map of lehi's journey in the wilderness

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Nephi’s Eight Years in the “Wilderness”: Reconsidering Definitions and Details

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Abstract: A traditional reading of Nephi’s chronicle of the trek through Arabia relies heavily on two verses in 1 Nephi 17. In verse 4, Nephi states that they “did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.” In verse 5, he reports that “we did come to the land which we called Bountiful.” The almost universal interpretation of these verses is that of sequential events: eight years traversing the arid desert of Western Arabia following which the Lehites entered the lush Bountiful for an unspecified time to build the ship. A question with the traditional reading is why a trip that could have taken eight months ostensibly took eight years. It may be that Nephi gave us that information. His “eight years” could be read as a general statement about one large context: the “wilderness” of all of Arabia. In other words, the “eight years in the wilderness” may have included both the time in the desert and the time in Bountiful. In this paper I examine the basis for such an alternative reading.

Recent discoveries have provided remarkable plausibility for many of the Book of Mormon’s locations and events. 1 As more discoveries are made, it becomes increasingly apparent that Nephi wrote his account of the family’s trek through Arabia with a high level of accuracy and detail. However, in spite of Nephi’s carefully composed text, a variety [Page 282] of questions remain. With an aim to seeking helpful clarifications, this article will explore three questions about the journey through Arabia:

• What did Nephi mean by the word wilderness ?
• Why did the trek ostensibly take eight years, and why do all current speculations designed to account for those “missing” years fall short?
• How much time did the Lehites spend in Bountiful, and how much of that total time was spent constructing Nephi’s ship?

Nephi tells us that he wrote the Small Plate account of the trek through Arabia in First Nephi some 30 years after his departure from Jerusalem (2 Nephi 5:27–31). Twenty years earlier, in what are usually referred to as the Large Plates, 2 Nephi had been similarly commanded to “make plates of ore that [he] might engraven upon them the record of [his] people” (1 Nephi 19:1). Note that Nephi’s father, Lehi, had been recording events of their exodus even earlier than that (v. 1). All of that latter material was dictated by Joseph Smith and recorded on the 116 large manuscript pages that were later lost by Martin Harris. It was in those Large Plates that Nephi wrote or copied material that was essentially contemporaneous. In the Small Plates, written 30 years later, Nephi wrote retrospectively and selectively to emphasize spiritual points and only touch “lightly, concerning the history of this people” (Jacob 1:2). In some places, we are forced to guess at certain details of the trek. An example of a rather important detail concerns how long it took them to travel through the arid portion of western Arabia? Did it take eight full years? It sounds like it when we read in 1 Nephi 17: 4–5,

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

And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful …

and we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum … etc.

A key question is what Nephi meant by wilderness . Another way to phrase this same question is where, exactly, did they spend those eight long years? The traditional and almost universal reading of these two verses assumes that the answers to these questions are obvious: They spent the eight years in the arid, desert portion of the journey: Jerusalem [Page 283] to Nahom, 3 and on to the edge of Bountiful. 4 In other words, it assumes that there were two sequential events: (1) the Lehites spent eight years reaching Bountiful, and then, after that, (2) another undetermined period of time in Bountiful while building some kind of vessel to get them to the Promised Land. But is that traditional interpretation correct? The major and overriding problem with that reading is that the distances just don’t match the timeframes given. If it was a journey of months; 5 how could it have taken them eight years? Jeff Lindsay puts it well when he writes that “as for the eight years in total, this is a puzzle for all of us.” 6

Yes, it is a puzzle, and in order to solve it, scholars have been obliged to speculate on how and where the Lehites spent the “missing years.” Those various speculations all contain significant credibility problems. Ironically, none of them are even necessary if we allow for the alternative reading of Nephi’s words, which I will present in this study. Those [Page 284] speculations will be discussed later in the section called “Speeds and Stops Through Arabia.”

An Alternative Reading of Nephi’s Wilderness

Before addressing the three most common attempts to account for the missing years, let’s first consider an alternative reading of what Nephi may have meant in 1 Nephi 17:4–5. The alternative reading that I suggest for Nephi’s comment is that the word wilderness might not have referred only to a desert environment, but to any undeveloped area. If that is the case, then the eight years “in the wilderness” could have included the time spent in the lush but uninhabited oasis/inlet of Bountiful. That changes everything. Most importantly, it allows Nephi’s eight years to represent the total time on the Arabian Peninsula, not just the time from Jerusalem to the entrance to Bountiful. This alternative reading of the verses requires considerable explanation, which I provide below. 7

Considering the eight-year timeframe to include the entirety of the time in Arabia, not just the desert portion, is important in at least four ways:

• It allows a reconsideration of the timeframes for the trek portion without having to speculate unlikely multi-year layovers to account for missing years.
• It provides a closing “book-end” for the time the Lehites spent on the Arabian Peninsula. At this point, there is no clearly marked ending for their stay in Bountiful. It is one of the “blank checks” of the Book of Mormon that is left for readers to fill in — but nobody has known what number to write. The alternative reading allows a possible number: that of eight years for their time in Arabia, which includes Bountiful.
• [Page 285] It allows an improved estimate of the time available to construct Nephi’s ship.
• It increases the likelihood that a large enough percentage of the seeds, obtained in the land of Jerusalem (1 Nephi 18:24), would still be viable to “grow exceedingly … in abundance” in the New World (18:24). In other words, the seeds they carried were, in effect, an invisible clock ticking on their journey to the Promised Land. All seeds, like everything living, have a shelf-life. They progressively lose viability; that’s the principle of entropy. Experts are divided as to how long seeds will last and still germinate but are united that the issue of seed longevity depends on the variety of the plants and the conditions of storage. Longevity is enhanced by very cool and dry storage and decreased by heat and humidity. The Lehites’ situation could not have been worse. They experienced mainly hot, not cool, conditions in the desert and, later, very damp, not dry, conditions while in Bountiful and during the ocean crossing, especially during the tempest (18:13–15). Nephi’s wording tells us that the crossing took at least five or six months, and most commentators suggest up to a year of sea-level voyage to sail across 16,000 miles of wet ocean. The traditional interpretation would require 13 to 14 years under these adverse conditions. Obviously, a greater percentage of the seeds would have survived the heat, then damp, of their journey if it took less time, eight or nine years, to complete. A question to ask yourself is where you would store extra seeds for multiple years: in the back of your cold fridge or next to the hot shower in the bathroom? For those who are interested, further discussion of this complicated topic of seed viability can be found in Appendix A.

A valid and obvious question is “How is an alternative reading even possible at all, given what appears to be Nephi’s clear and specific wording?” The next section attempts to answer that question.

An Amplification or Colophon Rather Than a Sequence

Let’s begin with a discussion of the larger context of the passage in 1 Nephi 17 which speaks of eight years in the wilderness. I will add the words “by the way” and “back to the story” to verse 4 (the reason will be shown shortly).

[Page 286] 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.

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

5. And [back to the story] we did come to the land which we called Bountiful. …

6. And we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum. …

7. And … we did pitch our tents by the seashore. …

8. And … the voice of the Lord came unto me saying: Arise, and get thee into the mountain. …

9. And … the Lord spake unto me, saying: Thou shalt construct a ship. …

10. And … the Lord told me whither I should go to find ore, that I might make tools.

11. And … I, Nephi, did make a bellows. …

Essentially all commentators — from Nibley in the 1950s to Aston, Brown, and Potter in the present — write unequivocally and at length about the eight years being in the desert portion alone. For example, Aston and Aston write, “After some eight years … of difficult desert travel from their Jerusalem home … ‘to the seashore’ at Bountiful.” 8 Then they talk additionally about building the ship. This, then, assumes a temporal sequence of two events/locales: the desert portion of the journey — ostensibly eight years — and the time spent in Bountiful — unknown, but generally taken to be another four years or so. In fact, the assumption of eight years, just in the desert portion, is so universally applied that many readers do not even recognize that an assumption is being made. This assumption fits the way modern readers read adventure accounts. But this is much more than an adventure story. One goal is to teach a doctrinal message of reliance on the Lord, trust in His goodness, commitment to yield our will to his, and a probationary period of agency [Page 287] and choice. 9 Although those encountering the Book of Mormon for the first time seldom realize it, 1 Nephi was written in a complex parallelistic and poetic style, as numerous scholars have shown but not all readers have noticed. 10 It is as if people are reading the verses with a  then inserted:

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

And [ then ] we did come to the land which we called Bountiful …

and we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum, … etc.

However, just as then can be easily and unconsciously inserted, so the words this includes could also be inserted, instead. That would make the verses read quite differently and yield a very different conclusion:

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

And [ this includes the following: ] we did come to the land which we called Bountiful …

Granted, this alternative reading is also speculative, though reasonable. An analogy may help. My wife and I have sons, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who live in Sacramento, California. We could recount a visit there by writing in real time using Nephi’s formatting. It might sound something like this:

[Page 288] And we did sojourn for the space of many days, yea, even two weeks in Sacramento,

And [ this includes the following: ] we did take a day-trip to the city called San Francisco, …

And we beheld Alcatraz Island in the sea (along with other sights).

A sequential reading would not be correct. The two weeks in Sacramento were not followed (and then) by a trip to San Francisco on the way home. San Francisco was not on the way home. We enjoyed the two weeks with the family in Sacramento, which we then amplified or elaborated upon to say that the overall holiday included a day-trip to San Francisco along with other specific day-trips and fun events.

In like manner, assuming a chronological sequence of 1 Nephi 17:4 followed by vs. 5 may sound obvious, but this is not necessarily warranted. Although the wilderness and Bountiful are usually read as a sequence of two events, it is possible to read the time in Bountiful as an amplification of the statement of the total of eight years. In other words, the large context was the overall wilderness. The specifics were the time spent traversing the desert portion from Jerusalem to Bountiful and also the time spent in Bountiful.

This alternative reading of 1 Nephi 17:4–5 as an amplification is not an isolated linguistic event; it is a frequent device in the Book of Mormon. Nephi uses it repeatedly when he presents a broad context and then amplifies it, clarifies it, or elaborates on it. A small sampling of this literary practice can be seen in the Table 1. As the table shows, he uses this rhetorical device two times in the very first verse of the Book of Mormon. But he also uses this device throughout his account. 11

[Page 289] Table 1. Nephi’s Literary Practice.

The last reference in Table 1 is perhaps the clearest example to replicate the situation of the verses in 1 Nephi 17:4–5. The location of the leg of the journey in 1 Nephi 17:1–2 is critical to keep in mind. Nephi can only be talking about the 700-mile leg from Nahom to Bountiful — skirting the southern edge of the Rub’ al Khali , the sun-blistering sand [Page 290] dunes of what is often called the Empty Quarter . That is the broad context. If a sequential assumption were applied to these verses, they would make little to no sense. The blessings that mitigated their challenges could not have followed the 700 miles. They all occurred during that leg of the trip. The descriptions of those blessings were all amplifications of the overall context of the journey from Nahom to the edge of Bountiful. It can be read in no other way.

In 1 Nephi 17:3 (shown above), Nephi presents a general principle: God will “provide means whereby they can accomplish the thing which he has commanded them.” 12 Nephi in the same verse applied this principle to their own specific case: “He did provide means for us while we did sojourn in the wilderness” (v. 3). The Lord is the Great Planner. Just as the earth was planned spiritually before it was created physically, the oasis of Bountiful was perfectly planned, prepared, fully stocked, and waiting for the arrival of the Lehites. The first verses of 1 Nephi 17:4–5 can thus be read as a further amplification of the general principle given in verse 3. The time in the lush and fertile Bountiful was also among those means provided. Nephi says as much when he adds in verse 5: “and all these things [‘much fruit and also wild honey’] were prepared of the Lord that we might not perish.” He continues listing the “means” in verses 6–13: an uninhabited oasis, ocean access, fresh water supply, flint for fire, ore to molten, trees for lumber, meat and fish to supplement the fruit and honey, his “light [to] prepare the way,” and so on. The logical takeaway of the amplifications of the general principle is the conclusion that Bountiful was a part of the total eight-year wilderness experience. That eight-year experience plausibly included the totality of travelling from Jerusalem, building the ship, and launching out into the Indian Ocean for the beginning of the ninth year rather than merely referring to the desert portion of the trek.

There is another way of thinking about all of this that is related, although expressed differently. The passage in 1 Nephi 17:3–4 could be thought of as a mid-course, parenthetical aside about the trip in its [Page 291] entirety. If the text were read with the parenthetical passage temporarily taken out, it would read as follows:

And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women … began to bear their journeyings without murmurings. … And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful, because of its much fruit and also wild honey; and all these things were prepared of the Lord that we might not perish.

The parenthetical passage, therefore, sounds as if Nephi, 30 years later, is interrupting the story to burst out in praise, song, and testimony to marvel that God always provides the means to accomplish what he has commanded, and that God specifically provided the necessary means for them . He adds that this went on for the entire eight years, not only during the desert portion but in Bountiful as well. He then returns to the factual account of the means in Bountiful.

This is not the only time Nephi uses such editorial asides, sometimes called colophons , 13 that interrupt a narrative account. For example, in 1 Nephi 1:14–15 Nephi starts to describe his father’s reaction to the book he was given. He then interrupts the description to explain to the reader the limitations of his recording (vv. 16–17). He then resumes his account of Lehi’s testifying of the truths he has just read (vv. 18–20). That is an editorial colophon; no one could read that text in any other way.

A smaller example starts in 1 Nephi 3:2, when Lehi tells Nephi of the Lord’s commandment that the sons are to return to Jerusalem for the Brass Plates. He then interrupts the commandment to explain why the Brass Plates are important (v. 3), only to resume recounting the commandment for the sons to return to Jerusalem (v. 4).

There is a similar aside or colophon when Nephi discusses Lehi’s rendition of the vision in 1 Nephi 8. Nephi then interrupts his father’s account to tell the reader that he is leaving out some material “to be short in writing” (8:29–30), only to then resume Lehi’s account in vv. 30–35. Nephi continues to quote Lehi and his exhortations to his sons for the remainder of chapter 8. Nephi then interrupts the account yet again with an explanation for the reader that there are two sets of plates. That comprises all of chapter 9. He then resumes the account of his father’s [Page 292] preaching and prophesying in chapter 10. All of Chapter 9, then, can be viewed as an editorial colophon.

Another example of a colophon begins in 1 Nephi 17:9–11, where Nephi describes making a bellows to melt the ore in order to fabricate tools. He then “interrupts” that narrative to tell us that the Lord prohibited fire but made the meat sweet and was their light then and afterwards (vv. 12–15). Nephi then resumes his account of forging the tools, which he “did molten out of the rock” (v. 16).

Similarly, in 1 Nephi 18:6, Nephi talks about the party boarding the ship. He interrupts that to talk about the births of Jacob and Joseph (vs. 7) and then resumes the discussion of the launch into the ocean in verse 8.

Many other examples could be cited, not just of Nephi’s use of editorial asides but other Book of Mormon writers’ use of this literary device as well. For example, I have previously written about another significant colophon at the end of Alma 30. The story of Korihor appears to end with his being trampled to death in Antionum. The moral lesson is then given: “Thus we see … the devil will not support his children at the last day” (Alma 30:60). This colophon has traditionally been read as the end of the story. Alma 31 is then seen as the beginning of another unrelated story — but still in Antionum. In that paper, I attempted to demonstrate that this colophon was really an editorial aside that broke up a continuous and related account beginning in Alma 30 and continuing into Alma 31. 14

In summary, 1 Nephi 17:4–5 can be reasonably understood as either an amplification or an editorial colophon during the narrative account of the Lehites’ travel through the larger “wilderness” of the Arabian Peninsula — and that includes Bountiful. For this to be a viable possibility, though, it is necessary to closely examine the word wilderness . Could Bountiful credibly be referred to as wilderness ? It must be for this new reading to be correct. I would ask the reader to indulge me in an extensive discussion of how diverse the concept of wilderness can be. It needs to be extensive, since I am attempting to provide an alternative reading to the one that is deeply imbedded in the minds of most readers of the Book of Mormon.

[Page 293] Bountiful as a Part of the Wilderness

Granted, for the Hebrew slaves coming out of the fertile Egyptian delta, wilderness meant some form of desert. The word wilderness , used 305 times in the KJV Old Testament, is usually translated from the Hebrew midbar (מִדבָּר, Strong’s H4057 15 ). A midbar generally refers to an arid and largely uninhabited and undeveloped wasteland, usually with limited vegetation and a limited human population. Since the Hebrew people refer to midbar using that particular conceptualization of what it means to be an uninhabited wasteland, it should come as no surprise that a search of Hebrew Bible references for midbar finds an overwhelming association with a desert or an arid, dry land. Jeremiah 2:6 contains particularly powerful desert imagery: “The Lord led us through the wilderness ( midbar ), through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt. (Jeremiah 2:6).

That is the iconic Hebrew midbar . That Lehi’s journey involved, in part, being led across just such an arid, dry land, even including skirting the southern sand-blown corner of the Rub’ al-Khali or “Empty Quarter” is a given; nobody disputes that. But that a wilderness is necessarily restricted only to a desert is actually not a given.

A Diversity of Deserts and Mountains as Wilderness

The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament does not restrict the word midba r to only a sand desert but offers considerable diversity. 16 The first Brown-Driver-Briggs definition is “tracts of land, used for the pasturage of flocks and herds.” In addition to the stark desert he described just above, Jeremiah also refers to “the pleasant places of the wilderness.” So, a midbar can contain “pleasant places” (Jeremiah 23:10; see also Psalms 65:13). The prophet Joel mentions “the pastures of the wilderness” in Joel 1:19–20 and even that “the pastures of the wilderness do spring [i.e., produce grass]” (Joel 2:22). In like manner, Nephi tells us that there were some relatively fertile sections along the wilderness of the ancient Frankincense Trail and again in the [Page 294] Nahom region. Based on the research of Warren Aston, 17 Jeff Lindsay comments that “’the most fertile parts’ [1 Nephi 16:14] come right after Shazer, followed by the ‘ more fertile parts,’ [v. 16] after which things become much more difficult and presumably a lot less fertile.” 18 Yet all of this was still considered to be a part of the general wilderness or midbar .

A second Brown-Driver-Briggs definition is “uninhabited land.” 19 Job refers to “the wilderness, wherein there is no man” (Job 38:26) but instead is a place for “wild asses … [where] the wilderness yieldeth food for them” (Job 24:5). Jeremiah talks of the “wild ass … [adapting to] the wilderness” (Jeremiah 2:24). Malachi calls it a “waste for the dragons [jackals] of the wilderness” (Malachi 1:3). Jeremiah longs for uninhabited seclusion in a solitary wilderness when he bemoans: “Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people, and go from them!” (Jeremiah 9:2). Deuteronomy 32:10 describes “a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness.” Lehi and his party passed through many such isolated patches between the infrequent oases. Note, however, that Bountiful itself was also apparently isolated and uninhabited. Aston writes, “It is evident, for several reasons, that Kharfot has been unpopulated for most of its history … [and there is] a likelihood to near certainty that it was uninhabited when the Lehites lived here.” 20

A third Brown-Driver-Briggs example of diversity in midbar is that it often refers to “large tracts of such land bearing various names, in certain districts of which there might be towns and cities.” 21 A few examples among many include the wildernesses of Kedar (Isaiah 42:11), Shur (Exodus 15:22), Sinai (Exodus 19:1), Kadesh (Psalms 29:8), Judah (Judges 1:16), Beersheba (Genesis 21:14), Moab (Deuteronomy 2:8), and even the great Arabian desert (Judges 11:22).

There is considerable diversity, then, even among Hebrew speakers, in the application of the word midbar . Egypt was surrounded by desert, as was the Holy Land. In some places, that meant drifting sand dunes, yes; but in other places, that meant arid and parched country with scrub bushes and occasional small farms that required constant irrigation. That [Page 295] doesn’t mean that those more arid areas were always totally uninhabited — humans adapt to all sorts of environments — but if a desert area is developed, it is only with a great deal of work, effort, and expense. 22

This diversity, even in the desert portions, is also shown in Nephi’s own description. He refers to the Valley of Lemuel as wilderness four times: 1 Nephi 2:11, 3:4, 3:14, and 3:15. Yet he still writes that they left the wilderness of the Valley of Lemuel to cross the river Laman and “depart into the wilderness” (repeated in four verses in a row in 1 Nephi 16:9–12). He is clearly saying that the Lehites left one type of wilderness to enter another type of wilderness.

Mountains within desert areas have always been accepted as yet another type of midbar , even by Hebrew writers. Abraham went into the mountain “wilderness” (Jacob 4:5) to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22:2). King Saul chased David into a wooded mountain midbar in the wilderness” (1 Samuel 23:14–15). In Lehi’s trek, the party skirted the Mazhafah mountains in the north, the Hijaz Mountains down much of the Frankincense Trail, and arrived at the Nahom (NHM) tribal territory “centered in the mountains northeast of Sana’a.” 23 When Nephi broke and replaced his steel bow, the Liahona directed him “into the top of the mountain” (1 Nephi 16:30). Remember, too, that the oasis of Bountiful contained its own mountain (1 Nephi 17:7).

Lush Tropical Rainforests as Wilderness

The breadth of meaning of a wilderness — still in the Book of Mormon itself — can be expanded even further. Nephi wrote his account of their [Page 296] trek some 30 years after leaving Jerusalem (2 Nephi 5:28). By then, he was established in the New World in an entirely different environment. He was now in the tropical rain forests surrounding the city of Nephi. Yet he continued to use the word wilderness (e.g., 2 Nephi 5:5). Clearly, the concept of wilderness had taken on an entirely different connotation. Nephi, his people, and his descendants were no longer just surviving in an arid desert or even enjoying an oasis-lagoon. Based on what many Latter-day Saint scholars believe is the most plausible general setting for the Book of Mormon, the Lehites were now living in a wilderness that consisted of the lush jungle-like tropical rain forests of Mesoamerica. 24

Years later, Mosiah described some of his people being “lost in the wilderness for the space of many days” (Mosiah 8:8, 21:25). He tells of the army chasing Limhi’s people, but they “could no longer follow their [Limhi’s] tracks; therefore they [the army] were lost in the wilderness” (Mosiah 22:16). In fact, the army was “lost in the wilderness for many days” (Mosiah 23:30). Similarly, Mosiah’s unsuccessful search party “wandered many days in the wilderness, even forty days did they wander” (Mosiah 7:1–4). Later, when king Noah sent his army to “destroy” Alma and his people who had “departed into the wilderness” (Mosiah 18:34), the army “searched in vain for the people of the Lord” (Mosiah 19:1). Notice that nobody died in all of this getting lost in the jungle rainforests, whereas, by contrast, “to lose one’s way in the desert was almost certain death.” 25 Moreover, when Zeniff was later forced to defend his people, he armed the men but “caused that the women and children of my people should be hid in the wilderness” (Mosiah 10:9). Hiding in a desert is difficult; hiding in a tropical rainforest is easy, almost unavoidable. Even pyramids and stone buildings become lost in vegetation. For example, one recent survey along the borders of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, using LIDAR aerial photography, revealed over 61,000 structures that are not easily visible from the ground because of the jungle growth. 26

[Page 297] One might object that these accounts in Mosiah occurred 400 years after Nephi and are therefore not relevant to an Ancient Near East (ANE) understanding of the word. This is irrelevant, since at this point, we are not talking about the ANE, we are talking about Nephi’s account, which, while beginning in the ANE, soon spread to the tropical rainforests of the Americas. Although we know that the Nephite language changed over time, the translation into the word wilderness was given to Joseph Smith by the Lord. It is not reasonable to expect that the textual meaning of a word that was familiar to, and used by, Joseph Smith changed, without warning, sometime between the ANE beginning of 1 Nephi and the New World account of Mosiah.

