LeGrand L. Baker

1 Nephi 17:4  

4 And we did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.

If we read this verse only in its immediate context, it might suggest that they remained in the desert between Nahom and Bountiful for a full eight years. However, that reading would not take into account the fact that Nephi had always used the word “wilderness” to describe the area through which they traveled.{1} So we may safely understand him to say that it had taken them eight years to travel from Jerusalem to Bountiful.

Nephi’s story began during the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, that is, in 598 B. C.{2} It is reasonable to assume that they left not long after that. Zedekiah reigned only eleven years, until 587 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem. The city apparently had not yet been destroyed when Lehi’s party arrived at Nahom. At least it appears so, for their knowing nothing of the Babylonian invasion probably accounts for why the boys were so intent on returning to their homes and property. However, they may have learned of it soon after the older sons’ rebellion.

Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem began “on the tenth day of the tenth month of Zedekiah’s ninth year.”{3} In Babylon, preparations for that campaign would have taken some time, as would the army’s march toward Jerusalem. It is possible that the reason Lehi and his party left Nahom when they did, with apparently little or no resistence from the brothers who had been dissenters, was because they had learned of Nebuchadnezzar’s attack on Jerusalem

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FOOTNOTES

{1} Nephi begins his story by writing that Lehi “left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents, and departed into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 2:4).

{2} Here, I am using the dates given in the LDS Bible dictionary, under “chronology.”

{3} The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 1:569.
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1 Nephi 17:1-3  

1 And it came to pass that we did again take our journey in the wilderness; and we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth. And we did travel and wade through much affliction in the wilderness; and our women did bear children in the wilderness.
2 And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women did give plenty of suck for their children, and were strong, yea, even like unto the men; and they began to bear their journeyings without murmurings.
3 And thus we see that the commandments of God must be fulfilled. And if it so be that the children of men keep the commandments of God he doth nourish them, and strengthen them, and provide means whereby they can accomplish the thing which he has commanded them; wherefore, he did provide means for us while we did sojourn in the wilderness.

Here is another “incidental proof” that Joseph Smith could not be the author of the Book of Mormon. In back country New York, Joseph had no access to this information, but the author was very precise in the details of his description of this geography. After Ishmael’s burial at Nahom the travelers made a sharp turn toward the east— into the desert and away from the Red Sea. Their destination, which Lehi and his people called “Bountiful,” is directly east of Nahom. However to get there, the party had to cross the deep, unforgiving, trackless sand of the Arabian desert.{1}

This desert was an horrendous place, where strangers were not welcome and where, we learn later, Lehi and his party were prohibited by the Lord from even building a fire so the light or the smoke would not be seen and expose their hiding places. Notwithstanding the difficulty of this leg of the journey, it is not the place in his story where Nephi calls attention to their hardships. Indeed, he gives this desert crossing only three verses, and those are a celebration of the goodness of God. He speaks of an unidentified sense of urgency, or else of their confidence in the Lord.

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FOOTNOTE

{1} For descrilptions and photos of the Arabian desert through which they passed, see, S. Kent Brown and Peter Johnson, Journey of Faith, from Jerusalem to the Promised Land (Provo, Utah, The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, BYU, 2006), 124-29.
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1 Nephi 17:47-48 

47 Behold, my soul is rent with anguish because of you, and my heart is pained; I fear lest ye shall be cast off forever. Behold, I am full of the Spirit of God, insomuch that my frame has no strength.
48 And now it came to pass that when I had spoken these words they were angry with me, and were desirous to throw me into the depths of the sea; and as they came forth to lay their hands upon me I spake unto them, saying: In the name of the Almighty God, I command you that ye touch me not, for I am filled with the power of God, even unto the consuming of my flesh; and whoso shall lay his hands upon me shall wither even as a dried reed; and he shall be as naught before the power of God, for God shall smite him.

S. Kent Brown and his BYU group found a place where the brothers’ threat would have been more serious than just tossing him into the water. They report that there are cliffs there where the sea crashed against rocks that would have broken his body before the water drowned him and carried him away:

It was a refreshing and exciting ride across the rolling ocean surface with fish visible below us and the steep escarpment rising dramatically above the seashore.

As we came around a curve in the shoreline, Wadi Sayq opened to our view. It was magnificent; before us lay a beautiful alcove of teaming tropical plants framed by steep and jagged mountains with a small freshwater lagoon in the center. This place touched our hearts and imagination because it fit perfectly the description Nephi gave in his record (1 Nephi 17:5-7). On one side, steep cliffs that rose over two hundred feet had at their base sharp rocks with crashing waves. Behind them, a beautifully cone-shaped mountain rose majestically over the lagoon, inviting inspiration. The steep mountain cliffs on either side of the alcove had natural caves etched into them where, the locals informed us, bees stored honey.{1}
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FOOTNOTE

{1} S. Kent Brown and Peter Johnson, Journey of Faith, from Jerusalem to the Promised Land (Provo, Utah, The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, BYU, 2006), 136-37.
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1 Nephi 17:43-46

42 And they did harden their hearts from time to time, and they did revile against Moses, and also against God; nevertheless, ye know that they were led forth by his matchless power into the land of promise.
43 And now, after all these things, the time has come that they have become wicked, yea, nearly unto ripeness; and I know not but they are at this day about to be destroyed; for I know that the day must surely come that they must be destroyed, save a few only, who shall be led away into captivity.
44 Wherefore, the Lord commanded my father that he should depart into the wilderness; and the Jews also sought to take away his life; yea, and ye also have sought to take away his life; wherefore, ye are murderers in your hearts and ye are like unto them.
45 Ye are swift to do iniquity but slow to remember the Lord your God. Ye have seen an angel, and he spake unto you; yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time; and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words; wherefore, he has spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder.
46 And ye also know that by the power of his almighty word he can cause the earth that it shall pass away; yea, and ye know that by his word he can cause the rough places to be made smooth, and smooth places shall be broken up. O, then, why is it, that ye can be so hard in your hearts?

