he states that: “the things which are pleasing unto the world I do n...

“Nephi taketh his brethren and returneth to the land of Jerusalem after the record of the Jews. The account of their sufferings.” I think this passage speaks a lot to the character of Nephi. Grant Hardy points out that Nephi, while not merely “a biased, self-aggrandizing character,” nonetheless “offers a didactic, one-side narrative that severely truncates events and flattens characters” (Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon , 44). I think this comes through quite clearly, in this passage. The events here summarized begin in 1 Nephi 3, when Lehi instructs his sons—on behalf of the Lord—to “go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 3:4 ). While Nephi is certainly portrayed as the more obedient party, he never mentions “taking” his brethren with him; they simply “took [their] journey in the wilderness, with [their] tents, to go up to the land of Jerusalem” ( 1 Nephi 3:9 ). (Incidentally, the fa...