Plains, Forests, Oceans, and Ice Fields as Wilderness

A more modern diversity of meaning is also shown in the etymology of the English word wilderness : “Wilderness (n.) ‘wild, uninhabited, or uncultivated place,’ with -ness + Old English wild-deor ‘wild animal, wild deer.’” 27 A “wilderness,” then, is a relatively uninhabited area, but not necessarily an arid or a sandy one. It is instructive to look at what Noah Webster considered a wilderness in 1828, at the time of Joseph  Smith. He started his definition with “a desert” but quickly moved beyond that . Similar to the Brown-Driver-Briggs definition given earlier, Webster referred to “a tract of land or region uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings.” Examples of that were “a forest or a wide barren plain.” 28 His second definition was “the ocean.” Let’s touch on these other meanings of a wilderness .

One major definition of wilderness in the minds of Americans in 1828, presumably including Joseph Smith, included the Great Plains of the Midwest and the deciduous forests of the East. Joseph Smith used the word wilderness over 200 times in the Book of Mormon and 16 times in [Page 298] the Doctrine and Covenants, often to describe the deciduous forests near his home. One entry reads, “My servant Parley P. Pratt … shall go … into the wilderness among the Lamanites” (D&C 32:1–2). Another asks, “And again, what do we hear? … A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county. … The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness … [by] the Susquehanna river” (D&C 128:20).

As the West was explored and developed, readers were told of vast evergreen forests on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Joseph Smith only saw those forests in vision but had expected to lead the Saints through the wilderness plains to those wilderness evergreen forests. 29 He was, of course, forced to leave that exodus to Brigham Young, but the West as wilderness still resides in the minds of millions of Americans. 30

As noted earlier, Noah Webster’s 1828 definitions expanded the diversity even further to include “the ocean.” 31 Even though Nephi did not use the word wilderness in his description of the ocean leg of the journey, to the weary travelers that would have seemed an empty wilderness. The Lehites became all too familiar with that wilderness, given their likely year-long crossing.” 32 So, if wilderness can be expanded to include uninhabited and undeveloped prairies, forests, and oceans, there seems no reason the midbar cannot be expanded to include the lagoon of Bountiful.

In an even further and more dramatic contrast to the Hebrew mindsets of deserts and mountains is the mindset of many people of the far north. They have always thought, and continue to think, of their vast, [Page 299] undeveloped regions of ice and snow as wilderness . 33 The U.S. National Park Service officially calls Alaska a “wilderness,” 34 and that word also applies to the southern continent, where “as much as 99.6% of Antarctica is considered to be wilderness .” 35

The definition of a w ilderness therefore — whether ancient or modern — often comes down to the mindset of the speaker. That’s why a mountain, a plain, a forest, an ocean, and even a frozen tundra could all be a wilderness . The definition is in the eye of the beholder. People envision the concept of an undeveloped area according to what is in their mental map. If these varying definitions of an undeveloped wilderness are all valid, and they seem to be, and if the fertile oases of Western Arabia are universally acceptable as part of the greater wilderness through which the Lehites traveled, then there seems to be no reason that midbar could not be expanded to include the uninhabited and undeveloped oasis of Bountiful.

There is no question that the fertility of the lagoon came as a total surprise to the Lehites. The beauty and fertility inspired them to spontaneously name the inlet Bountiful. Although the lagoon came across as bountiful in comparison to the Empty Quarter that they just spent an agonizing month or two traversing, Bountiful was as “wild” (uninhabited and uncultivated) in its own way as the arid land along the west coast of Arabia had been. It was a mini and fertile “wilderness” within a larger and dryer “wilderness.” In a fascinating parallel written not long after the death of Joseph Smith, William Palgrave, an 1860–65 traveler, found his own lush inlets in Oman (though along the northern coast of Oman, not in the Dhofar area).

[Page 300] [W]e anchored … [off] the coast. … Next morning dawned for us on a very pretty scene. It was a low shingly beach, behind which a wooded valley stretched far back between the mountains, and ended in deep gorges, also clothed with trees, though the rough granite crags peeped out here and there. … [There] were herds of goats clinging to the mountain ledges … and abundant [bountiful?] vegetation of mixed character … laden with round berries … [all] contrasted pleasantly with the past barrenness. 36

Nephi’s Own Hints of Bountiful as a Wilderness

An obvious question that follows this discussion of the diversity of wilderness is whether Nephi himself ever used the term to refer to the oasis of Bountiful. Would that not be the acid test? Obviously, we would not expect to find Nephi frequently using the word wilderness to refer to Bountiful, since that might well have been contrary to his youthful mindset of a midbar . That may be the reason why only twice may Nephi’s words associate Bountiful with wilderness . The first instance occurs as the family is loading up the ship: “After we had prepared all things, much fruits and meat from the wilderness , and honey in abundance, and provisions according to that which the Lord had commanded us, we did go down into the ship” (1 Nephi 18:6).

One must consider several questions with this possible link of Bountiful and wilderness .

• Why did Nephi place the word meat between the words fruit and honey ? He didn’t say, “fruit and honey from Bountiful and meat from the wilderness.” The placement of the words suggests that all three categories of food came from the same place: “from the wilderness” of Bountiful.
• What is meant by “meat from the wilderness”? Surely not the desert of the Rub’ al-Khali, which was many days of travel back up the rock-strewn wadi. Nor is it likely that they simply hopped across the high cliffs and mountains to the north. Going to the desert was, by no means, a case of merely stepping out of a garden oasis to get meat and then stepping back into the lagoon. Could the game animals have been as close as the mountain in which Nephi [Page 301] prayed? Since that mountain was unquestionably a part of Bountifu l, that would suggest that Bountiful was part of the wilderness.
• Why would the game be out in the desert in the first place? There was little food for them there and little water. An axiom is that animals follow water, and abundant fresh water was in the lagoon. In any case, it is well documented that wildlife, both kosher and non-kosher, was bountiful in Bountiful, as Aston convincingly documents. 37 They did not need to leave the region of Bountiful to find game.

The second instance of Nephi’s wording possibly associating Bountiful with wilderness comes not from what Nephi says, but from what he does not say. It occurs in 2 Nephi just after Lehi died. The full weight of the responsibility for the new immigrants’ physical and spiritual well-being had come crashing down on the head of Nephi, who was, after all, still just a young man. In a lament of great intimacy, often called Nephi’s Psalm , he contemplates his own perceived weaknesses. Then he recounts, in a poetic parallelistic couplet that seems to pair “led in wilderness” and “preserved upon waters,” that “My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness; and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep. (2 Nephi 4:20).

What wildernesses is he referring to? There is no disputing that Nephi experienced afflictions in the desert portion preceding his entering the land of Bountiful. And Nephi obviously included afflictions following Bountiful while crossing the wilderness of the “waters of the great deep.” [Page 302] But why does he appear to be skipping his afflictions within Bountiful? That he also experienced afflictions while in the inlet is beyond question. They included the onerous and overwhelming responsibility of building a seaworthy ship out of tree trunks, while being roundly mocked and ridiculed (1 Nephi 17:17), and even suffering an attempted murder (1 Nephi 17:48). It would be highly unlikely for him to describe afflictions in the desert and then skip several years, only to then describe afflictions on the ocean and thereby glossing over his afflictions in Bountiful. Instead, it suggests that he considered all of his afflictions, including those in Bountiful, to be a part of the total “afflictions in the wilderness.”

New World References to Bountiful as a Wilderness

So far, the emphasis has been based on Nephi’s account of the journey in the Old World. Other perspectives are recorded among the Lehites’ descendants in the New World. It is to those that I now turn.

The Traditions of the Lamanites

A very different take on the journey through Arabia comes from Laman and Lemuel’s progeny as recounted by Zeniff in Mosiah 10:12–16. According to his description of the Lamanites:

12. They were a wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, believing in the tradition of their fathers, which is this — Believing that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers, and that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea;

13. And again, that they were wronged while in the land of their first inheritance, after they had crossed the sea. …

14. And his brethren were wroth with him … they were also wroth with him upon the waters. …

15. And again, they were wroth with him when they had arrived in the promised land. …

16. And again, they were wroth with him because he departed into the wilderness [of the jungle].

Again, where is Bountiful in all of this? Did Laman and Lemuel not consider themselves wronged in Bountiful? Obviously they did. Zeniff makes it clear that the Lamanites felt “wronged” because Nephi “took the lead of their journey in the wilderness” (Mosiah 10:13) and because [Page 303] he instructed, cajoled, chided, reminded, prompted, taught, urged, encouraged, rebuked, scolded, and admonished his older brothers. Did this “wronging by Nephi’s assuming leadership” continue in Bountiful? Of course, it did. The group had no sooner pitched their tents upon arrival in Bountiful than Nephi “did exhort my brethren to faithfulness and diligence” — and he obviously took the leadership in constructing the ship. Predictably, “they began to murmur against me” (1 Nephi 17:15, 17). Nothing changed in Bountiful. In fact, the brothers became so angry with Nephi’s “wronging them” that they again attempted to murder him (v. 48).

That Zeniff gave such a comprehensive description of the perceived “wrongings” in the several wilderness situations, without specifically mentioning Bountiful, is startling. It is also revealing. Unless Bountiful was deliberately and intentionally skipped, which seems unimaginable, the Lamanite traditions included Bountiful within the general category of being “wronged in the wilderness.”

Mosiah’s and Alma’s Reminders to Their Sons

A different New-World perspective on the trek occurred when King Benjamin explained to his son Mosiah that the Liahona stopped working when the Lehites “were unfaithful … [so they] were driven back … and were smitten with famine” (Mosiah 1:17). Similarly, Alma reminded his son Helaman that when the Liahona stopped working “they did not travel a direct course , and were afflicted with hunger” (Alma 37:42). Indeed, Nephi indicates that they hungered during their journey. Likewise, they could have had “difficulty in locating the next oasis to make their base camp — and were instead ‘driven back, ’” presumably to the last known water source when the Liahona stopped working, prior to Bountiful. 38 It is equally clear that when the Liahona stopped working after Bountiful, they “knew not whither they should steer the ship” (i.e., it didn’t travel in “a direct course ”) and they were “driven back upon the waters” (1 Nephi 18:13) and likely had times of hunger. The Liahona was their lifeline for survival during those times.

But what about in Bountiful? Was the Liahona their lifeline during those several years as well? It must have been. It doesn’t seem credible that they would put the Liahona away as they entered the oasis of Bountiful and then take it back out once they launched into the ocean. [Page 304] That would seem to contradict Nephi’s account. He needed help to find many things in Bountiful. He surely needed the Liahona “to find iron ore” (1 Nephi 17:10), to find additional flint, to find the right trees to utilize, to find meat and game, and to find “what manner I should work the timbers of the ship” (1 Nephi 18:1). “The Lord showed unto me great things” (1 Nephi 18:3), and the Liahona was likely the vehicle for much of all this finding and showing. King Benjamin’s and Alma’s point was that the Liahona “was prepared to show unto our fathers the course which they should travel in the wilderness ” (Alma 37:39) all the time and every time, including before, during , and after Bountiful. Bountiful was not skipped; it was part of the “wilderness.”

The Words of the Lord about Bountiful as a Wilderness

A final piece of evidence of an association between Bountiful and the concept of midbar is to read what the Lord himself had to say about Bountiful being a wilderness . When he asked Nephi to reflect upon his tender mercies, he did not say, “Here you are, safely in Bountiful. Now look back at the means that I provided for you, back then, in the desert.” No, he continued to provide means. He said to Nephi in 1 Nephi 17:13, and this when Nephi first entered Bountiful and before they arrived in the New World: “And I will also be [note the future tense] your light in the wilderness ; and I will prepare the way [future tense] before you … [and] ye shall be led [future tense] towards the promised land ; and ye shall know [future tense] that it is by me that ye are led.”

The Lord was not just talking about merely providing a physical light for their nighttime travel through the desert (past tense). Yes, he had been their light; but he promised to continue to be their light. The “light in the wilderness” (whether physical light, spiritual light, or both) did not end when the desert ended (past tense). It is expressed in the future tense. In this scriptural promise, which was given at the very beginning of the Lehites’ many years in Bountiful, the Lord promised to remain their “light” in the wilderness of Bountiful and on the waters, just as he can be our light in our wildernesses. He next tellingly says, “ After ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that I, the Lord, am God; and that I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction” (v. 14). He is telling Nephi that he (Nephi) will look back over the entire experience — desert, Bountiful, and the oceans — and see that the “means” were “provided” the whole time (v. 3). By asking Nephi to recognize that he had been “their light in the wilderness ” and would continue to be their [Page 305] light in the future (in Bountiful), it appears that the Lord himself is calling Bountiful a part of the wilderness.

Speeds and Stops Through Arabia

Having discussed the diversity of meanings of wilderness , which seems to include Bountiful, the next point to consider is what this alternative reading might reveal about the timing of the various events that took place during their trek across Arabia. If we can suspend, at least for the sake of this discussion, the restriction imposed by assuming that the eight years were just the desert portion, we can reexamine the specific rest stops along the journey. I will also discuss the three speculations that attempt to fill the “missing” years required by the traditional interpretation.

The desert portion of the trek has been extensively covered in many scholarly discussions, especially by Warren Aston in his many publications. I will cover some of the same ground, but my focus will be on estimates of the time spent reaching each stopping point and the time of the activities that took place there. It is primarily about the timing that the various scholars disagree. Yet it is the timing of the trek that is most pertinent in calculating how long the Lehites sojourned in Bountiful.

Overall Distances and Reasonable Speeds

Let’s begin the discussion with the overall distances involved in the desert trek portion of the journey. From Jerusalem to Nahom (near Sana’a, Yemen) is 1,500 miles. The group then turned eastward to reach the entrance to Bountiful, which was likely Khor Kharfot, just 15 to 20 miles past the eastern Yemeni border into the country of modern-day Oman. That last leg, through harsh terrain, adds some 700 miles. The total distance along Lehi’s Trail from Jerusalem to Bountiful, then, is roughly 2,200 miles. 39 This is the same distance as from Salt Lake City to New York City.

Lehi and his group suffered scarcity of food, only occasional water, daytime heat and nighttime cold, and travel by foot or by camel. Essentially, all experts agree that they used camels, 40 but a camel’s [Page 306] role was primarily to carry provisions and tents. Sometimes travelers also “journeyed taking turns to walk and ride,” 41 but according to one observer on a camel train in 1888, riding was usually reserved for “small children, the aged, the sick, and even bed-rid folk.” 42

57_11_Ellis

Perhaps a better equivalency for the Arabian trek is the shorter “Mormon Trail” of the early pioneers. The Mormon Trail was similar in that both involved walking (for healthy adults), scarcity of food and water, rough terrain, and almost impenetrable barriers. The major difference [Page 307] is that the distance of the Mormon Trail was 1,000 miles less than the travel down the coast of Arabia. 43

In addition to distances involved in the trek, travel speeds need to be factored in. Kent Brown, and most other scholars, believe that Lehi’s camel caravan “was traveling about twenty miles per day, or perhaps fewer.” 44 The Book of Mormon Central (now, Scripture Central) team points out that “Lehi would likely have fled Jerusalem as quickly as possible, pushing his traveling party much faster than under normal travel conditions.” 45 Talking only about the initial 180 miles from Jerusalem to the tip of the eastern fork of the Red Sea (Eilat or Aqaba), 46 they conclude that the family could have accomplished “an average of only 20 to 25 miles (32–40 km) per day.” 47 Had the group been able to maintain that rate of travel for the entire trek down to what is now Oman, and with no long rest stops, they would have arrived in Bountiful in slightly less than four months. That speed is highly unlikely, because it was simply not sustainable, and we know they took rest stops. A more realistic speed is closer to the rate of the Mormon pioneers, who were “making about 13 miles a day” 48 traveling to their Promised Land in Utah. 49 Applying the speed of the Mormon pioneers to the Lehites’ trek yields a result of six months.

[Page 308] As noted earlier, these speeds create a problem, given Nephi’s apparent report that the journey prior to Bountiful required eight years. To resolve this, scholars have speculated that they spent multiple years — as many as six or seven — in one or more sites along the route. As Kent Brown puts it, “The eight-year duration of the wilderness experience suggests that … the family must have spent a considerable period in at least one location.” 50 No, there is another possibility: the alternative interpretation, which includes Bountiful in the eight years. That would allow the trip through the desert to be much faster.

In the next section of the paper, I present estimated times at the major stopping points along the way. I also discuss the three speculations that attempt to account for the “missing” years of the traditional reading of 1 Nephi 17:4–5. Here, I ask the reader’s indulgence, as considerable detail will be needed to critique each speculation. I then return to timing estimates for the major stopping points of the Lehites’ journey.

Speculation 1: Sluggishness Caused Slow Progress to Allow Comparison with Moses

The first speculation is not a full-blown theory as much as an observation. Don Bradley notes in passing that Lehi and his party were spiritually sluggish, just like the children of Israel under Moses. 51 For that reason, and to emphasize similarities between Moses and Nephi, the Lord permitted (or implicitly, “arranged”) for them to wander at an extremely slow overall pace throughout the journey. That slowdown was ostensibly in order for readers to draw a parallel between the Lehites’ exodus from apostate Jerusalem and the exodus of Moses from out of slavery in Egypt. 52 In his words,

[Page 309] In both the biblical and Book of Mormon exoduses, the people … moved toward their respective promised lands with painful sluggishness . The Israelites wandered 40 years to traverse the distance between Egypt and Palestine. The Lehites … managed to take eight years to go from Jerusalem to the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula — a pace of about 5 miles per week . 53

A speed of five miles per week, or less than a mile per day, seems highly unlikely, inefficient, and contrary to Nephi’s choice of wording, which suggests fairly rapid travel between specific, named, oasis stopping points. In addition, consider the nature of their tents. An Arabian tent compound was far from a cluster of collapsible pup-tents. According to an 1888 description, “The Arab tent … [is], strong and rude … and may last out, they say, a generation, only wearing thinner.” 54 Those tents were not only large and bulky, they were incredibly heavy. Aston notes that “even a single panel of a desert tent is a heavy and awkward item, weighing hundreds of pounds.” 55 Hilton and Hilton estimate that the full tents weighed around 500 pounds each. 56 Erecting several such huge, heavy, and complex tents to form a compound for just one night and afterwards striking the heavy tents and reloading the camels would have consumed much of a day at each end. It would not have taken place unless the group was staying for at least a few weeks. That may be why Nephi takes the time and space on the plates to record the setting up of the tents as significant and worth mentioning. In fact, while traveling “the space of many days” to the next watering hole, they would not have used their tents at all. Rather, they would have snatched what sleep they could during brief stops as they traveled by day when possible or by night when the heat became unbearable. Either way, they would not have had the luxury of setting up their luxurious and spacious Bedouin desert tents. Writing in 1865, Palgrave eloquently describes typical Arabian desert practice:

Then an insufficient halt for rest or sleep, at most of two or three hours, soon, interrupted by the oft-repeated admonition, “if we linger here we all die of thirst,” sounding in our ears; [Page 310] and then to remount our jaded beasts and push them on through the dark night. 57

They simply would not have loaded up the camels with their massive tents, all their provisions, their abundant seeds, and so on, and then traveled just a mile or two, only to unload the camels and set up their all their heavy tents again. That defies logic. And there is still another piece of evidence of the group’s rapid, not sluggish, travel speed. This one was pointed out by a helpful anonymous reviewer of an early draft of this paper. He suggested that since the Lord told the party not to “make much fire” (1 Nephi 17:12), that indicated, at least to that reviewer, that the Lehites “were hiding or at risk from others. Such a risk would be a motivation to hurry and not delay when passing through dangerous regions.”

Nor is there textual support for the idea that they ever “wandered,” although that may be a logical assumption to fill some of the missing time. But the text seems to indicate that they were being specifically directed by the Liahona; and even the few times that their faith lagged and the Liahona stopped working, they seem to have been immobilized in place. There is no indication that they “wandered” aimlessly. To the contrary, Nephi’s account provides clear directions and clear timeframes. Then, too, they were often crossing barren deserts, and “to lose one’s way in the desert was almost certain death.” 58

The implication that they were usually or frequently spiritually sluggish, like the children of Israel, also does not hold up to scrutiny. Bradley notes that

Lehi’s band failed to progress in their journey when they failed to give “heed and diligence” to God. … The Lehites failed to progress due to the Liahona ceasing to work when their “faith and diligence waned.” … The Lehites’ journey to the Promised Land continued to echo the Israelite wandering in the wilderness, even while they crossed the ocean. 59

In other words, the multi-year delay was caused by the lack of faith of the Lehites, just like the Hebrews under Moses. There is unquestionably a degree of validity in this comparison. Nephi points to the comparison in his admonition to his brothers, especially in 1 Nephi 17:23–30 and 42. But there are far more differences in the groups than similarities, and [Page 311] we must not overstate the resemblances. In fact, there are at least three glaring differences.

First, the children of Israel had been slaves who obeyed overlords. They needed time to find out who they were and how to handle their new freedom, how to become a cohesive and united body. Further, they needed to prepare for battle in an occupied land. By contrast, the Lehites were highly educated, upper-class, family members who were fleeing from, not toward, an established society. 60 They were not ignorant slaves. There were, likewise, no enemies to defeat once they arrived in the Promised Land.

Second, there was a huge difference in timeframes. The “exodus” of Lehi/Nephi took, at most, eight years and, as we will see, perhaps much less — not 40 years. It seems unlikely that the Lord dragged out the trek to underscore a lesson that was already apparent and made clear by Nephi himself. 61

Third, there was a vast difference in the spiritual level of the groups. Most of the Lehites were not consistently spiritually sluggish. The text simply does not support that reading. Other than when she believed all four of her sons were dead, Sariah never faltered. Camille Fronk notes that “children were the focus of life for women in ancient Israel. Only in their roles as mothers did Israelite women receive honor and authority.” 62 A temporary and grief-induced anger against her husband and even against God seems entirely understandable. Similarly, Lehi murmured only one time, when Nephi’s bow broke and they had no food (1 Nephi 16:20). Almost immediately, he was truly “chastened because of his murmuring against the Lord (v. 24), insomuch that he was brought down into the depths of sorrow” (v. 25).

Overall, the Lehites come across as faithful, at least most of the time. When one examines the full story closely and despite their characterization in talks and lessons, even Laman and Lemuel were not spiritually sluggish most of the time. It is obvious that they had periods of complaining, rebellion, and even attempted murder, but those periods were actually just occasional.