Nephi was reminding his brothers of the Feast of Tabernacles temple drama and its attendant ordinances and covenants, and he has now brought them to the place of the ceremonial battle between good and evil where the king was symbolically killed before being rescued from death and hell by Jehovah. But in Nephi’s version, there was no rescue for the king and his people; rather, their destruction is made sure by their own wickedness, and the only rescue he cites is God’s leading Lehi and his family from the doomed city. In the drama, Jehovah exercises his authority over the forces of nature to defeat Israel’s enemies and restores the king.{1} But when Nephi applied those principles to his brothers, he reminded them that it was they to whom God spoke with a voice “like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder.”

There is a psalm that echoes all of Nephi’s sentiments—both his own joy in the Lord and his fear for his brothers’ salvation. One cannot know whether he called on this psalm to express his feelings or whether part of it went through his mind as he spoke. The concept of righteousness had been the one with which they had first challenged him. He had used it in his response. The psalm is about the contrast between those who are and those who are not righteous. It says God will bless the one but not the other. It reads in part,

17 The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.
18 The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:17-18).

Those last words were a concluding promise of the Feast of Tabernacles temple drama..{2} Nephi’s next words were a further echo of the promise of the psalm.

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FOOTNOTES

{1} For a discussion of the ancient Israelite temple drama see Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord, “Part 1.”

{2} For a discussion of the that psalm as the basis for the Savior’s instruction to the Nephites in 3 Nephi 9 see Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord, First edition, p. 884-91; Second edition, p. 620-25.
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1 Nephi 17:41 

41 And he did straiten them in the wilderness with his rod; for they hardened their hearts, even as ye have; and the Lord straitened them because of their iniquity. He sent fiery flying serpents among them; and after they were bitten he prepared a way that they might be healed; and the labor which they had to perform was to look; and because of the simpleness of the way, or the easiness of it, there were many who perished.

The event Nephi was describing is mentioned in the Old Testament,{1} but its meaning is not discussed there (Numbers 21:4-9). To learn its meaning we have to go to the Book of Mormon where we find that the serpent symbolized the Savior as the Messiah. It was a later Nephi who explained that it represented the Atonement of “the coming of the Messiah” (Helaman 8:13-16).

The Savior referred to that Old Testament event when he spoke with Nicodemus. If we read the story of Nicodemus as being the Savior’s teaching that great, good, and learned man about who he (Jesus/Jehovah/Messiah) really was, then we see his statement about Moses’s brass serpent as an explanation that Jesus is the Messiah of whom Moses testified (John 3:14-21).
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FOOTNOTE

{1} The brass serpent, but not the incident, is mentioned again but with a negative connotation. It was worshiped as a false god, and king Hezekiah had it destroyed (2 Kings 18:4)
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1 Nephi 17:22 

22. And we know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, and all his commandments, according to the law of Moses; wherefore, we know that they are a righteous people; and our father hath judged them, and hath led us away because we would hearken unto his words; yea, and our brother is like unto him. And after this manner of language did my brethren murmur and complain against us.

This can be read two ways, but we suspect Nephi had only one in mind. The first way is to read it with disdain. The evil brothers were misusing the word “righteous” and were giving the people in Jerusalem credit they could not possibly deserve.

The second, and we think the more correct, is that the brothers knew exactly what they were saying, that their argument was not only sound in their thinking, but technically correct; and that it was because of the technical correctness of their argument that Nephi chose to include this incident as part of his story. The English word “righteous” is translated from the Hebrew zedek. In the Old Testament and in the Book of Mormon, “righteousness” usually means priesthood and temple correctness, that is doing the precisely right thing at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, with the right authority, saying the right words, and dressed the right way.

If Nephi’s brothers had accepted Josiah’s religious innovations, and were using the word “righteous” to mean simply following the prescribed pattern in religious ritual, then their argument would seem sound enough. They said, “And we know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, and all his commandments, according to the law of Moses; wherefore, we know that they are a righteous people.” Nephi’s reply does not challenge his brothers’ argument, only their definition of “righteousness.”

Rather than discussing whether the king, High Priest, and their followers at Jerusalem were doing the temple sacrifices, festivals in a form that seemed to follow the rules of the Law of Moses, Nephi asked about the Canaanites who were in the land before the Israelites came. He asks if they were righteous. To us that is a relevant question, and may imply that the apostate religions of the Canaanites looked from the outside very much like the religion from which they had apostatized. We can know from the discoveries of the ancient libraries of Ras Shamra that some of the Canaanite religious practices were similar to those of the Israelites.{1}

It appears that Nephi acknowledges his brothers’ contention that the people at Jerusalem seem righteous because they have perpetuated some of the works required by the Law of Moses. But by this acknowledgment he does not concede either the validity or correctness of those works or of his brothers’ conclusion that they were truly righteous as he and his father would define the word. Rather, he insists on the correct definition of “righteousness.” Nephi achieves that by recounting the story of Moses’s deliverance from Egypt (1 Nephi 17: 23-40). Nephi’s statement to his brothers may be read as simply a quick review of their ancient history, but it would seem relevant if we understood it to be his reminding them of the Feast of Tabernacles temple drama and of the covenants they made during those ceremonies.
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FOOTNOTE

{1} For a discussion of the libraries of Ugarit and what they teach us about the Canaanite religion, see, “Part 1, The Modern Re-discovery of the Ancient Israelite Feast of Tabernacles Temple Drama in the Old Testament,” in Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord.
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