[Page 312] Based on the work of Margaret Barker, several scholars are pursuing a possible paradigm shift. Grant Hardy, Neal Rappleye, Val Larsen, Kevin Christensen, and others are arguing that much of the conflict between the Lehi-Nephi-led side of the family and the Laman-Lemuel-led side may have been based on differing acceptance of the Deuteronomist reforms of King Josiah, and not on spiritual sluggishness on the part of anyone. 63 In other words, Laman and his followers may not have been rejecting God as much as they were rejecting Lehi’s “out-of- date” pre-reform ways. In the extreme, the desire to kill their brother and even their father was not “murder.” Rappleye points out that Josiah’s reforms may have justified, and even mandated, the killing of false prophets and that Laman and Lemuel saw their father and their brother as exactly that, as false prophets. 64 According to Val Larsen and Newell Wright, “Laman and Lemuel behave as the book [that] Josiah received mandates they behave. … [They] are motivated by fierce piety.” 65 In Hardy’s words, “Whatever else they may have been, Laman and Lemuel appear to have been orthodox, observant Jews.” 66 Val Larsen even calls them “pious.” 67

Nephi certainly does not describe his brothers as pious . Nor do they sound pious when they mock Nephi’s revelation to build a ship [Page 313] (1 Nephi 17:17), when they “make themselves merry … and speak with much rudeness,” and bind Nephi while crossing the ocean (1 Nephi 18: 9–11). So we are left with two conflicting theories. Laman and Lemuel were either (1) paragons of evil and rebellion who may be spiritually asleep, as Lehi later describes them, or (2) pious defenders of “competing religious ideologies.” 68 How does one resolve these two extreme views? Noel Reynolds provides one possible resolution when he writes that Laman and Lemuel “may be invoking reformist perspectives to justify their rebellions. But I interpret Nephi to be portraying these invocations as convenient rationalizations .” 69

Leaving aside the debate over the Deuteronomistic theory, let’s consider the softer side of Laman and Lemuel, based only on Nephi’s text. It may come as a surprise that almost two dozen instances in the record are clearly positives, not negatives. These positives are not often recognized and even less often enumerated:

• They left their comfortable lifestyles to follow their “visionary” father and his “foolish imaginations” (1 Nephi 2:11).
• They agreed to return to Jerusalem, a multi-week trip, for what seemed a hopeless mission (1 Nephi 3:5, 9).
• After Laban attempted to slay them (3:13), they “did follow [Nephi]” (1 Nephi 4:4) to make a second attempt.
• After a rage, they “did soften their hearts … were sorrowful and did plead … that I would forgive them” (1 Nephi 7:19–20).
• When Nephi “did exhort them that they would pray … it came to pass that they did so” (1 Nephi 7:21).
• Back in the Valley of Lemuel, “my brethren … did offer sacrifice and burnt offerings” (1 Nephi 7:22).
• Later, they were interested enough in their father’s teachings to be “disputing one with another” (1 Nephi 15:2).
• Once Nephi explained Isaiah’s teachings “they were pacified and did humble themselves before the Lord” (1 Nephi 15:20)
• They were interested enough to ask, “What meaneth this thing which our father saw in a dream?” (1 Nephi 15:21).
• Once Nephi explained the “hard things” (1 Nephi 16:1), they “did humble themselves before the Lord” (1 Nephi 16:5).
• [Page 314] When Nephi’s replacement bow resulted in meat, “they did humble themselves before the Lord” (1 Nephi 16:32).
• Their rebellion in Nahom was followed by rapid and sincere repentance, which the Lord accepted (1 Nephi 16:39).
• After being “shocked” by Nephi (17:53–54), “they were about to worship me [Nephi]” (1 Nephi 17:55).
• Nephi stopped that inappropriate worship, and Laman and Lemuel instead “did worship the Lord.” (1 Nephi 18:1).
• Then they “did go forth with me; and we did work [heavy manual labor on the ship]” (1 Nephi 18:1) for several years.
• They said of the ship “that the workmanship was exceedingly fine” (1 Nephi 18:4), which was a humble reversal of their earlier mockery (1 Nephi 17:17–18).
• At sea, they “began to make themselves merry” but “repented” and “loosed me [Nephi]” (1 Nephi 18:20).
• That was followed by “a great calm” (1 Nephi 18:21) of waves but also a lack of turbulence from Laman and Lemuel (presumably for months).
• In the New World, they helped Nephi. “till … and plant” (1 Nephi 18:24). And “find … beasts” and “ore” (1 Nephi 18:25).
• Following these mutual discoveries, they allowed Nephi to “teach … and … read many things” (1 Nephi 19:22–23) including 49 verses of Isaiah (1 Nephi 19:24 to 21:26).
• After Nephi read from the plates of brass, “my brethren came unto me” to ask “what meaneth these things?” (1 Nephi 22:1).
• They allowed their father, Lehi, to also speak “many things unto them” (2 Nephi 1:1), including what must have seemed to be rubbing salt in the wounds, a pleading to “hearken unto the voice of Nephi” (2 Nephi 1:28).

These 22 instances are not consistent with the behaviors of men who are the personification of evil. Rather, most of the time, Laman and Lemuel sound quite compliant. Yes, the infrequent flare-ups were intense; but those flare-ups were generally impulsive, irrational, and brief. The brothers come across, not as villains, but as emotional children throwing infantile tantrums of jealousy — although with the extreme actions and violence of adult men. If anything, their behavior comes across as decidedly bipolar. It ranged from brief and impulsive outbursts to brief and impulsive repentance and even worship, while twice bowing down to worship their little brother. Despite the infrequent negative outbursts, [Page 315] there were much longer periods of repentance and compliance. Rather than symbols of evil, they are symbols of vacillation. That symbolism is ideal. We, too, are at neither end-point of being celestial beings or telestial villains; most of us consistently vacillate as well.

This discussion is not meant to excuse Laman and Lemuel’s horrendous behavior on multiple occasions. It is to point out that most of the time, they were obedient, if reluctantly so. It may be a mistake to judge that Laman and Lemuel were “sluggish.” Nephi and Alma make it clear that the Lehites had occasional times of slothfulness (Alma 37: 41–43), but that is not enough to support the idea that the trek was extended because of constant “sluggishness” or to intensify and underscore the similarities between Nephi and Moses. It was not enough to stretch eight months into eight years.

Still, we must estimate just how much time the Lehites remained in any of the four primary stops that Nephi describes. Although not always the case, traveling pauses for Arabian camel caravans — pauses long enough to justify setting up their tents — still tended to be brief, just enough to catch whatever rest they could and replenish their supplies. And that seems to be what Nephi describes. Writing about typical Arabian caravans, Hugh Nibley tells us that “from ten to twelve days is the average time a Bedouin encampment of ordinary size will remain on the same ground,” although “they remain often for a whole month.” 70

And there is another problem. As Brown points out, “There were now a number of teenagers and young adults who would consume much of the available food supply. The longer they camped, the more the group would have eaten.” 71 Based on all of these facts — the hints of rapid travel, the aging of the seeds for the New World, and that the scriptural record does not talk of any long-term layovers —any multi-year residencies at any of the stops described by Nephi appear unlikely. Let’s examine the text of 1 Nephi for more realistic timeframes for traveling to each of the stops and the time spent in each one.

An Estimate of Time Spent Getting Out of Jerusalem

Lehi, like his contemporary, Jeremiah, proclaimed various warnings and woes upon the people of Jerusalem. Chief among them was, first, the destruction of a city that most citizens believed would be protected by God. A second warning was that the many Israelites would be carried away into captivity in Babylon (1 Nephi 1:13). The people initially “did [Page 316] mock [Lehi] because of the things which he testified” (v. 19), but that quickly escalated, and they “sought his life, that they might take it away” (v. 20). If one considers the Deuteronomist reforms of King Josiah, along with the intensity of their anger, the extreme reaction might have been because Lehi was (1) preaching a suffering servant Messiah and not a liberating warrior Messiah, (2) testifying “of their wickedness and their abominations” (v. 19), and (3) was preaching a Mother God and a Son of God (both ideas being rejected by the Deuteronomists). Of course, many readers simply assume that the excessive anger was attributable to the evil of the people of Jerusalem, while Lehi was righteous. It was most likely some combination of those causes.

In any case, and presumably like his contemporary Jeremiah, Lehi could not stop testifying, because the Lord’s “word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones … and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9). Only after he was commanded by the Lord to “take his family and depart into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 2:2) did Lehi take the death threats seriously and cease preaching. He was warned that “this people … seek to take away thy life” (v. 1).

Based on that divine warning, it is tempting to imagine a frantic overnight scramble to secure camels, load them with essentials, and race out of town, precipitously leaving “his house … and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things and [taking] nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents” (v. 4). One commentator uses the words escape and fleeing ,” 72 which make his departure sound like a desperate scramble to get away. That may or may not be accurate. To me, Nephi’s account does not sound as if a crazed mob was imminently charging toward the house, carrying pitchforks and blazing firebrands. The Lord actually said that “they seek to take away thy life” (v. 2). If seek means “planning or plotting,” Lehi might have had more time, perhaps as much as a week or two, to plan a more organized, but still rapid, exit. Lehi likely would not have had enough tents on hand and certainly not enough seed for a New World, which would have taken at least a few days to procure. In his account, Nephi used the calmer word depart (v. 2). Moreover, the leaving of Lehi’s “precious things” (v. 4) may have been a calculated decision rather than an oversight in a desperate panic to get away. Although it could have been overnight or the next day, a more measured departure suggests an extremely generous estimate of half a month for the departure from Jerusalem.

[Page 317] Travel From Jerusalem to the Valley of Lemuel

The group then traveled approximately the 180 to 250 miles (depending on route 73 ) to Eilat or Aqaba. “And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea” (1 Nephi 2:5). This was a journey that would have taken around two weeks. Still not safe and feeling vulnerable to Jewish travelers potentially taking news of his location back to Jerusalem, Lehi felt the need to avoid a stay in either town. Perhaps hearing about the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism from locals, they traveled an additional “ three days in the wilderness, [where] he pitched his tent in a valley by the side of a river of water” (vv. 5–6) . Lehi renamed the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism as the “Valley of Lemuel” to create an object lesson of stability. 74 This leg of the journey, traveling from Jerusalem to the Valley of Lemuel, took another half a month.

Speculation 2: Growing Crops in the Valley of Lemuel

The question is what did they do in the Valley and, more importantly, how long were they there? We now encounter the second speculation. The discussion may again appear to veer off-topic, but it is necessary to carefully examine the validity of what this speculation asserts. This speculation is the most popular one for filling in the missing years. The assertion is that Lehi and his family spent several growing seasons, hence several years, living in the Valley of Lemuel. Aston guesses that most of the “eight years in the wilderness” may have been spent here, “apparently to augment those [seeds] brought from Jerusalem … and long enough to include at least one growing season.” 75 (Aston makes a similar claim about growing crops in Shazer and Nahom, discussed later.)

Let’s take a closer look at this idea of growing crops in the Valley of Lemuel. I again ask the reader’s indulgence in so doing, and I offer the assurance that this detail is necessary to replace a speculation designed to try to “fill the time.” I return to a more realistic estimate of the time spent in the Valley of Lemuel following this discussion.

There are several considerations that make speculation 2 problematic, as discussed in the following sections.

The Seeds Came from the Land of Jerusalem

First and most decisive, Nephi specifically tells us that the seeds were not grown in the Valley of Lemuel. Nephi writes that when they arrived in [Page 318] the New World, “we began to plant seeds; yea, we did put all our seeds into the earth, which we had brought from the land of Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 18:24). If we take Nephi at his word, and surely most readers will want to do that, the word “all” would preclude the possibility that any of the seeds came from a bounteous crop grown in the Valley of Lemuel (or Shazer, or Nahom), or anywhere else along the way. Keep in mind, as the discussion continues, that there was not merely a large number of seeds but also a widely varying assortment (“all manner of seeds of every kind” (1 Nephi 8:1). The account clearly states that that “all” came from “the land of Jerusalem.” 76 Any idea of the seeds being “augmented” here or anywhere else does not come from the text.

Nobody Anticipated Growing Crops

Neither Lehi nor Nephi appear to have known, in the very beginning, the exact reason why the Lord commanded Lehi to depart from Jerusalem, other than to preserve his life. Nephi didn’t know why until his second theophany when the Lord revealed that “ye shall … be led to a land of promise” (1 Nephi 2:20). Nephi returned “to the tent of my father” (1 Nephi 3:1) to tell him the news. If Lehi had already known, he had apparently not shared it. It was not until Sariah’s panic that their sons had “perish[ed] in the wilderness” (1 Nephi 5:2) that he comforted her by telling her, “I have obtained a land of promise” (v. 5). Laman and Lemuel apparently knew by the time they recruited Ishmael’s family that they “shall obtain the land of promise” (1 Nephi 7:13), but probably not much earlier. If Laman and Lemuel, probably Zoram, and Ishmael’s family were initially ignorant of the full scope of their mission, it’s hard to imagine how Lehi could have recruited their labor to grow a widely varied and large crops of fruits, grains, and vegetables, not to eat, but to produce seeds for long-term storage. Kent Brown reminds us that “Lehi carried the main batch of seeds specifically for planting in the promised land. He evidently planted none along the way.” 77

There was no Fertile Garden Area in the Valley

Even if Lehi had been able to recruit labor and had planted some of the sacred seeds meant for the New World, there is yet another problem. There was no fertile garden area in the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism (the Valley of Lemuel) in which to grow crops. The gorge was too narrow and shadowed [Page 319] to grow anything at the Red Sea end. It widens out to the southeast, but that area was still an arid corner of desert, not fertile farmland. 78 The average rainfall in northwest Arabia totals 100 millimeters [4 inches] or less per year, which is far from the amount needed for cultivation” 79 And even that small amount cannot be counted on to be regular. “[Sudden] rain storms … came with such force that [they] created spurting jets of water [flash floods] … leaving only temporary pools of standing water.” 80

Lehi was not a Large-Scale Farmer

Lehi and Nephi, or both, have been described as “a model sheikh of the desert,” 81 “a smelter and trader in precious metals,” 82 a caravanner, 83 metal worker, 84 whitesmiths, workers of precious metals 85 and “highly trained … scribes” and scholars. 86 Nephi was also a “master sword smith,” 87 a master shipbuilder and ship navigator, a skilled woodworker who not only constructed a replacement wooden bow, which Nibley describes as “something of a miracle,” 88 but “did teach my people to build buildings, and to work in all manner of wood.” He was also a skilled stonemason who “did build a temple … and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine” (2 Nephi 5:15, 16). Finally, he was an eloquent spiritual and political leader and king. All of that is a staggering resumé for anyone; are we now to accept that Lehi and Nephi were also skilled and successful, [Page 320] large-scale farmers? 89 There is simply little to no credible evidence that they had the knowledge or ability to conduct extensive farming in the Valley of Lemuel. Making that even less credible is that they ostensibly grew this large- scale and multi-varied crop in a challenging, arid ground and with excessive temperatures that would preclude most crops setting fruit, even if they were able to sprout. Even in the unlikely event that Lehi can be imagined to be an experienced farmer, nobody, not even an seasoned grower, can make a wide variety of crops grow in a desert. In addition to those problems, S. Kent Brown asks another excellent question: “There is also the matter of arable land where Lehi might plant seeds. Would not local people claim such ground?” 90

Lehi and Sarah Lacked a Labor Force

The main strength and vigor of Lehi’s labor force was not available. Even if they had unnamed servants with them, 91 and there is no solid evidence of that; the labor force was still tiny. Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, Sam were away for arguably several months, which spanned most of a full growing season. Not only that, they had not yet recruited Ishmael and his family. Where was the labor force? Could an older Lehi and Sariah, even with the possible help of daughters, have tilled, planted, watered, weeded, harvested, threshed, and bagged the seeds by themselves?

The Timing of the Trips and the Growing Conflict

Consider also the timeframe. The text says that “we had gathered together all manner of seeds of every kind” (8:1), this immediately after it recounts the return of the sons. True, one could read “gathered” as “harvested,” but that also seems unlikely, given the immediacy of the sons’ return with Ishmael’s family. They ostensibly returned and immediately harvested. This would be a remarkable coincidence, and it totally overlooks the fact that the crops were highly varied and wouldn’t have all been harvested at the same time anyway. That immediacy is obscured, because the two events, the return and the “gathering,” are reported in separate chapters in the current edition of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 7:22 and 8:1). They sound like two entirely different activities; but they weren’t. In the original Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, the text of the sons’ return and the text of the gathering of the seeds are reported in the same chapter and even on the same line. Moreover, the text doesn’t actually [Page 321] say they “gathered” anything. The text uses the past perfect tense “we had gathered.” This suggests that they returned with the seeds already “gathered,” that is, “purchased” in Jerusalem (more on this shortly).

An Absence of Available Wild Fruits and Grains

Some commentators have speculated that “gathered” literally means “gathered,” and that the family merely picked existing seeds from spontaneously growing plants while they were living in the Valley of Lemuel. There are serious problems with this idea as well.

• Wild figs and dates would not fulfil the requirement of “all manner of seeds of every kind , both of grain of every kind , and also of the seeds of fruit of every kind ” (1 Nephi 8:1).
• There was no oasis here to produce spontaneous wild figs or dates growing on their own. Perhaps later in Shazer or Nahom, but not in the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism.
• If the Valley of Lemuel had wheat, barley, rye, dates, figs, and olives growing on their own, which seems unlikely given that this area was never described as an oasis. Such a wild crop would almost certainly have been owned by someone else and not be available to be “gathered” freely and in large quantities by total strangers.
• There is some question whether wild dates and figs, if those were the only seeds they had, would even grow “exceedingly” and “in abundance” (1 Nephi 18:24) in MesoAmerica, much less around the Great Lakes area or other new-land areas.
• As already noted, even if wild figs were the seeds to which Nephi refers and were simply “gathered,” Nephi would most likely have told us that the seeds came from the Valley of Lemuel in Arabia, not “which we had brought from the land of Jerusalem” (v. 24).

Did They Have the Resources to Purchase Seeds?

It seems more likely that the sons, along with Ishmael and his family, “gathered” the seeds in Jerusalem or as they traveled south through the “land of Jerusalem,” as the text reports (v. 24). However, a fair question is to ask how they “had gathered” the seeds. As mentioned above, the best possibility is that they purchased them, but with what money? After all, the text says that Lehi “left his gold, and his silver, and his precious things” behind when he left Jerusalem (1 Nephi 2:4). Worse, the treasure left behind was later stolen by Laban. However, leaving behind [Page 322] the family’s “precious things” and treasure does not necessarily mean they left behind all of the family’s financial resources. The “precious things” may have referred to gold bracelets, jewels, silver platters, framed mirrors, and the like. Lehi left all that behind, but that need not tell us that he left all his money behind. It seems irresponsible to take his family out into the desert with no money at all. Thus, it is entirely credible that they lost their “treasure,” but still had financial means. Fronk adds an intriguing possibility:

Nomadic women, such as Bedouin women, possessed one simple locked box to hold their valuables. … Bedouin women also wore their valuables, in the form of coins and jewelry, around their necks and wrists. One wonders whether Sariah did the same. The wealth around her neck or niceties in her box may have gradually disappeared as necessity to survive in the desert required trading or selling them. After all, Nephi said that his father left his possessions behind; he made no such claim for his mother’s wearable wealth. 92

Whether Fronk’s musing is correct or not, it is unrealistic to conclude that a group of at least 20 people traveled through 2,200 miles of somewhat populated areas with no financial resources whatsoever. 93 Even in the unlikely event that Lehi and Sariah had no funds, what of Ishmael’s resources? We are not told that Ishmael also left his wealth behind. He may well have had considerable resources.

This may be how a caravan of people could have spent months (or, ostensibly, years) successfully passing from water hole to water hole through somewhat populated areas. The ”empty quarter” may have truly been empty, but the oases along the Frankincense Trail, and especially at Sana’a (Nahom), were not. Several scholars now assert a social relationship between the Lehites and the local water owners. Travelers were typically “going from public waterhole to public waterhole … along only established routes … [and] where water is precious, waterwells are both known and populated.” 94 The Lehites would have needed money to purchase water rights at every oasis they visited, particularly along the [Page 323] Frankincense Trail, and would have interacted with those water owners. “The few existing wells were well known by Lehi’s time, and all were owned by tribes who guarded them closely. Travel to and from these wells could not be undertaken without the permission of the Arab tribes who owned the land.” 95

In addition to water needs, the Hiltons also point out that the Lehites would also have had to purchase birds and small animals. “Nephi tells us on seven occasions that the group offered ‘burnt offerings’ (animal sacrifices). … Lehi could have purchased or traded for these animals from local Bedouin herders.” 96 Kent Brown agrees and offers his opinion that they “purchased [sacrificial animals] locally,” adding that “if Lehi offered birds, he likely bought them from someone in the area who raised domesticated fowl.” 97 Aston concurs that they were not alone, writing that “Lehi’s family had contact with other peoples during the journey” and that “contacts with other people on the journey to Nahom could have been quite frequent.” 98 He has repeatedly pointed out that Nahom ( NHM ) was an “already-existing, locally known name,” 99 which strongly implies interaction with local NHM tribal members. In addition, NHM was known as a regional burial site, and Ishmael could not be buried without the payment of a fee, perhaps a significant fee.

Given this evidence of a need for and availability of financial resources, we may conclude that the Lehites also had the means to purchase the seeds in or around Jerusalem. That scenario seems more likely than to speculate that they grew a large and highly varied crop of seeds, grain, and fruit “of every kind” in a desert.

In sum, the speculation that they spent multiple years in the Valley of Lemuel growing seeds is unlikely. This idea is enticing as a way to help fill up some of the missing years required by the traditional reading. However, even if true and despite the objections listed above, two or three years in the Valley of Lemuel would still be insufficient to fill up all eight of the needed years. So what would be a more likely estimate of their time in the Valley?

[Page 324] A More Reasonable Estimate of Time Spent in the Valley

Jeffrey Chadwick, a noted archeologist, estimates that they sojourned in the Valley of Lemuel for just “four months.” 100 Kent Brown agrees but then widens the estimate: ”There are fewer problems if we assume that the family spent no more than a few months at the first camp, perhaps up to a year. All of the activities rehearsed by Nephi … could have taken place within a few months. … To this point, it appears to me that the family remained at the first camp for only a few months, a year at most.” 101

On the other hand, even if they didn’t grow their own crops in the Valley of Lemuel, it is still clear that a lot happened there. There were two trips back to Jerusalem: first, to obtain the Brass Plates (reasonably, two months); and second, to recruit Ishmael’s family to join the group (another two months). Plus, at least five weddings took place there (16:7). In addition, the entire Brass Plates were closely read and studied, and profound revelations received. “And all these things did my father see, and hear, and speak, as he dwelt in a tent, in the valley of Lemuel, and also a great many more things, which cannot be written upon these plates” (1 Nephi 9:1). Clearly, they were in the Valley of Lemuel for some time — just not multiple years, as would be required to support the traditional reading.

Given all of the events that took place in the Valley of Lemuel, Chadwick’s “four months” seems insufficient and Aston’s speculation of multiple years seems unsupported by the text. Brown’s other extreme is one full year. I would tend to strike a compromise of eight months but, in the interest of being as accommodating to the traditional estimate of 1 Nephi 17:4–5 as possible, let’s accept the high estimate of one year .

Travel to the Oasis of Shazer

After leaving the Valley of Lemuel, they “traveled for the space of four days … and we did pitch our tents again; and we did call the name of the place Shazer” (1 Nephi 16:13). Notice that Nephi’s takes the time and attention to specifically comment that, upon arrival, “we did pitch our tents” (v. 13). That strongly suggests that the setting up of the many tents was a significant and noteworthy activity. Nephi takes the trouble to specifically point out “they pitched their tents” at their arrival at the Camp of the Broken Bow (v. 17), at their arrival at Nahom (v. 33), and at their arrival in Bountiful (1 Nephi 17:6). It is clearly significant, and [Page 325] it tells us that setting up the tents was not something that happened on a nightly basis along the way.

He also reports that “we did call the name of the place, Shazer” (v. 13). It is not clear why they named the location, since it would have already had a name. This may indicate that they hadn’t yet encountered the residents of the area and learned the name. Alternatively, they may have unofficially given the oasis a new name just for themselves. Nibley comments that “Lehi … is following a good old Oriental custom” of naming any water one finds. 102 Several commentators, including Nibley, have suggested that Lehi named the site because of an association between that word and the concept of trees. 103 There may have been an unusual number of trees in that oasis or perhaps the Lehites hadn’t seen that many trees for some time. In any case, Shazer is believed to have been the 15-mile-long oasis along the Wadi Agharr. This was also known by the name of Wadi esh Sharma, because it was just east of the town of Sharma. 104 Perhaps the locals called the oasis by one of those names. Warren Aston, based on fieldwork, calls this oasis “the most plausible location for Shazer by far” 105 and asserts that it “can now be identified with a high degree of certainty.” 106

An Estimate of Time Spent at the Oasis of Shazer

Nephi is careful to note that they “pitched their tents” (v. 13) after arriving in Shazer, indicating that they were going to stay for a while. Even so, the stay does not sound like an extended one. It was certainly not multi-year. The only reason that is given for the stop (other than obviously to have [Page 326] a break near some water and rest for a bit), was to replenish their water and food supply. When traveling in the more fertile areas, they would slay “food by the way, with our bows and our arrows and our stones and our slings” (16:15), likely for the evening meal. At this longer stop by a water supply, the men could take the time to amass a stockpile of meat, presumably so the women could then butcher it into strips to dry as jerky for later travel. Lindsay notes that the Agharr area “is said to be the best hunting in all of Arabia.” 107 Wellington and Potter agree that “the best hunting in the entire area was in the mountains of Agharr.” 108 How could Joseph Smith have known that?

Confirming that they didn’t stay any longer than a few weeks is that very little text is devoted to that rest stop. The entire stay is summarized in just one sentence. That could not have been a multi-year stay or even a season to grow crops. It seems reasonable that Nephi would have mentioned that. In addition, the oasis and its water-rights would have been owned by someone, and the Lehites’ financial resources were undoubtedly limited for extended water access. There was probably not enough for a long-term stay unless there was a compelling reason to stay that long and there is no indication of that in the text. However, wanting to give the traditional reading of 1 Nephi 17:4–5 as much benefit of the doubt as possible and to be on the generous end, let’s allocate one month of hard hunting and hard work for their stay in Shazer.

Travel to the “Camp of the Broken Bow”

The next viable location for a longish stay is where Nephi broke his bow. The location of that next stopping point, which some have called the “Camp of the Broken Bow,” is not definite, but Wellington and Potter point out that “traditional wood that Arabs used to make their bows … grows in a very limited range high in the mountains just west of the trail near the halt of Bishah.” 109 That lies about 830 miles to the south (around 425 miles north of Sana’a).

In describing how long it took to get there, Nephi writes only, “after we had traveled for the space of many days, we did pitch our tents” (1 Nephi 16:17). There is little known about Nephi’s “space of many days” or “space of a time.” His wording is curious, at least to modern readers. I might mention that ancient Hebrew thought is believed by many scholars to [Page 327] have been abstract and metaphorical, while modern thought, based on Greek thinking, tends to be highly detailed and concrete. For example, the “space of a home” might be defined by moderns as the square footage of the building. The ancient Hebrews might define the “space of a home” by the emotions and activities that make a house into a home. For them, a home is family; for us, it may be furniture, wall decorations, or square footage. Similarly, time for most moderns is a series of chronological and dated snapshots. For the Hebrews, time is a rhythm of recurring event patterns. Perhaps that is what Alma meant when he said, “all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men” (Alma 40:8). What may have been of most importance for Nephi in his “space of many days” or the “space of a time” 110 may have been the rhythm of the desert and the rhythm of travel, not the exact number of days in transit.

When the travel was just a few days (three or four), Nephi mentions that specifically (1 Nephi 2:6; 2:13; 18:13, 15). When it was a full year of more, Nephi tells us that, too. However, his “space of many days” or “space of a time” appears to have been a range of months and not an exact number. This perhaps reflects the rhythm of travel rather than the need for accuracy. Fortunately, we can tease out a few hints. Since the distance from Shazer to the Camp of the Broken Bow was approximately 830 miles, the “space of many days” at 13 miles per day meant that they traveled for 60 days or a little over two months . This timeframe is close to the next leg of their journey, from the Camp of the Broken Bow to Nahom. This is discussed further below, but it was 425 miles, which works out to be 33 days, or just over one month . This estimate of a “space of a time” being around two months is further supported by scripture. When king Mosiah sent out a search party to try to find Zeniff, the wording is scripturally defined: they “wandered many days in the wilderness, even 40 days did they wander” (Mosiah 7:4). Here, the meaning of “many days” is given as “40 days” (or almost two months). 111 We encounter this Hebraic wording several times as we continue further [Page 328] into Nephi’s account. Each time, as with this travel time, it appears to be “a couple of months.”

So, the travel time from Shazer (the Wadi Agharr) to the Camp of the Broken Bow would have taken around one month (the space of a time).

An Estimate of Time Spent in the Camp of the Broken Bow

After having traveled for the “space of many days” from Shazer to the Camp of the Broken Bow, Nephi reports that they stayed in the area for “the space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:17). When they finally stopped to set up their large tents, one can almost hear between the lines that it was a grateful time of rest from the misery of travel. Another Arabian traveler, arriving to just such a welcome oasis, described how “palms grow rich and [there are] sudden round hot springs on the slope. The azure water runs in pools in their shade, delicious to bathe in if modesty allowed.” 112 Little wonder that Nephi took the time and space to engrave the tidbits that they were able to finally rest after the fatigue of travel and obtain hot and fresh food. They must have been happy to “pitch our tents for the space of a time” (v. 17).

An estimate of how much time was “the space of a time” must still allow for several events, though none of them could have taken all that long, certainly not multiple years and not the time to grow crops. First, the family had to set up the tents; to rest after being “much fatigued.” Then the sons set off for game, only to have Nephi’s steel bow break and his brothers’ bows lose their springs (vv. 18, 21), “almost certainly” due to a change in humidity. 113 The loss of the bows at precisely the spot where there was bow-making wood 114 is yet another tender mercy that Joseph Smith could not have known about in frontier American in 1820.

In any case, with no food, the families were soon in crisis and predictably began to “murmur exceedingly” (v. 20). Nephi chose to not join in but, rather, immediately began to build a hunting bow, which was another marvel. As mentioned earlier, Hugh Nibley gives it as his opinion that the finding of bow-wood was “something of a miracle.” Then Nibley makes the startling claim that it was “almost as great a feat for Nephi to make a [lethal] bow as it was for him to build a ship.” 115 The replacement bow obviously could not just be a bent branch with a string [Page 329] of animal gut. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it took a long time; Nephi didn’t have a long time. The families were in danger of starving. It took, perhaps, as little as one week to find the right branch, cure the green wood, shape the bow, and make arrows to fit that new hunting bow. 116

During that week, Nephi “did speak much unto my brethren” (v. 22), and by the time he was ready to hunt, “they had humbled themselves because of my words” (v. 24). This means the repentance process did not take additional time. Lehi, the priesthood authority who had shockingly joined in the murmuring, was sufficiently “chastened because of his murmuring against the Lord” (v. 25) to still be able to receive revelation through the Liahona as to where Nephi should go (v. 30). Again, this didn’t need to take a long time; Jehovah is “quick to hear the cries of his people and to answer their prayers” (Alma 9:26). When Nephi returned with “beasts [plural] which I had slain,” they did further “humble themselves before the Lord, and did give thanks unto him,” probably in the form of another animal sacrifice (1 Nephi 16: 32).

As explained just above, in determining the time spent at the Camp of the Broken Bow, we can look again at the words “the space of a time” (v. 17). If the 830 miles from Shazer to the Camp of the Broken Bow took the “space of many days” (40 to 60 days or around two months), then the “the space of a time” at the Camp of the Broken Bow was likely comparable: a little over two months.

To be fair, when Aston, an expert on the trip through Arabia, speculates to fill in some of the “missing years,” he is valiantly trying to resolve the problem of the traditional view. He writes: “As their time in the wilderness occupied eight years, [which was] a distance usually covered by trade caravans in around a hundred travel days, clearly some extended stops must have been made where crops could be grown.” 117 Therefore, it “seems likely to have been a place where crops could be grown … and it would be some time before crops could be harvested.” 118 Unfortunately, for his speculation to fill the time, growing more crops at the Camp of the Broken Bow (or Shazer, or Nahom, or Bountiful) is nowhere indicated by Nephi. Further, it begs the question of where they acquired seeds to grow crops (since all experts, including Aston, agree that they didn’t use the seeds they were bringing from Jerusalem). [Page 330] Finally, it requires that nothing worthy of adding to the Small Plates happened in an entire growing season, and that seems unlikely. This idea of growing crops at the Camp of the Broken Bow is even less likely than the speculation of growing crops in the Valley of Lemuel. They were at someone else’s oasis, and in Arabia a water oasis would be “owned by tribes who guarded them closely.” 119 The Lehites couldn’t just move in and start growing crops. Further, and as also mentioned earlier, there is nothing in the text to support the conjecture that any seeds were grown in any location other than the “land of Jerusalem.” Plus, there is no hint that the Lehites stayed in the Camp of the Broken Bow anywhere near that long. That conjecture is an understandable attempt to support the traditional reading of 1 Nephi 17:45 but is not supported by the text. I estimate that they were at the Camp of the Broken Bow for, at most, two months.

Travel to the Land of Nahom (NHM)

Following those two months, they did “again take our journey, traveling … for the space of many days ” (1 Nephi 16: 33), or perhaps a couple more months of travel. This seems reasonable based on the distances involved. The distance from the Camp of the Broken Bow to the Nahom area was approximately another 425 miles. That distance was somewhat less than the two-month travel from Shazer to the Camp of the Broken Bow, which was 830 miles. Assuming the same average speed of 13 miles per day, the “space of many days” from the Camp of the Broken Bow to Nahom (425 miles) would be 33 days, or just over one month.

Time Spent in the Land of Nahom

Nephi records that “We did pitch our tents again, that we might tarry for the space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:33). Now, though, there was a new upset. “And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom” (v. 34). This would have thrown the entire camp into turmoil. Ishmael was Lehi’s best friend and possibly a cousin. And it hit everyone hard, especially Ishmael’s daughters, and likely his sons. Grief at his death resulted in the daughters rebelling “against my father, and also against me” (vv. 35–36). Although Nephi gives the reason for the rebellion as grief and mourning, more was going on. For one thing, their grief was exacerbating by the fact that “they have suffered much affliction, hunger, thirst, and fatigue” (v. 35). For another, not only was [Page 331] their father dead, but they knew that “the one thing expressed most clearly by Israelite burial practices is the … desire … [for] burial in one’s native land at least, and if possible, with one’s ancestors. ‘Bury me with my fathers,’ Jacob’s request (Gen 49:29), was the wish of every ancient Israelite.” 120 Ishmael was going to be denied this custom. Even worse, his body was soon to be left behind as the Lehites moved on. Perhaps that explains why the daughters of Ishmael “were desirous to return again to Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 16:36). They may have had the vain hope of somehow getting his body, and likely themselves, back to his ancestral home.

There may have been even more than that going on. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland compares this situation with the sin of Lot’s wife. It was not just that Lot’s wife looked back, but that

in her heart she wanted to go back. … She was already missing what Sodom and Gomorrah had offered her. As Elder Maxwell once said, such people know they should have their primary residence in Zion, but they still hope to keep a summer cottage in Babylon. … We certainly know that Laman and Lemuel were resentful when Lehi and his family were commanded to leave Jerusalem. So it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. 121

It was perhaps that the “looking back longingly” was an understandable part of a grief process that allowed the daughters to avoid the same punishment that was given to Lot’s wife. The consequence was not salt, but lack of food. “We must perish in the wilderness with hunger” (1 Nephi 16:35).

Whether Laman was a part of the daughters’ initial murmuring, or he simply capitalized on it, he was soon on board with them. He had put his hand to the plow; but his own desire to “look back” and return to corrupt Jerusalem marked him as unfit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62). Sadly, some of today’s Church members are also “looking back” and leaving the Church over exaggerated social issues and the misreadings of historical events. Hopefully, like the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:17–19), many [Page 332] will come to realize how much better it really is to be close to the Father and return to the Church. 122

How long the daughters’ resentment festered before it burst out into the open is not clear. What is clear is that Laman took the rebellion a major step forward when he approached Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael and “did … stir up their hearts to anger” (1 Nephi 16:38). He even suggested a horrendous and impulsive idea: “Behold, let us slay our father, and also our brother Nephi” (v. 37). Whether that idea was related to Deuteronomist claims or not, patricide and fratricide were unforgivable, and Laman was on the brink. This time, Lehi and Nephi could not defuse the situation alone; it wasn’t until “the voice of the Lord came and did speak many words unto them” (v. 39) that “they did turn away their anger, and did repent of their sins” (v. 39). We must conclude that their repentance was sincere, since “the Lord did bless us again with food, that we did not perish” (v. 39).

The crisis of food, and its solution, are very important details. The timeframe of the crisis (the “space of a time”) appears to be fairly short, if for no other reason than because it was tied to the lack of food. It could not have taken months of rebellion and months of repentance, or the family would have starved to death. It had to have been an intense and impulsive flare-up that quickly dissipated, probably less than a week. The problem was resolved by the Lord, following the repentance. This not to say that the Lehites didn’t stay in Nahom; we can be sure they did. But the question, again, is how long they were there. In another attempt to explain the missing years of the traditional interpretation, we encounter another speculative theory.

Speculation 3: The Lehites Sold Themselves into Slavery

S. Kent Brown was well aware of the dilemma caused by the traditional reading of 1 Nephi 17:4–5. He notes that “the period [of eight years] is far too long even for a cautious crossing of the Arabian desert.” 123 To reconcile that problem, he proposes

the possibility, even likelihood, that family members had to come under the domination of desert tribesmen either for protection or for food. … Scattered clues hint that family members lived in a dependent or servile relationship to desert [Page 333] peoples. … In sum, it seems reasonable that the years spent by Lehi and his family in crossing the desert were characterized by the not uncommon practice “in times of scarcity” of “the bargaining away of freedom — or part of it — in return for food.” 124

As evidence for this startling suggestion, Brown points to a comment by Alma: “Yea, and he has also brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem; and he has also, by his everlasting power, delivered them out of bondage and captivity, from time to time even down to the present day. … ye also ought to retain in remembrance, as I have done, their captivity” (Alma 36:29).

However, Alma’s comment, made hundreds of years later, may have been a reference to the much later bondage of Limhi’s people and Alma’s people to the Lamanites (Mosiah 27:16; Alma 16:3). It might also be a warning of a recurring pattern (“from time to time even down to the present day” (Alma 36:28) and refer to captivity in spiritual bondage. We must all “retain in remembrance” the danger of being “taken captive by the devil” (Alma 12:11), who “flattereth away … until he grasps them [us] with his awful chains” (2 Nephi 28:22). It is unlikely that Alma is referring here to the Lehites’ time in Nahom, since literal slavery usually meant bondage for a long period of time, if not for a lifetime. Plus, Nephi and later prophets compared the trek through Arabia to the exodus of Moses. If slavery in Nahom, and subsequent deliverance, had occurred, that would seem like low-hanging fruit for such a comparison. If the entire party, including women and children, had been enslaved, why would there be silence from Nephi and only a few “scattered clues” over hundreds of years of prophetic writing? It is telling that Nephi 2 , the son of Helaman, envied the times of Nephi 1 as golden years. He writes: “Oh, that I could have had my days in the days when my father Nephi first came out of the land of Jerusalem. … Yea, if my days could have been in those days, then would my soul have had joy in the righteousness of my brethren. But behold, I am consigned that these are my days” (Helaman 7:7–9).

A second evidence that Brown offers concerns the word sojourn, used in 1 Nephi 17:3. Brown writes, “In the Bible, the term to sojourn regularly refers to servile relationships.” 125 However, the verb to sojourn (לָגוּר, lagur ; Strong’s H1481) actually means “to abide, dwell in, dwell with, remain, [Page 334] inhabit, be a stranger” and “to turn aside from the road (for a lodging or any other purpose).” 126 The Lehites were “sojourners” at all their stops, including in Bountiful. According to Loren Spendlove, lagur “is rarely associated with any type of forced servitude.” 127 In fact, the Hebrew Bible explicitly excludes the idea of servitude for sojourners. 128 The Torah instead mandates hospitality to sojourning strangers (for example, Exodus 22:21, 23:9, Leviticus 19:33, Deuteronomy 10:19). Besides, selling oneself into slavery is not a brief process, as Brown acknowledges: “In the worst of cases, one becomes the slave or property of another so that one’s freedom has to be wrested by purchase or by escape.” 129 If either slavery or deliverance were the case, how is it possible that Nephi missed this golden opportunity to emphasize the testimony- building deliverance by the power of the Lord? Yet there is not a word about it.

Another problem regards the seeds and the camels. If the Lehites had been taken into bondage, why would those who seized them not also seize their property? Their abundant grain and their camels would be valuable property, right there for the taking, an obvious extension of capturing people. Yet, Nephi’s account in 1 Nephi 18:6 explicitly states that they still had their heavy tents, and “ all our loading and our seeds” when they boarded the ship for the New World. This is confirmed in the promised land when they “did pitch our tents” and “did put all our seeds into the earth” (1 Nephi 18:23). Why did their purported captors fail to seize their valuable property? Further, Nephi is clear that the problem of starvation was resolved by the Lord, not by them. The solution was repentance, not slavery (1 Nephi 16:39). Chadwick writes, “Rather than bondage, the bitterness and suffering that caused Lehi so much sorrow seem in every case directly attributable to the wicked and violent actions of his older sons Laman and Lemuel.” 130

Even putting aside speculation 3, we are not finished with attempts to fill in the missing years. Warren Aston again raises the possibility that the Lehites took the time to grow and harvest food in Nahom: “Nephi’s account … suggests that Lehi’s group intended remaining in [Page 335] this region long enough to grow and harvest crops.” 131 There is no textual support for that conjecture. I am sympathetic with the need to account for the missing years required by the traditional reading, but this last speculation seems unlikely. For one thing, where did they get the seeds to plant crops at every major stopping point? They certainly didn’t use the sacred seeds that were intended for the New World. They would rather starve than use those seeds, as Aston points out: “It is a testament to the faith of Lehi and Sariah that the seeds they were carrying were not used to alleviate their needs.” 132

A More Likely Estimate of Time in Nahom

Still, several events occurred in Nahom, and we must consider them. Nephi writes that they were there for the “space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:33), which seems more than a few weeks. The events had to have taken up to a month or two, but no more. I have earlier demonstrated by logic, by scripture, and by mileage calculation that the “space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:33) was only a few months. If they had remained in Nahom for six, seven or eight years, Nephi would have told us that. He didn’t. Nephi writes nothing to support the idea that the space of a time was several years. What the text says is that there was a rebellion, and they subsequently suffered loss of food. They did not solve this problem by themselves through slavery or by growing crops; the Lord solved it after their repentance (v. 39). In fact, in the very next verse , immediately following their repentance, Nephi announces that “we did again take our journey in the wilderness” (1 Nephi 17:1). Where do years of servitude or years of growing crops fit into that scenario?

Let’s put aside the demands to fill in missing time that are created by the traditional reading of “eight years in the wilderness” and rely only on logic and the text. The “space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:33) again suggests several months and, indeed, the events in Nahom sound as if they would have taken that much time. There was the death and burial of Ishmael, the need to replenish provisions for the final leg of the trip, the festering of the rebellion against Lehi and Nephi, an acute flare-up, including the threat of murder, and what must have been speedy repentance that resulted in the restoring of food. Several months sounds accurate; several years does not. We can generously allow two and a half months for their “space of a time” in Nahom.

[Page 336] Travel to the Entrance to Bountiful (Wadi Sayq)

The final leg of the journey was unquestionably the most difficult and brutal. Nephi makes that point crystal clear. Another traveler in Arabia in 1876 also describes the cruelty of an Arabian desert crossing:

The summer’s night at end, the sun stands up as a crown of hostile flames. … The desert day dawns not little by little, but it is noontide in an hour. The sun, entering as a tyrant upon the waste landscape, darts upon us a torment of fiery beams, not to be remitted till the far-off evening. … Grave is that giddy heat upon the crown of the head … in the glassiness of this sun-stricken nature: the hot sand-blink is in the eyes. 133

This horrendous part of the trek extended approximately 700 more miserable miles from Nahom past Ma’rib, which is widely accepted as the ancient home of the Queen of Sheba. 134 Their Liahona-inspired path miraculously skirted the deadliest section of the dreaded Empty Quarter to the north and the Ramlat Saba’tayn desert to the south. This perfect direction, which threads a needle, again shows evidence of divine guidance via the Liahona. In Jeff Lindsay’s, words, “Incredibly, following Nephi’s directions … this path will allow you to have a shot at survival.” 135 If they traveled at the “usual” speed of 13 miles per day, that would mean 54 days — or more likely 54 nights. In other words, it may have taken just under two months to travel from Nahom to the entrance to Bountiful.

Total Time for the Entire Journey (Jerusalem to Bountiful)

With the estimates given above, it is now possible to calculate the total time of the entire journey to the entrance to Bountiful without the constraints of the traditional interpretation. Table 2 reviews what has been discussed to this point, while balancing realistic estimates and still being as generous as possible.

[Page 337] Table 2. Major Activities/Journeys — Jerusalem to Bountiful.

The grand total of the entire journey, from Jerusalem to the entrance to Bountiful, would appear to be two years, not eight years, and that is being quite generous in estimating the time spent at the four stops.

But there is more. In the traditional reading, there has been no clearly marked ending for the group to remain in Bountiful itself. With the alternate reading of Nephi’s wilderness , including Bountiful, an ending time becomes apparent. It is now plausible that they spent eight years total in the Arabian Peninsula, meaning that they must have been in Bountiful for six years. This is consistent with Jeffrey R. Chadwick’s suggestion: “I strongly suspect that as much as six of the eight years in the wilderness was actually time spent at Bountiful.” 136

What is not clear is how much of those six years was spent actually building the ship, compared to other activities that most people fail to take into account. They did not enter the oasis lagoon and immediately begin building a ship. Clearly, it must have taken time for Nephi, having no tools initially and no shipbuilding experience, to even prepare to build a large and seaworthy ocean-going ship. All scholars estimate that the ship-building project would have taken multiple years — but how many of the six years? The full six years could not have been spent just assembling the ship. That would ignore significant preparatory and logistical activities. What else did they do in Bountiful? I am unaware of any other scholar’s attempt to account for all their activities, other than the building of the ship. There are other support activities to consider when accounting for their six years in Bountiful.

[Page 338] An Estimate of Timing and Activities in Bountiful

The building of the ship was the crown jewel of the time in Bountiful. With the aid of reluctant assistants and the Lord’s help “from time to time” (1 Nephi 18:1), Nephi was able to construct a large and seaworthy vessel. This ship was capable of transporting a large group of people and a huge cargo across some 16,000 miles of ocean. There are many competing ideas of what this ship may have been like. Aston suggests that it could even have been an elaborate raft but adds, “I actually favor a mortise and tenon timber ship.” 137 Potter opposes the idea of a raft 138 and speculates that Nephi could have “learned how” to construct such a ship by observing, and roughly copying, vessels being constructed in Khor Rori. He suggests that “Nephi needed access to the best shipwrights of his day” 139 and that Khor Rori was the one location “where Nephi could learn how to construct … his ship … from master shipwrights.” 140 He suggests that the final product, “with the exception of an added deck, was rather conventional for the period.” 141

Others focus on 1 Nephi 18:2, where Nephi specifically tells us that “I, Nephi, did not work the timbers after the manner which was learned by men … [but] did build it after the manner which the Lord had shown unto me” (1 Nephi 18:2). They read that the “workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine” (v. 4) and imagine a ship that was not at all conventional. McConkie and Millet, for example, movingly write, “The sweat and tears shed in the building of the ship were a sacrament, for the building of the ship was a form of worship and an act of faith.” 142 Newell Wright shares his opinion that “the ship becomes a symbol of Christ: ‘And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying: Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters.’ Christ equated the ship with himself.” 143 One sure thing seems to be that this vessel could not have been thrown together in haste. It was a unique and miraculous vessel. Nephi humbly but clearly states that “after I had finished the ship, according to the word of the [Page 339] Lord, my brethren beheld that it was good” — so much so that it caused Laman and Lemuel to “humble themselves again before the Lord” (18:4). What a reversal, because Laman and Lemuel were the “brethren” who, at the beginning, began to “Murmur against me, saying: Our brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship; yea, and he also thinketh that he can cross these great waters. And thus my brethren … did not believe that I could build a ship; neither would they believe that I was instructed of the Lord” (1 Nephi 17:17–18).

To build a vessel like that would have required a significant amount of time — but how much time? The length of time the Lehites spent in Bountiful is not mentioned by Nephi, not even in an account that is otherwise rich with details. However, it would be a gross error to assume that the total time in Bountiful was taken up by just the building (i.e., assembling) of the vessel, no matter how impressive that was. Other significant events and a great deal of preparation are not usually considered. The preparation work included miraculous accomplishments that, without the help of the Lord, would have been impossible. Those other major accomplishments should not be glossed over. For Laman, Lemuel, the sons of Ishmael, and presumably some of the wives, these events constituted stumbling blocks; for Lehi, Sariah, Nephi, Sam, and presumably others of the wives, they were opportunities to trust and lean on the Lord.

Setting up Camp and Securing the Labor of Laman and Lemuel

Let’s consider what might have gone into Nephi’s incredible accomplishments in the preparation period for the assembling (the actual building) of the vessel. The ship project was not started immediately; that is clear. The voice of the Lord did not come to Nephi for “the space of many days” (1 Nephi 17:7). That timeframe, as discussed earlier, would seem to mean that it was several months before he received the news that he was to build a ship. The Lehites were not idle during those several months.

First, they had to set up their tents again, most likely on the western bluff or plateau, to avoid any risk of monsoon flash floods or taking up valley space needed for the massive project to come. They likely also had to arrange one or more of the natural caves and hollows at the cliff edges for long-term kitchens, lumber storage/drying areas, and for additional sleeping areas, thus saving at least some of the tent fabrics (modified, of course) to later use as sails for the ship. That all took time.

[Page 340] Second, they had to “stock the cupboards.” They needed to hunt immediately to build up a store of meat as well as fish from the edge of the Indian Ocean. Bountiful fruit and honey gathered naturally around the lagoon were well and good, but the human body also requires protein to supplement that diet. Aston points out that “the plentiful sea life all along the coast likely holds the key to understanding how Lehi’s group with its limited manpower could derive enough protein from their environment. … Fish not proscribed by Mosaic Law likely formed a large part of the Lehites’ diet once they lived at Bountiful.” 144 So they needed to hunt for kosher game. Aston tells us definitively that there was bountiful wildlife in Bountiful (discussed below), and one can easily imagine that they had a celebration banquet and offered thanks sacrifices not long after their arrival. How delicious that fresh meat would have been to them! They also continued to make jerky, for Nephi tells us that they had a store of “meat from the wilderness” to take “down into the ship” at their departure (1 Nephi 18:6). The fruit was easy enough to gather, and some of the honeycombs were available in the same trees, though to preserve such stores required a learning curve. Brent Heaton describes how honey could be taken from the trees without being stung, but that was a technique that had to be learned. Other honeycombs were hanging from the cliff walls. 145 They would have either had to climb up 146 or rappel down from the cliff tops, 147 and that would have taken time to learn how to do.

Third, they most likely would have constructed, at a minimum, a stone altar or worship area, just as they had built an altar upon first arriving in the Valley of Lemuel (1 Nephi 2:7). There is credible speculation that they may have constructed a “worship sanctuary” in the same dimensions and with the same features as Solomon’s temple [Page 341] in Jerusalem. 148 This would be consistent with the Nephites building a temple “after the manner of the temple of Solomon,” in the New World (2 Nephi 5:16). Warren Aston and his son Chad discovered stone ruins that could have been “some kind of ceremonial place.” 149 However, Aston has suggested caution regarding dating stone remains. 150 Certainly, though, Lehi and Nephi would have constructed some kind of worship area or at least a relatively permanent stone altar. That would also have taken time.

Fourth, other basic needs would have had to be arranged. Those included at least health and illness needs, sanitation needs, and repairing, or likely replacing, clothing. The only animals large enough for leather garments were either camel hides or the hides of the Arabian leopards and the wolves that occasionally hunted in the lagoon. 151 Such animals would have yielded hides, but those hides had to be cleaned and processed. That would have represented another learning curve that took time. The children’s spiritual education also had to be arranged.

Time to do such things is rarely considered but could have been considerable. We do not know exactly how much time such activities would have taken. Some items would have been ongoing, but others were immediate needs. All the record says is that “after I, Nephi, had been in the land of Bountiful for the space of many days , the voice of the Lord came unto me, saying: Arise, and get thee into the mountain” (1 Nephi 17:7). The question of what “the space of many days” means was addressed earlier in the paper. If the “space of many days” suggests approximately two months, this preparatory work prior to Nephi’s receiving the new theophany would have taken somewhere around two months .

At Nephi’s theophany, the Lord provided the stunning news that Nephi was to build a seaworthy vessel that would be able to carry provisions for a large group of adults and children, 152 plus the new tools, [Page 342] the large amount of varying seeds, and enough remaining large travel tents to “pitch our tents … [in the] Promised Land” (1 Nephi 18:23). Keep in mind that this vessel was to be handmade, using homemade tools to fell and mill what would have to have been a very large number of trees. Little wonder that his brothers murmured, “Our brother is a fool” (1 Nephi 17:17) and “did not believe that I could build a ship; neither would they believe that I was instructed of the Lord” (v. 18).

Their skepticism prompted another long admonition by Nephi which compared their situation to that of the children of Israel under Moses. The comparison implied that Nephi was a Moses figure, which could not have gone down well with Laman and Lemuel. Nephi then punctuated the sermon by saying that Laman and Lemuel were “murderers in your hearts” (1 Nephi 17:44) and that he feared “lest ye shall be cast off forever” (v. 47). Laman and Lemuel flew into an instant and murderous rage, which was stopped by the dramatic threat that, if they touched him, they would “wither even as a dried reed” (v. 48).

Although Laman and Lemuel doubted that their younger brother could build a ship, they clearly did not doubt his warning and backed off significantly. It is important to notice that there was a long “cooling off” period for Laman and Lemuel, and presumably the sons of Ishmael as well. We don’t know what was going on during that period of time. We are told in verse 16 that Nephi was already making the tools for building the ship, the activity that had drawn Laman and Lemuel’s mockery. Laman and his followers would have had much to think about as these activities were going on, but what they were doing, we do not know. Nephi does tell us that during this time, they “were confounded and could not contend against me; neither durst they lay their hands upon me nor touch me with their fingers, even for the space of many days ” (v. 52). We’ve already seen that when Nephi writes that something took the “space of many days” (v. 52), that appears to mean another two months or so. After these apparently two months, the Lord instructed Nephi to “shock” his brothers, and “the Lord did shake them” (v. 54) into compliance, and Nephi secured their willingness to provide labor, apparently for several years (1 Nephi 18:1).

Those two sets of activities occurred back-to-back. The first time period comprised the time to set up their tents, recuperate, hunt, and settle in before receiving the Lord’s directive to build the ship. The second time period was the calming down of Laman and Lemuel, and the time when they could not touch him.

[Page 343] The “Bountiful Blacksmith Shop”

When the Lord first commanded the construction of the ship (1 Nephi 17:8), a stunned Nephi could only ask the Lord: “Wither shall I go that I may find ore to molten, that I may make tools to construct the ship?” (v. 9). Having received the answer to that question, he then had to gather, or mine, the ore. A casual reading of the text estimates that as a few-days job and trivial detail. Not so. The gathering or mining of the ore and the flint to make fire every day, the hand-construction of a working and reliable bellows made out of animal hides, and the subsequent smelting of the ore (v. 11) meant, in effect, creating a serious, working “blacksmith shop” right there in the inlet. Then Nephi had to hand-forge metal tools. Significantly, his first question was not, “Where can I find tools ?” but “Whither shall I go that I may find ore to molten, that I may make tools” (v. 9). He apparently already knew how to make tools that were capable of standing up to constant use in heavy construction over several years. Nephi had confidence that, given the right raw materials, he would be able to do so. Tvedtnes makes the point that “when the Lord told Nephi … to build a ship, he had to give detailed instructions on how to do it. … but there is no record that Nephi had to ask how to prepare the metal tools.” This further supports the idea that Nephi had been trained as a metalworker. 153 This initial accomplishment should not be glossed over, although it usually is.

Consider, also, that making just one set of tools would have been woefully inadequate. There had to be enough tools for Nephi’s entire labor force. Though that was small, it still included seven healthy young men: Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Zoram, and the two sons of Ishmael. Jacob was too young to be much more than possibly a messenger-boy. If Joseph had been born in the trek from Nahom, he would still be just a toddler. If he had been born in Bountiful, as Chadwick believes, he would have still been a baby. Chadwick supplies evidence for his supposition. 154 The [Page 344] young wives and Lehi’s wife, Sariah, would likely have helped out in any way that they could. However, they may have been fully occupied with childcare, cooking, and taking care of clothing. Near the latter part of the group’s stay in Bountiful, the women would have had to modify some of the tent fabrics for use as sails, since the account is clear that the ship moved by wind power, not just by ocean currents (18:8).

There is no mention of Ishmael’s wife. Somewhat surprisingly, she was not mentioned as mourning Ishmael’s death, so she, like Ishmael, may have died during the trek. As for Lehi, the text does not record his functioning in the role of family patriarch during these years, although he did receive the revelation of when to go down into the ship to depart (1 Nephi 18:5). He would later give final patriarchal blessings on arrival in the New World. There are various reasons for his inactivity, but one possibility is that he may have been severely ill and therefore unavailable. Circumstantial evidence for this speculation is his absence in what most scholars call “Nephi’s Bountiful” not “Lehi’s Bountiful,” his life- threatening illness during the sea voyage (vv. 17–18), Nephi’s report that he was “stricken in years” (18:17), and the immediacy of his death in the New Word. He appears to have given the blessings soon after arriving, prior to which he stated, “a few more days and I go the way of all the earth” (2 Nephi 4:12). Then again, he may have been managing the day-to-day affairs of the camp in the background. In any case, he does not appear to have been available for hard labor.

Nephi, then, had at least six strong and healthy fellow laborers, 155 and undoubtedly some additional help from the women. Even so, Nephi quite appropriately refers to the building of the ship as his achievement. At the completion of that monumental task, he says, “after I [not “we” [Page 345] but “I”] had finished the ship, according to the word of the Lord, my brethren beheld that it was good” (1 Nephi 18:4). That identification is an accurate description, for he was surely the planner, foreman, manager, and supervisor for the blacksmith projects (as well as the ship project discussed below). The others were simply helpers and laborers.

Still, they all needed tools. Although there could have been a limited amount of sharing among the workers, one set of tools wouldn’t have “cut it.” The production of all of the sets of tools appears to have been the work of Nephi alone, because only he had metalworking skills. Several scholars have speculated that Nephi was trained as a fine whitesmith (or goldsmith). 156 It comes as somewhat of a surprise that he could also function as a blacksmith. The difference is that whitesmiths manipulate lighter metals, adding finishing touches through filing, carving, and polishing, while blacksmiths use raw iron to make large and sometimes crude products. 157 Nephi apparently could do both, since he was also able to forge scrapers for hides, wood planes, heavy hammers, mauls, axes, and saws.

Nor was this a one-and-done activity. Even if they had used power tools, which they obviously did not have, the vessel may have taken over a year to build. It would at least triple the time to accomplish the same thing using only their homemade hand tools. And making the tools was not the only function of the “Bountiful Blacksmith Shop.” 158 Wellington and Potter argue that “Nephi needed hardwood to build a ship strong enough to survive an ocean crossing.” As any woodworker knows, there is a major difference between hand-working softwoods and hand- working hardwoods; it is an entirely different proposition. Not only are hardwoods hard — making them difficult to cut, shape, and [Page 346] smooth — they also dull the tool-cutting blades very quickly. Therefore, sharpening and even replacing broken tools was an on-going need.

We don’t know, of course, how fast Nephi could have set up his “blacksmith shop,” mined the ore, built the bellows, smelted the iron, carved and attached the wooden handles for multiple sets of tools. However, it sounds as if it would have taken considerable time. These significant accomplishments and the timing of them should not be glossed over, although readers don’t usually consider any of this. It seems as if the time for the blacksmith-related activities had to have been in the order of six months or so.

The “Bountiful Sawmill and Lumber Yard”

After that came the lumber problem. Here, the other workers could help Nephi, at least to some degree. The question of timber and the resulting lumber has been, and continues to be, a sticking point among the various scholars. They are conflicted as to whether there were appropriate trees in sufficient quantities in either Khor Kharfot or Khor Rori to build a ship. Potter makes a startling claim: “If good shipbuilding timber never grew in Oman, then Nephi must have used, like the Arab shipwrights, imported materials from India and the islands thereabout.” 159 Wellington and Potter quote an Omani expert to say that “most, if not all, planking timber had to be imported.” 160

Warren Aston strongly disagrees with Potter’s theory of Nephi importing already milled lumber from India; and indeed, the finances and logistics of that seem overwhelming. Aston believes that sufficient timber grew in Khor Kharfot to build a ship, using just existing trees. Judith Grimes, a botanist who visited the inlet with Aston, notes on Aston’s video “Lehi in Arabia” that “most of the trees here are from 1.5 to 3 meters [5 to 10 feet] in girth and have 2 to 4 meters [6.5 to 13 feet] of solid trunk, which means there’s quite a bit of harvestable wood if it was ever required for building.” Then, showing the viewers one very large tree, she added, “This Tamarind tree is the largest tree in this wadi that we have found so far. It has a girth of 7 meters [23 feet].” 161

Felling many dozens of such trees using homemade axes and primitive saws would already have been a major undertaking. But they also had to limb the branches off, which was another significant amount of work. Once stripped, the trunks and larger branches had to be [Page 347] dragged back to the building location, possibly with the help of camels. That still would be a time-consuming activity. Then imagine scraping off the bark, splitting the length of the trunk multiple times to create planks and beams, and then milling the “timber” into “lumber” to yield beams or rough boards, all of which would be needed in abundance for a more traditional ship, but also in smaller quantities even for a sophisticated raft.

It seems clear that, in addition to creating a serious, working “blacksmith shop” in the inlet, Nephi also had to create a serious, working “sawmill and lumber yard” in order to harvest and process lumber out of native trees. Plus, the men could not have even started the assembly and joining of the planking until they had an impressive supply of lumber already collected and right there on hand, ready to use. The building of the ship, once underway, could not have been stopped if one type of lumber ran out and the men had to go and chop down and process another tree. What might have been the time required for the logging and milling? Even at full speed and with enthusiastic workers, that had to have taken a minimum of another six months .

The Curing of the Green Wood

But that’s not the end of the story. It is not as simple as merely cutting down the trees and splitting the trunks to create usable lumber. As one website explains:

When a tree is first cut down and the logs are sectioned into lumber, the resulting wood is considered “green” because it still has a considerable moisture content. … Green lumber can contain upwards of 130 percent [of the moisture expected for that kind of wood]; cured lumber can have between 7 and 20 percent moisture. … It’s important to realize that curing green lumber can take years if the curing practice isn’t expedited using a [very large] wood-kiln or an alternative method of drying. Air-drying lumber typically takes one year per inch of wood thickness. The first step in curing green lumber… is identifying an appropriate location for the process. … Otherwise it may reabsorb the moisture it is trying to release. Aside from being dry, the area should also have circulating air to help the drying process along. To avoid distortion, a few pieces of dunnage or stickers (small pieces of wood) can [Page 348] be placed between layers of lumber. … Let the wood sit for as many years as its thickness indicates. 162

Given tenuous family relationships and the ever-aging of the seeds, this would be a particularly serious problem — especially if one interprets Nephi’s comment in 1 Nephi 17:4–5 in the traditional fashion. Eight years would already have been used up just getting to Bountiful. In addition to settling in, making metal tools, cutting down many dozen trees, all of which would have taken considerable time, we now must add another one to two years to properly stack the timbers for drying, probably into the indentations in the cliffs to protect from the rain and fog, and then curing the green timber. And that cannot be rushed. Unless timber is cured correctly, the wood will shrink, twist, or even worse, split. One cannot build a water-tight ship with wood that contains warps and splits. Perhaps they sped up the curing of the green wood using bonfires and laboriously hand-fanned the heat into the woodpile. But … caution! The website continues: “Care must be taken not to heat the lumber too quickly, as this can cause uneven curing or create potential flaws, such as splitting.” 163

Of course, some of the boards (for example, those used for the housing areas, railings, masts, or the storage bins) didn’t require fully cured timber, because they wouldn’t be in contact with the ocean water, and a twist or split wouldn’t be as serious. The many planks that made up the hull are a different story. The wood had to be planed with a homemade wood plane, not only to make them smooth, but also thin enough to facilitate the drying process. If the Lehites used mortise and tenon joints, as in the Church’s Book of Mormon Videos , they would have had to be chiseled with great accuracy. In that same Church video, the boards of the ship appear to be 8- to 10-inch-thick beams. There might have been some beams, but the hull planks would have had to be much thinner than that to have them air dry as quickly as possible, given no kiln. It’s hard to imagine the planks averaging as thin as an inch and a half in thickness. If the rule-of-thumb given above is correct and it takes one year per inch of wood thickness, at 1½ inches thick, it would require at least 18 months .

[Page 349] The Time Required to Assemble the Ship

Table 2 reviewed the time estimates for the trek through the arid areas of Western Arabia. Table 3 reviews the estimates for the time spent in activities in Bountiful. The earlier calculated estimate for the total trek through Western Arabia, all the way from Jerusalem to Bountiful, was approximately two years, not eight years. That left roughly six years for the time in Bountiful. Of those six years in Bountiful, I have allowed a reasonable year and a half for settling in, hunting, building an altar, constructing tools, preparing a first stockpile of milled lumber, and then another 18 months for the green lumber to fire cure. That equals 34 months or just short of three years — and that is before even beginning the actual assembly of the ship. Two years getting to Bountiful and almost three years in the preparation of the materials would make almost five full years from leaving Jerusalem before the assembly of the ship could even begin. Logically, though, this still needs to be modified. Some of those activities would have overlapped. For example, Nephi could have been forging additional tools while Ishmael’s sons were felling trees, or Laman and Zoram could have been splitting trunks while Sam and Lemuel milled and stacked the timber and stoked and fanned the fires to cure the green wood. That kind of overlapping would cut the time taken up in preparation for the building by, say, ten months, making two years of preparation for the assembly of the ship.

Adding those two more years to the two years for the trek to Bountiful would make four years before assembling the ship. Those four years would then be subtracted from Nephi’s total of eight years in Arabia . The result is four years for an estimate of the time it would have taken to assemble the vessel.

Table 3. Preparation and Assembly of the Ship.

[Page 350] It is interesting to compare my figure of four years for the building (assembly) of the ship with estimates that other commentators have advanced. The lowest estimate comes from Matthew Bowen, who notes that “the Vikings, for example, could build their ships in a mere matter of months. The fact that Nephi had to press his brothers into service suggests that building the ship was a matter of urgency. They did not linger in Bountiful any longer than it took to build the ship — a process that probably would have taken a year or less .” 164 To arrive at that low estimate, Bowen must be overlooking the other preparatory activities that had to take place in Bountiful, and that the ship had to be much larger and much more sophisticated than a Viking boat. A slightly higher estimate comes from Warren Aston, who asserts, “With the limited manpower available to Lehi’s group and the need to also attend to domestic concerns at Bountiful, a likely minimum period required for constructing the ship is two years. It may well have taken longer.” 165 David Lefevre talks about “the two or more years it took to build the ship.” 166 George Potter’s estimate is higher; he asserts that “the building of the ship was an enormous undertaking that spanned many years.” 167 The highest, though, is that of Jeffrey Chadwick, who opines, “I strongly suspect that as much as six of the eight years in the wilderness was actually time spent at Bountiful building Nephi’s ship.” 168 Note, though, that Chadwick may be including the preparatory activities in Bountiful in addition to the assembly of the vessel; it logically could not have been all six of the years. In fact, I am not aware of any of the ancillary preparations being seriously considered in the extant literature, but they seem obvious enough when pointed out. The scholarly range, then, is one to six years. To that, I offer my own compromise figure of four years .

Conclusions — Does it Matter?

A fair question to ask of this or any article looking into scripture is whether the commentary makes any difference. I think it does. More specifically, the possible alternative interpretation of Nephi’s “eight years in the wilderness” provides bookends that Book of Mormon readers haven’t heretofore had. With the traditional (sequential) reading, there [Page 351] was only a beginning date. There was no ending date for when the Lehites pushed off into the Indian Ocean. If Nephi meant to say that the eight years ended as they entered Bountiful (the traditional reading), that leaves no closing time for Bountiful and no estimate of the time to build the ship. With the alternative reading, there is now a closing bookend: eight total years from Jerusalem to the launch into the Indian Ocean. 169 It seems plausible, and perhaps even likely, that the desert portion and the Bountiful portion, combined, made up the literal “eight years in the wilderness.” With a fixed total of eight years for the entire trip, it now becomes possible to estimate more closely the timing of key events. It allows for the desert crossing to be made in a more credible two years, rather than having to lean on such unlikely speculations as alleged sluggishness, growing crops at every stop, or years spent in bondage to Arabian overlords. And it allows a more solid estimate for the otherwise unspecified ship building period in Bountiful. We can tentatively estimate that it took approximately two years of preparation and four years of assembly to build the ship.

Please don’t misread this article. The take-away is not that my estimate, and that of Jeffrey Chadwick, is correct and that others are wrong and should be dismissed. Previous speculations have been offered in a valiant attempt to make the illogical seem logical. The point is that those speculations may not even have been necessary. Nephi’s statement in 1 Nephi 17:4–5 may have been an appreciative aside or colophon to proclaim his gratitude to the Lord’s granting them “means” such as Bountiful and to amplify his description of the entire trip. It could have been a testimony of awe, an aside that “interrupted” his narrative, similar to many other asides he offers in several other places in First Nephi. If that is correct and that “eight years in the wilderness” includes the undeveloped wilderness of Bountiful, it is no longer necessary to generate speculative apologetic theories to account for the traditional but unlikely reading of those two verses. Eight years of desert travel and the glossing over of details about the ship’s construction is what has been presented in talks, books, scholarly articles, firesides, classes, videos, and casual conversations. With the clearly plausible new reading of the verses, it becomes possible to draw better estimates of the time spent at various locations and the time spent building the ship. Best of all, those conclusions no longer strain credulity.

[Page 352] As stated earlier, well into this project I found that Jeffrey R. Chadwick had come to the same conclusion that I had. He had written, “It seems to me that … the entire trip [to the Bountiful area] … lasted no more than two years. … Nephi’s summary statement about eight years in the wilderness seems to me to include … Bountiful.” 170 I was obviously thrilled to find that conclusion made by such an eminent scholar in the Church. Although I obviously agreed with and accepted Chadwick’s opinion, it was unfortunate that he provided no justification for re-interpreting or glossing over Nephi’s specific declaration in 1 Nephi 17:4–5. I hope I have filled that gap based on logic and reasoning. I readily admit the possibility that my estimates of the specific timing of the various parts of the trip and the construction of the ship may be incorrect and may be refined by experts in the various fields. However, that is not the point. The point is that we can now come closer to an understanding of the actual trek and its message of emerging from corruption and chaos, traveling through a period of trial and testing, to eventually arrive in our promised land, than has been offered to date. I hope that this article will initiate and encourage new commentary and further discussion regarding Lehi’s and Nephi’s s trip through Arabia.

Appendix A: The Viability and Lifetime of Seeds

There can be some debate about the shelf-life of seeds. Some may conclude, as I have, that it would have made a difference for Nephi and his people whether the seeds were 13 to 14 years old (traditional reading) or 8 to 9 years old (alternative reading). Others contend that even old seeds can retain at least a degree of viability over long periods of time. Everyone can agree, however, that all seeds, like any living entity, increasingly lose their viability over time and eventually die. The deciding factor is how quickly that process happens. 171

Those who believe that 13 or 14 years would not have been a problem often point to anecdotal accounts of seeds germinating after hundreds, even thousands of years. Date palm seeds were found, they point out, in Herod the Great’s summer palace at Masada. In fact, several of those seeds were successfully sprouted. One, and only one, grew into an 11-foot [Page 353] palm tree that was nicknamed “Methuselah.” 172 Others believe that 13 or 14 years could have been a serious problem and that anecdotal accounts of ancient seeds sprouting represent a rare exception. “Methuselah” was an anomaly. Generally, old seeds do not germinate. As the USDA asserts,

There was no authenticated evidence that wheat taken from undisturbed Egyptian tombs will germinate. … [Even] the printed word does not seem to dispel the story of life in mummy seeds as such stories appear in the popular press from time to time. … The so-called mummy seeds have retained the shape of barley and wheat, but the structure is similar to that of charcoal. There is no possibility of these structures producing seedlings.” 173

True, Nephi’s account is not talking about ancient, mummified seeds, but only seeds either transported for 13 to 14 years or 8 to 9 years. Still, most scientific studies of seed longevity have found that, under “ambient” or “normal” storage, seeds begin to lose viability within just two years, and the percentage that are viable for germination decreases after that. A recent literature review of multiple studies concluded that “under ambient or more natural soil conditions, viability drops considerably within a few years.” 174 According to the University of Minnesota, the average longevity of most vegetable seeds is approximately 4–5 years. 175

Several factors determine how long seeds can remain viable: temperature, moisture content, and length of storage in darkness. In the literature review above, the seeds had been in dark and cold storage below 18°C (64°F) — some as low as -18°C (-4°F). 176 The USDA asserts, “Unless crop seeds are kept under favorable storage conditions, they lose [Page 354] viability within a few years.” 177 It appears factual that hot and moist seeds die within a few years; cold and dry seeds remain dormant, hence viable, for much longer. Now consider the circumstances of the seeds that were transported in the Lehites’ camel train. As it turns out, the conditions couldn’t have been worse:

• The seeds were not in cool temperatures of 70°F down to 0°F but in the desert heat of Arabia, where “summer heat is intense, reaching temperatures as high as 130°F (55°C) in places.” 178 Winter temperatures are cooler, of course, but still “ranges between 8°C to 20°C [68°F to 46°F] in the interior parts while higher temperatures (19°C – 29°C [66°F – 84°F]) have been recorded in the coastal areas of Red Sea.” 179
• The seeds were probably strapped to the sides of the camels in shape-conforming burlap-like cloth bags. If so, that would have meant that they were separated from the bright Arabian sun only by simple cloth. Of course, the seeds could have been carried in huge clay pots, but this seems unlikely, given the large tents, provisions, and other goods the Lehites were also transporting.
• The seeds may have been dry as they crossed the arid desert, but they were likely moist, even damp, otherwise. In a discussion of climate in Arabia, Britannica reports that coastal regions “are subject to high summer humidity, with dew and fog at night or early morning.” 180 The Dhofar area (both Khor Kharfot and Khor Rori) are known for early morning fog. Aston reports that “from May to September, there is a steady stream of cloud cover and fog that blankets the mountains, and moist air.” 181 Consider, also, that the monsoon season can produce up to six inches of rain at a time. The average annual rainfall “is between 400–600 mm [Page 355] [15–24 inches].” 182 “In the southern coastal range of the Dhofar region, … in summer, the rains are usually light, but they occur almost daily .” 183 So, humidity in Bountiful would have been very high, typical of the tropics and also high while crossing the ocean near the equator where the relatively small ship was close to sea-level. Finally, although the cargo and seeds may have been well protected, one has to wonder how they fared during the multi-day tropical storm described in 1 Nephi 18:13–21.

The traditional reading of 1 Nephi 17:4 (up to 14 years to planting) must be considered in interpreting Nephi’s timeframe for the trek and Nephi’s assertion that the crop “did grow exceedingly; wherefore, we were blessed in abundance” (1 Nephi 18:24). Admittedly, nothing said so far “proves” that the alternative reading is correct, and the traditional reading is wrong. The point is only that the difference between 8–9 years and 13–14 years might have been the difference between an abundant crop and barely enough to feed the people and generate new seeds for the next growing season. It seems obvious that “the older the seed, the less energy it has left in storage.” 184 In sum, the seed question provides support that favors a shorter rather than a longer journey.

Go here to see the 26 thoughts on “ “Nephi’s Eight Years in the “Wilderness”: Reconsidering Definitions and Details” ” or to comment on it.

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Monday, June 19, 2017

• Understanding Lehi’s Desert Trek

5 comments:

Do you happen to know what kinds of animals Nephi would have hunted? Looks to me like no self respecting deer would hang around such a place.

Ira: The animals along the Red Sea are not the same as those in the Sand Desert of the Rub'al Khali (Empty Quarter). Which do you mean?

Just wondering what Nephi would have hunted is all. Big or small game I guess is the question. I read a book about the adventures of Lawence of Arabia. Not a fun place to live and travel. Thanks, Ira

There are probably far more animals than one might think that were available for Nephi and his brothers to kill for food: 1. There were two types of animal life along Nephi’s course. Along the Red Sea where they first traveled, the Oryx (species of antelope), Ibex (species of wild goat), Reem (a large horned animal in ancient Hebrew literature, somewhat like a wild ox [Job 39:9]), as well as a small white deer, pigeon, grouse, partridge, and hare, all of which have been hunted for millennia! No doubt they would have also done some fishing along the Red Sea. 2. In the Rub’al Khali (Empty Quarter) sand desert, there were Arabian Leopards, Desert Hedgehogs, white-tailed Mongoose, Common cat-like Genet, Honey Badger, Sand Gazelle, Arabian Oryx (White Oryx), Sand Cat or Dune Cat, Sand Fox, Cape Hares, Striped Hyenas, Red Foxes, Caracals (wild cat often called a Desert Lynx), two species of gazelle and Arabian wolves all live within the southern Arabian desert.

Thanks Del, good information.

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• Lehi's Journey

Lehi's Journey from Jerusalem to the New World

Archaeological Evidence for 7 Locations on Lehi’s Journey to the Promised Land

To view this article on Book of Mormon Central,  CLICK HERE .

When Lehi embarked on his journey around 600 B.C., little did he know that millions of people would read and wonder about his story thousands of years later. While there is still much to learn about the people and stories in the Book of Mormon, some of the best archaeological evidence to support the Book of Mormon comes from Lehi’s journey to the promised land.

Seven notable locations are specifically mentioned in 1 Nephi as points along Lehi’s journey: Jerusalem ( 1 Nephi 1:4 ), the “borders of the Red Sea” ( 1 Nephi 2:6 ), the Valley of Lemuel ( 1 Nephi 2:8 ), Shazer ( 1 Nephi 16:13 ), the camp of the broken bow ( 1 Nephi 16:17–18 ), Nahom ( 1 Nephi 16:34 ), and Bountiful ( 1 Nephi 17:5 ).

Watch: Compelling Book of Mormon Evidence for Lehi’s Journey through Arabia

1. Jerusalem

Lehi’s story begins in Jerusalem, he having dwelt there “all his days” ( 1 Nephi 1:4 ). Jerusalem is perhaps the most archaeologically scrutinized city in the entire world, as it is important to three major world religions and is the epicenter of many events in the Bible.

As such, we have a good amount of archaeological information about how people lived in Jerusalem in 600 B.C. To learn all about what Lehi’s Jerusalem was like, you can read  Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem , available on the Book of Mormon Central Archive.

There are a few things about the way Nephi describes Jerusalem that match well with what we know about the city in 600 B.C. Nephi describes his writing as “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” ( 1 Nephi 1:2 ). Interestingly, archaeologists have  discovered pottery in Israel that contains Egyptian hieratic  in combination with some conventions of the Hebrew language.

When Nephi and his brothers go back and forth to Jerusalem to get the brass plates and the family of Ishmael, they always refer to Jerusalem’s elevation in consistent ways. Whenever they go towards Jerusalem, they “go up,” and whenever they leave Jerusalem into the wilderness, they “go down.”

This is consistent with how  ancient Israelites perceived Jerusalem geographically, and even theologically . Jerusalem was located in the Judean hill country, elevated above the surrounding regions. Because Jerusalem was also the home of Solomon’s temple, journeys toward the city were seen as a heavenly ascent to a sacred place.

While these are only two pieces of evidence, explore the articles and books below to get a sample of all the archaeological evidence for Jerusalem that coincides with how Lehi and Nephi describe their home city.

2. The Borders of the Red Sea

When Lehi and his family travel south, they describe traveling both “by” the borders of the Red Sea, and “in” the borders of the Red Sea ( 1 Nephi 2:5 ). Researchers George Potter and Richard Wellington believe that “borders” may refer to mountains or cliffs adjacent to the Red Sea coast.

The Gaza branch of the Frankincense trail reaches the northern tip of the Red Sea, and then proceeds south along the Red Sea coast, which is flanked in by a formidable mountain range. After reaching the proposed location for the Valley of Lemuel, the Frankincense trail then proceeds inland to join with the main vein of the Frankincense trail as it goes south to Yemen.

As Lehi and family reached the Red Sea coast, they would have well surpassed the 3-day traveling requirement for Israelites to offer their own sacrifices outside the Jerusalem temple, as Lehi demonstrates in 1 Nephi 2:7 .

3. The Location of the Valley of Lemuel

In 1 Nephi 2, Lehi and his family settle their camp in a valley with a river, whose mouth opens into the Red Sea. Lehi “called the name of the river, Laman” ( 1 Nephi 2:8 ) and called the valley after his son Lemuel.

Researchers have remarkably identified a location that matches Lehi’s description of a valley that is “firm and steadfast, and immoveable” ( 1 Nephi 2:10 ), and a river that is “continually running” ( 1 Nephi 2:9 ).

Wadi Tayyib al-Ism is an impressive valley located today in northwest Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea. It is approximately a 3-days journey away from the northern-most tip of the Red Sea ( 1 Nephi 2:6 ), and it has sheer granite walls rising about 2000 ft to form a formidable valley.

Most significantly, Wadi Tayyib al-Ism has a small stream (that during flood seasons and in ages past was much more like a river) of water that flows all year

Our best clues for the location of Shazer come from its name. The etymology of Shazer has had several proposals. Some have proposed it means “to twist, to intertwine,” possibly a reference to the gnarled and twisted acacia trees that may have populated the area.

Hugh Nibley and others have suggested it derives from a common Palestinian place-name “shajer” meaning “trees, forest, woody, wooded.” Matt Bowen has most recently proposed that Shazer may come from a Semitic word meaning “gazelle,” referring to the abundant resources for hunting that Lehi’s family may have encountered.

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Regardless of which etymology you follow, it appears that the name for Shazer is related to fertility for either fauna or flora. Nephi describes that the location is approximately a four-day journey south-southeast from the valley of Lemuel.

As it turns out, Wadi Agharr (also known as Wadi Sharma), located in the northern Hijaz mountains, is a fertile valley with an oasis over fifteen miles long, and is the appropriate distance away from the proposed Valley of Lemuel.

5. The Camp of the Broken Bow

The location of the place where Nephi broke his bow ( 1 Nephi 16:18 ) is known with the least certainty. The best clue we have comes from 1 Nephi 16 where Nephi states that they “did go forth again in the wilderness, following the same direction, keeping in the  most  fertile parts of the wilderness, which were in the borders near the Red Sea” ( 1 Nephi 16:14 , emphasis added). After they hunted for food, they continued their journey southward in “the  more  fertile parts of the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 16:16 , emphasis added).

It appears that as the family traveled southward, the fertility of the land and the family’s opportunities for food grew scarcer. That is indeed what we find along the Frankincense trail, with cultivated land being as far as 50 miles apart from each other in this part of modern-day Arabia.

Interestingly, it is in this region near the halt of Bishah that a particular type of olive tree grows that is suitable for crafting a bow. When Nephi broke his steel bow, he likely would have used the wood from the Attim or wild olive tree to craft his wooden bow ( 1 Nephi 16:23 ).

Unlike all the other places Lehi stopped, it appears he did not give this place a name. Instead, Nahom was likely already given as a name for this location by the residing population ( 1 Nephi 16:34 ). If the place was called Nahom back in Lehi’s time, you might expect to be able to find it in the archaeological record, and that’s exactly what we  find in southern Arabia , along Lehi’s trail.

Researchers found the name “Nehem” on a 1763 map of Arabia, and then in 1997, German archaeologists  discovered an altar that dated back to Lehi’s time , with an inscription containing the name “NHM.”

The location of the Nehem tribal area in southwestern Arabia also corresponds well with Lehi’s position along his journey. Nephi recounts that after leaving Nahom they “did travel nearly eastward from that time forth” ( 1 Nephi 17:1 ) until they reached Bountiful, which is likely located along the coast of Oman.

7. Bountiful

After traveling due eastward, Lehi’s family eventually reaches the coast of the Arabian Peninsula in modern-day Oman. Researcher Warren Aston has identified Khor Kharfot, an inlet in the Dhofar region, as a potential location for Bountiful. He also identified  twelve requirements that must be present  in the vegetation and landscape to qualify, as described in 1 Nephi 17–18.

Khor Kharfot matches well Nephi’s description of having fresh water, fruit, honey, access to the coast, mountains and cliffs, ore for tools, and timber for shipbuilding. George Potter and Richard Wellington have alternatively identified Khor Rori as an ideal fit for the location of Bountiful.

Evidence that supports the narratives in the Book of Mormon is ever increasing. While we still have much to learn about the ancient world and how it correlates with the Book of Mormon, the stories in 1 Nephi fit right at home in 7th century Israel.

The locations of Lehi’s journey are beginning to be identified, and details about his experiences in the wilderness correlate well with what we know about the ancient Near East. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has encouraged members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to embrace and seek after evidences of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

In making our case for the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, I believe God intends us to find and use the evidence He has given—reasons, if you will—which affirm the truthfulness of His work…Thus armed with so much evidence of the kind we have celebrated here tonight, we ought to be more assertive than we sometimes are in defending our testimony of truth.

As members of the Church take to heart the commission to be more assertive in defending our testimonies by studying and researching evidences, the Book of Mormon will surely get better with age.

Jeffrey R. Holland, “ The Greatness of the Evidence ,”  Chiasmus Jubilee  August 17, 2017.

Watch the video below for a summary of all the evidence for Lehi’s journey to the Promised Land.

Thursday 25th of February 2021

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Table of Contents

• Across Arabia with Lehi and Sariah: “Truth Shall Spring out of the Earth”
• Lehi’s Trail: From the Valley of Lemuel to Nephi’s Harbor
• Refining the Spotlight on Lehi and Sariah
• “We Did Again Take Our Journey”
• An Archaeologist’s View
• The Brightening Light on the Journey of Lehi and Sariah
• Birds Along Lehi’s Trail
• Weather Report from the Valley of Lemuel
• With Real Intent: Out of Judaism
• Out of the Dust: Steel in Early Metallurgy

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Puzzles in Lehi and Nephi’s Trek Through “the Wilderness”

Cover image via ChurchofJesusChrist.org. 

In spite of Nephi’s beautifully crafted and carefully composed description of the trek of Lehi’s family down through the Arabia peninsula, we can sometimes misinterpret his words.  One verse that is often puzzling is how long it took to travel through the arid, desert portion to the lush oasis of Bountiful.  It sounds like eight years when we read 1 Nephi 17: 4-5.  But we may be misinterpreting those verses.  Nephi wrote that:

And we did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.  And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful… and we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum.

A key to understanding what Nephi is saying, here, involves our preconceptions of what is meant by the word “wilderness.”  The traditional and almost universal reading of these verses assumes that:  A) the Lehites spent eight years in a dry and arid desert before reaching Bountiful and then, B) an undetermined period of time in Bountiful building the ship.  But the distances just don’t match the time frames Nephi describes.  It was a journey of months; how could it possibly have taken eight years? [1]  Plus, the seeds that they carried were an invisible but ticking clock.  Nephi clearly tells us that the seeds came from the Land of Jerusalem, and “all” were planted in the New World where they grew “exceedingly…in abundance” (1 Nephi 18:24).  How is that possible?  All seeds, like everything living, have a shelf-life.  Seeds progressively lose viability; that’s the principle of entropy.  All experts agree that seed longevity is enhanced with cool conditions and dry storage.  The Lehites’ situation could not have been worse.  They experienced hot conditions in the desert and humid conditions in Bountiful and crossing the ocean.  Obviously, a trip of shorter duration, say 8½ years, would be less puzzling from the standpoint of the seeds than a trip of 12 or 13 years.  So, 8 years in the desert portion may not be what Nephi is telling us.  Rather, the desert portion of the trip may have taken no more than a couple of years.

In attempting to fill in the “missing years,” scholars have come up with several speculations.  All of them contain significant credibility problems.  But what if Lehi and his family reached Bountiful in only two years, not eight?  What if the word “wilderness” didn’t refer only to a desert, but to any undeveloped area?   And what if the inlet of Bountiful – lush, yes; abundant, yes, but still uninhabited and undeveloped – was part of the “wilderness”?  In other words, what if the exiles spent eight years in Arabia , not eight years in the desert ?

Well, that would change everything.

The assumption that the eight years referred to just the desert portion of the trek is so universal that many readers do not even recognize that an assumption is being made.  But it is.  It is as if people are reading the verses as a sequence with the word “then” inserted:

And we did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.  And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful… and [then] we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum.” 

But is this correct?  Just as “then” can be easily and unconsciously inserted, so the words, “this includes” could be inserted, instead.  That amplification would make the verses read quite differently and yield a very different conclusion:  “And we did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.  And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful… and [this includes the following:] we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum.”

Perhaps a fun example will help.  My wife and I have sons and grandchildren who live in California.  We could write about a visit with them using Nephi’s formatting.  It might sound something like this:

And we did sojourn for the space of many days, yea, even two weeks in Sacramento… and [this includes the following:]  we did take a day-trip to the city called San Francisco… and we beheld the sea, and Alcatraz Island was in the midst thereof and the Golden Gate Bridge did cross the void thereof.

The problem with that is that a sequential reading of that trip would not be correct.  The two weeks in Sacramento were not followed (“and then”) by a trip to San Francisco on the way home.  San Francisco was not on the way home.  We described two weeks with the family in Sacramento, which we then amplified to say that the two weeks “included” a day-trip to San Francisco.

Amplification is a frequent device in the Book of Mormon.  Look at the verses just before that:  “We did travel nearly eastward from that time forth.”  Nephi then amplifies the comments with the explanations that: 1) “We did travel…through much affliction,” 2) “Our women did bear children” 3) “We did live upon raw meat,” 4) “Our women did give plenty of suck,” and 5) “[They]…were strong, even like unto the men.”  A sequential assumption (A then B) would make no sense.  The blessings could not have followed the 700 miles.  They all occurred during that leg of the trip (A includes B).

In the next verse, also, Nephi presents a general principle: God will “provide means whereby they can accomplish the thing which he has commanded them.”  In the same verse, Nephi applies this principle to their own specific case:  “He did provide means for us while we did sojourn in the wilderness” (verse 3).  The Lord is the Great Planner.  Just as the earth was planned spiritually before it was created physically, the oasis of Bountiful was perfectly planned, prepared, fully stocked, and waiting for the arrival of the Lehites.  The verses in 1 Nephi 17:4-5 can thus be read as an amplification of the general principle given in verse 3.  The time in the lush and fertile Bountiful was also among those “means” provided.  Nephi says as much when he adds in verse 5: “and all these things [fruit and wild honey] were prepared of the Lord that we might not perish.”  He continues listing the “means” in verses 6 through 13:  an uninhabited oasis, ocean access, fresh water supply, flint for fire, ore to molten, trees for lumber, meat, and fish.

Another way of thinking about all this is as an editorial aside (sometimes called a colophon).  Nephi uses such editorial asides frequently.  If the text were read with Nephi’s passage removed, it would read as follows:

And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women … began to bear their journeyings without murmurings.… And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful , because of its much fruit and also wild honey; and all these things were prepared of the Lord that we might not perish….

The parenthetical passage, written years after the fact, may be Nephi interrupting the story to burst out in praise, song, and testimony.  He marvels that Heavenly Father always provides the means to accomplish what he has commanded.  And God specifically provided the necessary means for them – during the entire eight years, not only during the desert portion, but in Bountiful, as well.  Nephi then returns to the factual account of the means that God provided.

For all this to be a viable possibility, it is necessary for Bountiful to be a “wilderness,” The Hebrew word is “ midbar,” which naturally usually referred to a desert, since that is what surrounded them.  Even so, there is still some diversity as shown in Nephi’s own description.  The Lehites walked across flat tundra, rolling sand dunes, and high mountains.  Interestingly, Nephi refers to the Valley of Lemuel as wilderness (four times) yet still writes that they left the wilderness of the Valley of Lemuel to “depart into the wilderness” (repeated in four verses).  So, they left one type of desert to enter another type of desert.

The question is, could the lush oasis of Bountiful also be a wilderness?  Nephi seems to refer to it that way at least two times.  When the family loaded the ship, that included “fruits and meat from the wilderness, and honey in abundance” (1 Nephi 18:6).  They didn’t return up the wadi some 20 miles into the desert to get the meat.  That’s ridiculous.  There were few if any animals there.  Animals follow water, and fresh water was right there in their lagoon, not in the desert.

And, just after Lehi died, he wrote, “My God … hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness (2 Nephi 4:20).  We read about his afflictions in the desert prior to Bountiful, but those didn’t cease once in the inlet.  Those afflictions included his brothers trying to throw him off a cliff “into the depths of the sea” (1 Nephi 17:48).  Nephi considered all of his afflictions, including those in Bountiful, to be a part of his total “afflictions in the wilderness.”

Later, when the Nephites were established in the vast forests of the New World, Mosiah described, four times, his people being “lost in the wilderness.”  That was not a desert.  And when Zeniff was forced to defend his people, he armed the men but “caused that the women and children of my people should be hid in the wilderness” (Mosiah 10:9).  Hiding in a desert is difficult; hiding in a forest is easy.

Zeniff also described Lamanite tradition, “which is this—Believing that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea” (Mosiah 10:12-16).  Was Bountiful excluded from this tradition?  Of course not.  Laman and Lemuel considered themselves wronged in Bountiful, as well.  They had no sooner arrived in the inlet than Nephi began to exhort them to faithfulness and diligence.  Nothing changed in Bountiful.  In fact, they became so angry with his “wronging them” there that they again attempted to murder him.  Unless Bountiful was intentionally skipped, which is unimaginable, the Lamanite traditions included Bountiful in “wronged in the wilderness.”

Consider what the Lord said – and this, when they first entered Bountiful:  “And I will also be [future tense] your light in the wilderness ; and I will prepare the way before you [future tense]” (1 Nephi 17:13-14).  Then he added, “ after ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that …I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction.”  So, Nephi would look back over the entire experience, including Bountiful, and see that the “means” were “prepared” the whole time.

Even later, Joseph Smith used wilderness to describe the heavy forests near his home:  “And again, what do we hear? …A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county…. The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness …[by] the Susquehanna river” (D&C 128:20).  Noah Webster’s 1828 definition further expands the diversity when he includes “the ocean” as well as “uninhabited and undeveloped prairies.”  The people of Alaska still call their vast, undeveloped regions of ice and snow, “wilderness.”  It appears that the definition of a w ilderness comes down to the mindset of the speaker.  If these varying definitions of an undeveloped wilderness are all valid, and they seem to be, there is no reason that word could not include the uninhabited and undeveloped oasis of Bountiful, as well.

Having discussed the diversity of meanings of wilderness and that wilderness could include Bountiful, the next point to consider is what this alternative reading might reveal about the timing of the various events that took place during their trek through Arabia.

From Jerusalem to Nahom and then eastward to Bountiful is 2,200 miles, the same distance as from Salt Lake City to New York City.  Most experts agree that the group traveled between 15 and 20 miles per day.  With no extended rest stops, they should have arrived in Bountiful in six months.  That is a major problem for those interpreting Nephi’s wording of “eight years in the wilderness” as meaning only the desert portion.  To resolve this, some scholars have speculated that they delayed their journey in each stop to either grow crops in a desert – with no available seeds and no water access – or to sell themselves into multi-year indentured servitude or even slavery to Arabian overlords.  Both theories have serious limitations and those are refuted in my much longer article in the Interpreter journal.  But the bottom line is that such speculations are simply not needed with the alternative interpretation of the eight years as including Bountiful.

Without such unneeded speculations, we can estimate more reasonable times both for traveling and at the four primary stops that Nephi describes.  Let’s start with leaving Jerusalem.  Although it may be tempting to imagine a frantic overnight scramble to escape or flee, Nephi’s account does not describe a crazed mob charging toward the house carrying pitchforks and blazing firebrands.  Rather, the Lord told Lehi that “they seek to take away thy life” (1 Nephi 2:2).  If “seek” means “planning or plotting,” Lehi might have had more time, perhaps as much as a week or two, to purchase enough tents and camels and obtain enough seed for planting in the New World.  Two weeks is a closer match to Nephi’s calmer phrase, “depart” into the wilderness.

The group then traveled approximately 180 to 250 miles (depending on route) to the Red Sea.  That would have taken another two weeks.  Still not safe from Jewish travelers taking news back to Jerusalem, Lehi and his family traveled an additional “three days in the wilderness, [where] he pitched his tent in a valley [ Wadi Tayyib al-Ism ] by the side of a river of water” (1 Nephi 2:5-6), which he renamed, the Valley of Lemuel.

A lot happened at that first stop.  There were two trips back to Jerusalem and at least five weddings.  The entire Brass Plates were closely studied, and profound revelations were received.  “And all these things did my father see, and hear, and speak, as he dwelt in a tent, in the valley of Lemuel, and also a great many more things, which cannot be written upon these plates” (1 Nephi 9:1).  They were in the Valley of Lemuel for some time – just not multiple years as would be required to support the traditional reading.  Jeffrey Chadwick estimates that they sojourned in the Valley of Lemuel for just four months. [2]   Kent Brown agrees but then widens the estimate: “All of the activities rehearsed by Nephi …could have taken place within a few months … a year at most.” [3]

After leaving the Valley of Lemuel, they “traveled for the space of four days … and we did call the name of the place Shazer” (1 Nephi 16:13), which is believed to be the 15-mile oasis along the Wadi Agharr.  Their stay, though, does not sound like an extended one – probably a month, but certainly not multi-year.  They likely used this time to amass a stockpile of meat to dry as jerky for later travel.  Wellington and Potter assert that “the best hunting in the entire area was in the mountains of Agharr.” [4]  (How could Joseph Smith have known that?)  The entire stay is summarized in just one verse, so let’s allocate one month of hard hunting and meat processing at Shazer.

Since the distance from Shazer to the next stop was approximately 830 miles, the “space of many days” (1 Nephi 16:17) at 15 miles per day meant that they traveled for 60 days or a little over two months.  This estimate is supported by scripture where the meaning of “many days” is given as “40 days” (Mosiah 7:4).

Several events took place at this stop, though none of them could have taken multiple years.  The sons set off to hunt only to lose their bows due to a drastic change in humidity.  Then Nephi’s steel bow broke.  With no food, the families were soon in crisis and began to “murmur exceedingly” (verse 20).  Nephi immediately began to build a hunting bow which was, according to Hugh Nibley, “almost as great a feat for Nephi to make a [lethal] bow as it was for him to build a ship.” [5]   That doesn’t necessarily mean that it took a long time; Nephi didn’t have a long time.  The families were in danger of starving.  It took, perhaps, as little as one week to find the right branch, cure the green wood, and shape the bow.  Wellington and Potter point out that “traditional wood that Arabs used to make their bows …grows in a very limited range …[near] Bishah.” [6]  The loss of the bows at precisely the spot where there was bow-making wood is yet another tender mercy that Joseph Smith could not have known in frontier America in 1820.

During that same week, Nephi “did speak much unto my brethren” and by the time the new bow was finished, “they had humbled themselves because of my words” (verses 22 & 24).  This means the repentance process did not take additional time.  Christ/Jehovah is “quick to hear the cries of his people and to answer their prayers” (Alma 9:26).  Nephi returned with meat to the joy of the entire camp.  All in all, it seems unlikely that the Lehites were there for any longer than Nephi’s “the space of a time” or around two months.

They then traveled for two more months, a distance of approximately 830 miles, only to encounter a new upset.  “And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom” (1 Nephi 16:34).  This threw the entire camp into turmoil and hit everyone hard, especially Ishmael’s daughters.  Ishmael was going to be denied the Israelite custom of burying in one’s native land.  Even worse, his body was soon to be left behind as the Lehites moved on.  Perhaps that explains why the daughters of Ishmael “were desirous to return again to Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 16:36).  Elder Jeffrey R. Holland compares this situation with the sin of Lot’s wife.  It was not just that Lot’s wife looked back, but that… “in her heart she wanted to go back. …She was already missing what Sodom and Gomorrah had offered her.  As Elder Maxwell once said, such people know they should have their primary residence in Zion, but they still hope to keep a summer cottage in Babylon.” [7]

Whether Laman was a part of the daughters’ initial murmuring, or simply capitalized on it, he was soon on board with them.  He had put his hand to the plow; but his own desire to “look back” and return to corrupt Jerusalem marked him as unfit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62).  Sadly, some of today’s Church members are also “looking back” and leaving the Church over exaggerated social issues and the misreadings of historical events.  Hopefully, like the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:17-19), many will come to realize how much better it really is to be close to the Father and will return to the Church. [8]

Laman took the rebellion a major step forward when he suggested the horrendous idea: “Behold, let us slay our father, and also our brother Nephi” (verse 37).  This time, Lehi and Nephi could not defuse the situation alone; it wasn’t until “the voice of the Lord came and did speak many words unto them” (verse 39) that “they did turn away their anger, and did repent of their sins” (verse 39).  That could not have taken months of rebellion and months of repentance, or the family would have starved to death.  It had to have been an intense and impulsive flare-up that quickly dissipated, probably in less than a week.  And the crisis was not solved by selling themselves into bondage (as one scholar speculated to fill up the “missing” years).  No, the problem was resolved by the Lord, following their repentance.  We must conclude that their repentance was sincere since “the Lord did bless us again with food, that we did not perish” (verse 39).

The burial of Ishmael and the brief, though violent, rebellion had to have taken up to a month or two (the “space of a time” – verse 33), but no more.  If they had remained in Nahom for 6, 7, or 8 years, Nephi would have told us that.  He didn’t.  Nephi writes nothing about growing crops or indentured servitude for several years.  What the text says is that was a rebellion, they suffered loss of food, and the Lord solved the crisis after their repentance (verse 39).  In fact, in the very next verse , Nephi announces that “we did again take our journey in the wilderness” (1 Nephi 17:1).  That final leg of the journey was unquestionably the most difficult and brutal.  This horrendous part of the trek extended approximately 700 more miserable miles.  At 13 miles per day, that meant 54 days – or more likely 54 nights – or just under two months to reach Bountiful.

The grand total of the entire journey – Jerusalem to Bountiful – computes to two years, not eight years; and that is being quite generous in estimating the time spent at the four stops.

But there is more.  If Nephi’s “eight years in the wilderness” included Bountiful, then they must have been in Bountiful for six years.  This is consistent with Jeffrey R. Chadwick’s suggestion: “I strongly suspect that as much as six of the eight years in the wilderness was actually time spent at Bountiful.” [9]

What is not clear is how much of those six years was spent actually building a ship that would transport a large group of people and a huge cargo across 16,000 miles of ocean.  The ship was the miraculous crown jewel of the time in Bountiful.  McConkie and Millet movingly write, “The sweat and tears shed in the building of the ship were a sacrament, for the building of the ship was a form of worship and an act of faith.” [10]   Newell Wright shared a beautiful opinion that the ship became a symbol of Christ.  “Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters” (1 Nephi 17:8).  As Wright pointed out, “Christ equated the ship with himself.” [11]  One thing that seems sure is that this vessel could not have been thrown together in haste.  Even so, most people fail to take into account the preparation demanded before it could even begin.  The full six years could not have been spent just assembling the ship, and the other major accomplishments should not be glossed over.

According to Nephi, the voice of the Lord did not come to him for several months (“the space of many days” – 1 Nephi 17:7).  But the colony members were far from idle during those several months.

• First , they had to set up their tents again, most likely on the western plateau to avoid monsoon flash floods. They had to prepare the natural caves and hollows at the cliff edges for long-term kitchens, lumber storage/drying areas, and for additional sleeping areas, thus saving at least some of the tent fabrics to later modify as sails for the ship.
• Second , they had to “stock the cupboards.” The fruit was easy enough to gather but many of the honeycombs were hanging from the cliff walls [12] requiring them to climb up or rappel down from the cliff tops. [13]   Plus, the human body requires protein.  Aston points out that “the plentiful sea life all along the coast likely holds the key to understanding how Lehi’s group with its limited manpower could derive enough protein” [14] and there was abundant wildlife to hunt in Bountiful.  But this all took time.
• Third , they most likely would have constructed a stone worship area, just as they had built an altar upon first arriving in the Valley of Lemuel (1 Nephi 2:7). Perhaps they even built a temple as they did in the New World (2 Nephi 5:16).  Warren Aston and his son, Chad, discovered stone ruins and Richard Hauck later proposed that these ruins could have been the remains of a “sanctuary site [in] the same size and proportion as the Temple of Solomon.” [15]
• Fourth , other activities included solving health and illness needs, sanitation requirements, and repairing, or likely replacing, clothing. Arabian leopards and the wolves that occasionally hunted in the lagoon would have yielded hides, but those had to be scraped clean, dried, and processed – another learning curve.

Time to do such things is rarely considered but could have been considerable.  All the record says is that “after I, Nephi, had been in the land of Bountiful for the space of many days, the voice of the Lord came unto me, saying: Arise , and get thee into the mountain” (1 Nephi 17:7).  All this preparatory work prior to Nephi’s receiving the new revelation must have taken around two months.

On the mountain, the Lord provided the stunning news that Nephi was to build a handmade ship using homemade tools to fell and mill what would have to have been many dozens of trees.  Little wonder that his brothers murmured, “Our brother is a fool” (1 Nephi 17:17) and “did not believe that I could build a ship; neither would they believe that I was instructed of the Lord” (verse 18).

That skepticism prompted another long admonition by Nephi comparing their situation to that of the children of Israel under Moses.  The comparison implied that Nephi was a Moses figure, which did not go down well with Laman and Lemuel.  Nephi then punctuated the sermon by saying that Laman and Lemuel were “murderers in your hearts” (verse 44) and that he feared “lest ye shall be cast off forever” (verse 47).  Laman and Lemuel flew into an instant and murderous rage, which was stopped by the dramatic threat that, if they touched him, they would “wither even as a dried reed” (verse 48).

Although Laman and Lemuel doubted their younger brother could build a ship, they clearly did not doubt his warning and backed off significantly.  Notice that there was a long “cooling off” period for Laman and Lemuel.  We don’t know what they were doing in this time, but Nephi writes that they “were confounded and could not contend against me; neither durst they lay their hands upon me nor touch me with their fingers, even for the space of many days” (verse 52).  After these apparently two months, the Lord instructed Nephi to “shock” his brothers into compliance and Nephi secured their willingness to provide labor, apparently for several years (1 Nephi 18:1).  Note that those two sets of activities occurred back-to-back.  The first time period comprised the time to set up their tents, recuperate, hunt, and settle in before receiving the Lord’s directive to build the ship.  The second time period was the calming down of Laman and Lemuel and the time when they could not touch him.

During this time, Nephi was already mining ore, gathering flint, building a reliable bellows made out of animal hides, and preparing to make tools.  A casual reading of the text takes that as a few-day’s job and a trivial detail.  Not so.  Nephi had to, in effect, create a serious and on-going “blacksmith shop” right there in the inlet.  He would eventually have seven healthy young men who all needed their own building tools, not to mention multiple cooking tools and tools for scraping and preparing hides.  One set of tools wouldn’t have “cut it.”  The production of all of the sets of tools appears to have been the work of Nephi alone because only he had metalworking skills to forge heavy hammers, mauls, axes, hide-scrapers, and saws.  These initial accomplishments should not be glossed over, although they usually are.

Nor was this a one-and-done activity.  Wellington and Potter argue that “Nephi needed hardwood to build a ship strong enough to survive an ocean crossing.”  As any woodworker knows, there is a major difference between hand-working softwoods and hand-working hardwoods; it is an entirely different proposition.  Not only are hardwoods hard – making them difficult to cut, shape, and smooth – they also dull the tool cutting blades very quickly.  Therefore, sharpening and even replacing broken tools was an on-going need.  We don’t know, of course, how fast Nephi could have set up his “blacksmith shop,” but it sounds as if it would have taken considerable time.  It seems as if the time for the blacksmith-related activities had to have been in the order of six months or so.

After that came the lumber problem.  Judith Grimes, a botanist who visited Bountiful, found many large trees; one had a girth of 23 feet.  Felling many dozens of such trees with only homemade axes and primitive saws would already have been a monumental undertaking.  But they also had to limb the branches and drag the trunks and larger branches back to the building location.  Then they had to scrape off the bark and split the trunk multiple times to mill the “timber” into “lumber” for planks and beams.  It seems clear that Nephi had to create a serious, working “sawmill and lumber yard” in order to harvest and process lumber out of native trees.  The men could not have even started the assembly and joining of the planking until they had an impressive supply of lumber already collected and right there on hand, ready to go.  Even at full speed and with enthusiastic workers, that had to have taken a minimum of six months.

But even that is not the end of the story.  “When a tree is first cut down and the logs are sectioned into lumber, the resulting wood is considered ‘green’ because it still has a considerable moisture content. …Air-drying lumber typically takes one year per inch of wood thickness.” [16]   And that cannot be rushed.  Unless timber is cured correctly, the wood will shrink, twist, or even worse, split.  One cannot build a water-tight ship with wood that contains warps and splits.  Perhaps they sped up the curing of the green wood using bonfires and laboriously hand-fanned the heat into the woodpile.  But … caution!  The same website continues:  “Care must be taken not to heat the lumber too quickly, as this can cause uneven curing or create potential flaws, such as splitting.”

Of course, some of the boards (for example, those used for the housing areas, railings, masts, or the storage bins) didn’t require fully cured timber because they wouldn’t be in contact with the ocean water and a twist or split wouldn’t be as serious.  The many planks that made up the hull are a different story.  The wood had to be planed with a homemade wood plane to not only make them smooth, but also thin enough to facilitate the drying process.  If the Lehites used mortise and tenon joints, as in the Church’s Book of Mormon Videos , they would have had to be chiseled with great accuracy.  In that same Church video, the boards of the ship appear to be 8- to 10-inch-thick beams.  Sure, there might have been some beams that thick, but the hull planks would have had to be much thinner to have them air dry as quickly as possible, given no kiln.  It’s hard to even imagine the planks averaging as thin as an inch and a half in thickness but, if the rule-of-thumb given above is correct and it takes one year per inch of wood thickness, at 1½ inches thick, that would require at least 18 months.

Earlier, the estimate for the trek through the desert portion was calculated as approximately two years, not eight years.  That leaves roughly six years for the time in Bountiful.  Of those six years in Bountiful, I have allowed a reasonable year and a half for settling in, blacksmithing, milling timber, and then another 18 months for the green wood to cure.  That equals 34 months – and that is before even beginning the actual assembly.  Logically, some of those activities would have overlapped.  For example, Nephi could have been forging tools while Ishmael’s sons were felling trees, or Laman and Zoram could have been splitting trunks while Sam and Lemuel milled the timber.  That kind of overlapping would cut the time taken up in preparation for the building by, say, ten months, making two full years of preparation before the assembly of the ship.

Adding the two years for the trek through the desert to two years of preparation in Bountiful makes four years before assembling the ship.  Subtracting those four years from Nephi’s total of eight years in Arabia result in four more years to actually assemble the vessel.

A fair question to ask of this or any article looking into scripture is whether the commentary makes any difference.  I think it does.  Eight years of desert travel and the glossing over of details about the ship’s construction is what has been presented in talks, books, scholarly articles, firesides, classes, videos, and casual conversations.  With the clearly plausible new reading of the verses, it becomes possible to draw better estimates of the time spent at various locations and the time spent building the ship.  Thus, this alternative interpretation of Nephi’s “eight years in the wilderness” solves a major puzzle by suggesting conclusions that no longer strain credulity.  Plus, with the alternative reading, it now becomes possible to estimate more closely the timing of key events and provides a closing bookend:  eight total years from Jerusalem to the launch into the Indian Ocean.  This interpretation allows a more logical estimate of two years in the desert, a solid estimate of two years of preparation in Bountiful, and a calculation of four years of assembly to build the ship.  It is hoped that this article provides a deeper understanding of scripture.  Such an outcome is always to be welcomed.

[1] A more detailed discussion of these problems is contained in my much longer article, which can be found in the “Interpreter Foundation” website.  Look for Godfrey J. Ellis, “Nephi’s Eight Years in the ‘Wilderness’: Reconsidering Definitions and Details,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 57 (2023) : 281-356 .  The logic is spelled out more clearly there.  A similar interpretation was offered by Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “An Archeologist’s View, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006): 74.  Unfortunately, he did not offer justifications for re-interpreting or ignoring Nephi’s assertion in 1 Nephi 17:4-5.

[2] Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “An Archeologist’s View,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006), 73.

[3] S. Kent Brown, “Refining the Spotlight on Lehi & Sariah,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006): 48.

[4] Richard Wellington and George Potter, “Lehi’s Trail,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006), 30.

[5] Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), 61.

[6] Richard Wellington and George Potter, “Lehi’s Trail,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006), 30.

[7] Jeffrey R. Holland, “Remember Lot’s Wife,” BYU Speeches , Jan. 13, 2009, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/remember-lots-wife/.

[8] I am indebted to Dean Bjornestad for the comparisons with Lot’s wife and the Prodigal Son.

[9] Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “An Archeologist’s View, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006), 74.

[10] Joseph Fielding McConkie and Robert L. Millet,  Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon , vol. 1, First and Second Nephi (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1987), 140.

[11] Newell Wright, email correspondence to Godfrey Ellis, Dec. 27, 2022.

[12] A description of safely taking honey from the honeycombs in the trees of Khor Kharfot is reported in Brent Heaton, “What Life is Like Today at Nephi’s Bountiful,” Meridian Magazine (July 12, 2018), https://latterdaysaintmag.com/what-life-is-like-today-at-nephis-bountiful/

[13] See a photo-essay by Alan Taylor, “Honey Hunting on the Cliffs of China’s Yunnan Province,” The Atlantic , June 6, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/06/honey-hunting-chinas-yunnan-province-photos/591202/.

[14] Warren P. Aston, Lehi and Sariah in Arabia: The Old World Setting of the Book of Mormon (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Publishing, 2015) , 137.

[15] Scott and Maurine Proctor, “Nephi’s Bountiful: Archaeological Dig: Was There a Holy Place of Worship at Nephi’s Bountiful?” Meridian Magazine , Feb. 29, 2016, https://ldsmag.com/day-2-was-there-a-holy-place-of-worship-at-nephis-bountiful.

[16] “Curing Lumber,” Thomas, a Xometry Company; www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/curing-lumber/#:~:text=Air%2Ddrying%20lumber%20typically%20takes,it%20is%20trying%20to%20release.

David Mohr January 2, 2024

There is no discussion of the meaning of the word sojourn. I usually see sojourn as meaning staying. Add the definition of wilderness as a place without civilization's influence and you can easily say they were eight years travelling from Jerusalem to leaving Bountiful or even from Jerusalem to the new world,where they established a new civilization. As put forth in the essay, we need to expand our thinking to include the many tasks glossed over by Nephi.

Charles Dike January 2, 2024

This article precludes the possibility that the 600-year prophecy was based on an intercalated lunar/solar calendar. Randall Spackman's 12-lunar month calendar fits reasonably snuggly if the prophecy began when the Nephites set sail. Interesting.

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Lehi's journey in the old world.

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Lehi's journey in the Old World

Lehi's journey paralleled the ancient "frankincense trail," a trade route used in ancient arabia.

Hilton and Hilton noted that Lehi's journey paralleled the ancient "Frankincense trail," a trade route used in ancient Arabia:

The much traveled [Frankincense] trail begins at the coast of modern Oman. From there it goes from ancient waterhole to waterhole throughout the Middle East. We should note that the word trail does not refer to a well-defined, narrow path or roadway, but to a more general route that followed a valley or canyon. The width of the route varied with the geography, ranging from a half mile to up to fifty miles at one point. [1]

Hugh Nibley had already sketched the essentials of the route in the 1950s, pointing out Joseph Smith's uncanny accuracy in identifying the only plausible route for Nephi, decades before the truth became generally known in the west:

It is obvious that the party went down the eastern and not the western shore of the Red Sea (as some have suggested) from the fact that they changed their course and turned east at the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and "did travel nearly eastward from that time forth," passing through the worst desert of all, where they "did travel and wade through much affliction," and "did live upon raw meat in the wilderness" ( 1 Nephi 17꞉1-2 ). Had the party journeyed on the west coast of the Red Sea, they would have had only water to the east of them at the nineteenth parallel and for hundreds of miles to come. But why the nineteenth parallel? Because Joseph Smith may have made an inspired statement to that effect. He did not know, of course, and nobody knew until the 1930s, that only by taking a "nearly eastward" direction from that point could Lehi have reached the one place where he could find the rest and the materials necessary to prepare for his long sea voyage... The best western authority on Arabia was thus completely wrong about the whole nature of the great southeast quarter a generation after the Book of Mormon appeared, and it was not until 1930 that the world knew that the country in which Lehi's people were said to have suffered the most is actually the worst and most repelling desert on eart In Nephi's picture of the desert everything checks perfectly. There is not one single slip amid a wealth of detail, the more significant because it is so casually conveyed. [2]

Question: Could Lehi's group have made a transoceanic crossing as described in the Book of Mormon?

Book of Mormon Central, KnoWhy #21: Did Ancient People Sail the Seas? (Video)

It is definitely possible to sail from arabia to the americas.

The Book of Mormon, in 1 Nephi chapters 17 and 18, recounts that Nephi built a ship in which the Lehi colony sailed from the old world to the new. In June 2010 the History Channel aired a documentary, "Who Really Discovered America?" which claims that it would have been impossible for a ship made by Nephi to have successfully carried the people and necessary supplies in a transoceanic crossing.

It is definitely possible to sail from Arabia to the Americas. The only way to conclude that Nephi could not have done so is to insist that he must have built an inadequate ship, and this documentary is very specific in its assumptions about what Nephi must have built and why therefore the voyage could not have succeeded. There is no basis for accepting those assumptions except for a disbelief in the premise that God may reveal information to men and women.

What were the specifications of Nephi's ship?

In 1 Nephi chapter 17, Nephi recorded the circumstances of his instruction to build a ship:

And it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had been in the land of Bountiful for the space of many days, the voice of the Lord came unto me, saying: Arise, and get thee into the mountain. And it came to pass that I arose and went up into the mountain, and cried unto the Lord. And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying: Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters.( 1 Nephi 17꞉7-8 ) And I said unto them: If God had commanded me to do all things I could do them. If he should command me that I should say unto this water, be thou earth, it should be earth; and if I should say it, it would be done. And now, if the Lord has such great power, and has wrought so many miracles among the children of men, how is it that he cannot instruct me, that I should build a ship? ( 1 Nephi 17꞉50-51 )

In 1 Nephi chapter 18, Nephi additionally comments on the exceptional nature of the ship's construction:

And it came to pass that they did worship the Lord, and did go forth with me; and we did work timbers of curious workmanship. And the Lord did show me from time to time after what manner I should work the timbers of the ship. Now I, Nephi, did not work the timbers after the manner which was learned by men, neither did I build the ship after the manner of men; but I did build it after the manner which the Lord had shown unto me; wherefore, it was not after the manner of men. And I, Nephi, did go into the mount oft, and I did pray oft unto the Lord; wherefore the Lord showed unto me great things. And it came to pass that after I had finished the ship, according to the word of the Lord, my brethren beheld that it was good, and that the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine; wherefore, they did humble themselves again before the Lord. ( 1 Nephi 18꞉1-4 )

Nephi does not record the technical details of the design or construction of the ship, aside from that it was made of timbers, it sailed and was driven forth before the wind and so presumably had sails, and that it could be steered.

But Nephi did repeatedly specify that he did not design it himself, did not base it on the shipbuilding technology then available in his own and neighboring cultures, and that his work was not informed by any source except direct revelation.

The History Channel used false assumptions in reaching its conclusion

In "Who Really Discovered America?" the documentary presents analysis from a naval archeologist and an oceanographer, which assumes the following:

• That Nephi would have built a ship according to the naval technology then available.
• Therefore, Nephi's ship would have closely resembled a Roman ship of the time, with a "round formed hull," "thick ribbed," a square sail, and an "elevated bow and stern."
• Ships built in that Roman style were unable to travel at top sailing speeds.
• The Lehites would have launched from the Arabian peninsula, sailed eastward across the Indian Ocean, eastward across the Pacific Ocean, and landed somewhere on the west coast of the Americas.
• The voyage was non-stop with no replenishment of supplies.

The documentary thereby concludes that:

• Known wind patterns and currents across those oceans would have prevented a Roman ship from making that crossing any faster than 580 days.
• All passengers would have died on such a long voyage. The documentary does not spell out why this would necessarily follow; presumably he meant that the Lehites could not have carried sufficient supplies to sustain them for so long.

Of the assumptions used, the first three are directly contradicted by the Book of Mormon text. The fifth is not addressed by the text at all. The analysis is not a serious study of the available information and the conclusions are faulty.

The text instead states that Nephi built a ship from revealed designs and techniques, which were "curious" and not "after the manner of men." There's absolutely nothing to indicate that Nephi's ship had the hull, ribs, sails, bow and stern like the documentary says they must have been.

Resources Were Available to Build a Ship

Many believe that there weren't sufficient resources for Nephi to build a ship, but at least two locations have been proposed by Book of Mormon Scholars for Nephi's Bountiful which provide abundant resources for Nephi to construct a ship. Scholar George D. Potter offers Khor Rori as a candidate for Nephi's bountiful in a paper for Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship . [3] Scholars Lynn and Hope Wilson propose Khor Kharfot as Nephi's Bountiful. [4]

• ↑ Lynn M. Hilton and Hope Hilton, In Search of Lehi's Trail (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 21, (italics in original). ISBN 0877476306. Also published in Ensign 6 (September 1976): off-site and (October 1976): off-site .
• ↑ Hugh W. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon , 3rd edition, (Vol. 6 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley), edited by John W. Welch, (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company; Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1988),234–235.
• ↑ George D. Potter, " Khor Rori: A Maritime Resources-Based Candidate for Nephi’s Harbor ," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 51 (2022): 253–94.
• ↑ Lynn M. Hilton, “ In Search of Lehi’s Trail—30 Years Later ,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 2 (2006).
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The Things Which My Father Saw

Approaches to lehi's dream and nephi's vision, daniel l. belnap , gaye strathearn , and stanley a. johnson , editors, “it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy”: lehi’s vision of teaching and learning, charles swift.

Charles Swift, “‘It Filled My Soul with Exceedingly Great Joy’: Lehi’s Vision of Teaching and Learning,” in The Things Which My Father Saw: Approaches to Lehi’s Dream and Nephi’s Vision (2011 Sperry Symposium), ed. Daniel L. Belnap, Gaye Strathearn, and Stanley A. Johnson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), 347–73.

Charles Swift was an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University when this was published.

There is much discussion about education these days, ranging from “What is the best way to teach?” to something even more fundamental: “What is education itself? What does it mean to teach, and what does it mean to learn?” This paper will explore Lehi’s vision of the tree of life as a model of teaching and learning. In studying this vision with such a purpose in mind, I will explore a pattern of ritualistic initiation in the vision and how it relates to the idea of teaching and learning as experiential acts. Taking a close look at some of the symbolic elements of the initiatory experiences in the vision can help us better understand the teaching and learning that occurs and apply that understanding to education today. When applying this knowledge, I will primarily rely on the writings of Parker Palmer, one of the most well respected scholars writing about teaching and learning today. [1] His emphasis on the spiritual elements of teaching and learning will help us understand the implications the tree of life vision may have for education.

Author and anthropologist Joan Halifax notes that the Western approach to teaching and learning holds that “the word education means ‘to be led out of ignorance into knowing and knowledge.’ Learning is described in terms of the accumulation of facts.” [2] There is another way to view teaching and learning, however: the idea of education as rooted in experience, particularly ritual experience. As Halifax points out, there is a “wide variety of forms and styles” of ritual learning in cultures that practice it, but “the most important context of learning occurs in the ritual process of initiation, known as rites of passage .” She continues by discussing three stages associated with initiation, as formulated by Arnold Van Gennep: (1) separation, in which an individual moves away from the familiar social landscape into something or somewhere unknown; (2) “the threshold experience,” in which the individual experiences liminality, [3] a transformative time when “myth and story unfold and where love and death become amplified for the initiate,” and “when the initiate learns to bear witness, to be present for all dimensions of reality”; and (3) incorporation, “the movement back into the everyday world, a time of healing, of making whole again,” in which the individual is brought back into normal society as a changed, transformed person, ready to accept the new duties or responsibilities such transformation has brought about. [4] Richard Dilworth Rust, a scholar who writes about the Book of Mormon as a literary testimony, sees a similar phenomenon in God’s interaction with man as described in the Book of Mormon: “Many of the characteristics of God’s ways pertain to thresholds—or, to use a word derived from limen , the Latin word for threshold , they are liminal .” [5] As we shall see, Lehi participates in such a process of experiential learning in his vision of the tree of life.

It is essential to this discussion to remember that we are talking about a ritual experience as it occurs in a vision or dream . If we wished to explore the vision within the context of Lehi’s actual, physical life at that time, we could argue that the rite of separation occurs when he and his family flee Jerusalem and enter the wilderness, that the threshold experience is the vision itself, and that the incorporation is when he comes back from the vision and tries to spiritually heal his family. However, since we are discussing this initiation ritual as experienced in a vision or dream, we need to remember that each stage—separation, threshold experience, and incorporation—occur through Lehi’s role as a receiver of the vision. If we were to claim, for example, that Lehi never actually experienced the separation stage because, most likely, he was with his family in their camp while he was having the vision, we would miss the point that this discussion is about what symbolically happens in the vision, not in the physical world.

Lehi’s Separation Stage

Lehi’s separation stage is at the beginning of the vision, when he moves away from the known world and is separated, finding himself in a dark and dreary wilderness. Here Lehi is faced with the “unfamiliar, the unknown.” He is confronted by what he does not know and is eventually left alone to find his way toward the meaning of his experience.

The wilderness and the man in the white robe. The Book of Mormon portrays Lehi as a caring, loving father. We also know him to be a good husband, leader, and prophet of God. [6] But he also plays another role in the Book of Mormon that we do not often speak of: he is a model teacher who is constantly learning and teaching. In his vision of the tree of life, he is a humble learner, listening to the man in the white robe and following him, and a bold teacher, sharing what he has learned rather than merely keeping the benefit to himself.

The first image Lehi sees in his vision is one of darkness: “For behold, methought I saw in my dream, a dark and dreary wilderness” (1 Nephi 8:4). In a religious context, darkness symbolizes “a silencing of prophetic revelation” and “the state of the human mind unilluminated by God’s revelation.” [7] In our context of teaching and learning, darkness represents “ignorance” [8] and “the unknown.” [9] It is significant that it is not just any place that is dark and dreary, but a wilderness. In scripture, such wilderness is a “spiritual as much as a physical testing ground,” [10] “any place in which the people are tested, tried, proven, refined by trials, taught grace, and prepared to meet the Lord.” [11] Since Lehi and his family have not yet made their journey to the New World, it is highly likely that the wilderness he sees in his vision is a desert. [12]

This dark and dreary wilderness becomes a classroom of sorts for Lehi. At this point, he is symbolically alone with his awareness of his own ignorance—of his need to learn. In his vision, he is separated from others and beginning his initiation, confronted with how much he does not know.

Next, Lehi sees a man dressed in a white robe. Significantly, in biblical symbolism, white is not set opposite to black but rather to darkness, [13] making it the perfect symbolic color for the man in the robe to wear. The color symbolizes “purity, chastity, innocence, spotlessness, and . . . peace,” [14] as well as “timelessness.” [15] More than any other color, white “has been associated with religious devotion since the days of ancient Egypt.” The reason white has been used in devotion so much is because it represents “spiritual purity and chastity of thought.” [16] “White” is not the only word in this verse that carries symbolic importance. The term “robe” is also symbolic, representing a “godly, upright character,” [17] and a white robe can symbolize “innocence, virtue.” [18] The fact that Lehi’s guide appears dressed in a white robe is of tremendous symbolic importance. [19]

The man in the white robe can be a symbol of a number of things. He can be seen as representing the Holy Spirit in that he acts as a guide to the prophet. He may be considered a type of Christ in that he redeems him from the fallen dark and dreary world by taking him to a place that can offer salvation. [20] There is yet another individual that the man in the white robe represents: the teacher. “The most important thing a teacher can do,” writes Elder Gene R. Cook, “is to help the student feel the Spirit of the Lord. If the Spirit is there, true teaching and true learning will take place, and lives will begin to be changed.” [21] Often the role of the teacher is to speak, to teach through words, but sometimes the role requires little speaking at all. Whether the man in the white robe said much or not, however, what he did was the act of a great teacher. The man was a guide for Lehi, and, as BYU professor (and current Sunday School general president for the Church) Russell T. Osguthorpe writes, to be “an effective guide one must possess two attributes: (1) knowledge of the terrain, and (2) knowledge of the traveler.” [22] He did not simply tell Lehi where he needed to go, nor did he go for him, but he guided the prophet to the place he needed to be. The fact that he knew where Lehi needed to go implies that he had “knowledge of the traveler” and not just the terrain.

Counterintuitively, this teacher in the white robe does not deliver Lehi from the dark and dreary wilderness to the open field; after following the man, Lehi finds himself in “a dark and dreary waste.” [23] In effect, the man does not take Lehi to where Lehi would probably want to go, but instead takes him to the place the prophet needed to be to continue his journey.

Teachers who guide their students develop the trust necessary for true teaching and learning to happen. “Because our guide accompanies us on our journey, we develop a trust in one another that always comes when we are seeking truth. Our guide is not there to dispense truth but to show us the way to find it—knowing all the while that because truth is intimate, we shall each come to know it in our own way.” [24] If we accept the fact that it is the Spirit who teaches, then an important part of the guide’s job is to bring us to a point where we can be taught by the Spirit, who will then help us to come to know in our own way. As Elder Cook teaches: “I suspect we sometimes think that if we don’t convey all the information we have on a subject, those we teach won’t learn what they need to know. But I would suggest a different perspective. As we develop greater trust in the Lord, we will know that if we can bring the Spirit into a teaching situation, that Spirit will help the other person to learn and know what is most essential.” [25]

The man in the white robe taught Lehi more by teaching less. [26] So far as we know, he did not lecture Lehi about the Savior, nor did he even talk to him about the symbol of the tree of life. In fact, he did not even do so much as take him to the tree. He simply helped Lehi get to a point, as a student, where he could do what he needed to do in order to learn. What Lehi is about to learn in this vision is at the very core of what he needs to know—it is the single truth by which he will understand the universe. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ at its most simple and sublime: the Savior, his Atonement, and the life we must lead to come unto him.

Solitude. Since there is no longer any mention of the man in the white robe, it is reasonable to conclude that Lehi traveled for many hours in darkness alone and is alone when he begins to pray. The man in the white robe does not abandon his student but purposefully leaves him in solitude—a state that is significant to learning. This scene from Lehi’s vision is not a random occurrence without importance. “Scriptural journeys often symbolize man’s earthly walk from birth through the spiritual wildernesses of a fallen world (see Ether 6:4–7 for the ocean allegory of man’s journey; see also 1 Nephi 8 for the path leading to the tree of life).” [27] The image of “the lone wanderer lost in the darkness” is the most common one to “haunt the early Arab poets” and “is the standard nightmare of the Arab.” In fact, “it is the supreme boast of every poet that he has traveled long distances through dark and dreary wastes all alone.” [28] It is clear why this experience in the dark wilderness, alone, would be sufficient to cause Lehi to turn to the Lord in prayer.

Lehi’s finding himself in several hours of solitude in his vision contributes significantly to this rite of separation. This experience can often contribute to one’s learning; as Palmer notes, “If knowledge allows us to receive the world as it is, solitude allows us to receive ourselves as we are. If silence gives us knowledge of the world, solitude gives us knowledge of ourselves.” [29]

This image of Lehi traveling alone for many hours presents a number of questions: Why did the man in the white robe leave—or, did Lehi leave him? Why did Lehi travel in darkness for so long? What did Lehi do during all those hours? The answer to each of these questions may lie in the meaning of such a pilgrimage. This journey, consisting of only thirteen words, serves as a necessary preparation for his prayer. “The point of requiring people to undertake the journeys in the Book of Mormon is to make it possible for them to have experiences that drive them to their extremity, at which point they discover the delivering power of God.” [30] Lehi’s experience in the dark waste helps prepare him not only for his prayer but ultimately for his coming to the tree of life.

Lehi’s Threshold Experience Stage

Lehi’s threshold stage, when he undergoes a liminal experience that transforms him, occurs when he partakes of the fruit of the tree of life. If we keep in mind what we learn from Nephi’s vision about what Lehi saw, this is definitely a time in which Lehi sees the “myth and story unfold” as “love and death become amplified” through his partaking of the fruit and witnessing the life and death of the Son of God (see 1 Nephi 10:11). During this stage the prophet “learns to bear witness, to be present for all dimensions of reality” represented in the following symbolic principles incorporated in the dream.

The tree of life. Lehi sees the tree of life, “whose fruit was desirable to make one happy” (1 Nephi 8:10). The tree is a significant archetype in literature and culture. “The sacredness of trees and plants is so firmly and deeply rooted in almost every phase and aspect of religious and magico-religious phenomena that it has become an integral and a recurrent feature in one form or another at all times and in most states of culture, ranging from the Tree of Life to the May-pole.” [31] The tree has played an important symbolic role in many cultures throughout the world. [32]

We can see another dimension of the meaning of the tree of life by looking at part of the vision Nephi experienced when he wanted to see what his father saw. When Nephi wonders about the meaning of the tree of life, he is immediately shown Mary and the birth of the Son of God (see 1 Nephi 11:9–22). Nephi understands by what he sees that the tree represents the love of God, but it is also clear that the love of God is personified in the Savior. “We need to read this in connection with other statements made by the prophets, e.g., ‘God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him’ (1 John 4:16). That is to say, ‘the love of God’ spoken of by Nephi relates readily to Jesus Christ, the great exemplar of love, and thus we may think of the tree as a symbol of the Savior.” [33]

Truth. Understanding the tree of life as a symbol of the Lord is crucial to understanding the idea of teaching and learning in ritual that can be conveyed through this vision. The Savior is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and education is the pursuit of truth. If the Savior is truth, and the tree of life is a symbol for the Savior, then the tree of life can also be a symbol for truth. The way in which Lehi interacts with the tree of life teaches us how to teach and learn—how to interact with truth. We come to know the Savior as truth not by objectifying him but by entering a relationship with him. [34] Lehi does not objectify the tree of life but enters into a relationship with it—first by seeing it and admiring its fruit and then by partaking of the fruit. It is easy to become so familiar with the vision of the tree of life and with what people would actually do in “real life” if they were to come upon a tree bearing fruit that looks delicious that we assume that what happened in the vision is the only thing that could have happened. The point, though, is that this is a vision— it is not real life . We may eat fruit because we are hungry or because the fruit looks good; there is usually no deeper meaning to the act. In a vision full of symbolism, however, we need to ask ourselves if even the most common of acts is intended to teach us something more deeply. Considering what could have happened illuminates the importance of what did happen. Lehi does not make the tree the object of his analytical study. He does not break off a leaf or piece of fruit and dissect it. He does not pull out a knife and scrape away at the bark to study it or analyze what is underneath it. Nor does he cut the tree down in an attempt to construct something out of it. It would have made an interesting, highly symbolic story if Lehi had crafted the tree into an altar on which he could offer sacrifices to God. Or he could have incorporated the tree’s lumber into the boat he and his family would sail in during their journey to the promised land. Perhaps the tree could have even remained intact as the mast. In each of these scenarios, Lehi would have been objectifying the tree. Instead, however, he becomes one with it—just as we are to become one with the Lord and not try to objectify him.

If we are to learn about learning from the vision of the tree of life, we must appreciate the personal nature of the experience Lehi had with it. Lehi had a deep, intimate experience with truth, and it filled his soul with joy. It was a paradoxical moment of solitude (not even his wife or children were present) and ultimate communion. Just as in the physical world, where people enter into a type of relationship with their food when they partake of it, Lehi enters into a relationship with the tree and its fruit when he partakes of the fruit. The fruit, and by extension the tree, becomes a part of Lehi. Spiritually speaking, this act helps Lehi and the Lord become one. Lehi’s partaking of the tree of life becomes a type of sacramental act—the sacrament being the ultimate experience of partaking of food and becoming one: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood,” the Savior said, “dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:56).

Palmer offers us an approach to education that is spiritual in nature: “ To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced .” [35] Teaching and learning involve a relationship—a covenantal relationship. Palmer explains that the English word “truth” comes from a Germanic root that also gives us the word “troth.” When you pledge your troth (as in betrothed ), you enter into a covenantal relationship of mutual trust and faith: “Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known.” [36] While this relationship with truth may make sense to a religious person who might see the Savior as truth, it is not limited to that perspective. The ultimate relationship is with the ultimate truth, naturally, but teaching and learning are about relationships with truth at all levels. Such relationships grow and develop naturally; they are not coerced.

Lehi’s Incorporation Stage

Lehi’s incorporation stage, in which there is “the movement back into the everyday world,” begins when Lehi sees his family and beckons them to partake of the fruit. This is a “time of healing, of making whole again.” He is no longer separated but is once again part of the society of his family.

After Lehi partakes of the fruit, he sees his family and asks them to come to him and partake of the fruit as well. [37] The righteous members of his family—Sariah, Nephi, and Sam—come and partake, while Laman and Lemuel, his unrighteous sons, do not. When he invites his family to partake of the fruit, Lehi is entering into the incorporation stage of his initiation. He is returning to society as a transformed person. It is important to keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier, that we are discussing a vision and that he returns to society in the context of his vision. He is not returning to the society of the Arab world in which his family exists historically; he is returning in his vision to the society of his family after the separation stage of having followed the man in the white robe and then being by himself for a number of hours. Lehi is still on his journey, but this journey has changed significantly. He has transformed from learner to teacher/ learner. He teaches his family by inviting them to partake of the fruit, but he continues to learn as he observes who in his family accepts his invitation and who rejects it.

One of the amazing aspects of Lehi’s calling to his family is how little is said. [38] According to the record that we have, Lehi simply invited his family to come and partake of the fruit. He may have told them that it was desirable above all other fruit, or that may have just been his repeated description of the fruit in his narrative. In any case, he says very little, inviting but not commanding or requiring. “He could not and would not force them.” [39] He does not describe the tree, nor does he explain why the fruit is so good—he just asks them to come to him and eat the fruit. Interestingly, this is also the way in which the man in the white robe taught Lehi: there was no lecture; he just asked Lehi to follow him. Lehi allows his family to enter into a relationship with the tree of life instead of making himself the gate they must enter through to gain what he has gained.

This is a mark of a good teacher. Lehi does not make himself the subject of what is to be learned, nor does he draw attention to himself rather than to the subject. True, he invites his family to come to him—not to listen to him but to partake of the fruit. He is standing right next to the tree (as far as we know), but it is the fruit he wants to get into those he loves, not his words or observations. Palmer speaks of this difference. In an academic culture that frames the debate as between being teacher-centered or student-centered, he argues for being centered on the subject, as Lehi was. “Passion for the subject propels that subject,” he writes, “not the teacher, into the center of the learning circle—and when a great thing is in their midst, students have direct access to the energy of learning and of life.” [40] The issue at hand is not what technique is used but how the teacher views the act of teaching. A teacher-centered teacher can still divide the class into groups, just as a student-centered teacher might lecture. A subject-centered teacher, however, will focus on how to help the students gather around the subject and learn, allowing the best technique for any given time to flow from the subject. Such a teacher lectures when that is what will best help everyone learn from the subject and does group work when that is best.

This marks the end of Lehi’s incorporation stage. He has returned to the society of his family. It is a time of being made whole, since the family is together again, and a time of healing, since some of his family partake of the fruit. However, it is not without pain, since Laman and Lemuel refuse to partake. Lehi is a transformed person because of his liminal experience of partaking of the fruit, and he is ready to live his life in harmony with that experience. Yet the dream is not over with Lehi’s personal transformation. Instead the dream now reveals the same pattern but on a larger scale, where instead of just Lehi, it is now every man who will go through the pattern.

The next two verses of the vision (1 Nephi 8:19–20) comprise what I consider to be a transition. Though there are different ways of viewing this part of the vision, I see this point as being between the end of the Lehi’s incorporation stage and the beginning of the multitudes’ separation stage. These transition verses introduce two key elements of the vision: the rod of iron and the path. They become significant components of the separation stage for the multitudes.

The rod of iron. After his experience with his family, Lehi sees the rod of iron that “extended along the bank of the river” and “led to the tree by which [he] stood” (1 Nephi 8:19). This rod is an important symbol in the vision and can have a number of different interpretations. Even Nephi’s idea that the rod of iron represents the word of God (see 1 Nephi 15:23–24) can be interpreted on different levels. Taken at the most apparent level, the rod of iron represents the scriptures and other words from God: “The rod of iron is a representation of the ‘word of God’ (1 Ne. 15:23–24). During the millennial era, Jesus will rule the nations with an iron rod, or with the word of God (Rev. 19:15).” [41] However, I think a more meaningful interpretation of the rod of iron is that it is a type of Christ, who is the Word of God (see John 1:1–5). It is significant that Nephi understands that the rod of iron is the word of God when he observes, in vision, the Lord in his mortal ministry (see 1 Nephi 11:24–25).

Because the rod of iron is one of the most prevalent and easily remembered symbols in Lehi’s vision, it is easy to forget that he had not seen any rod until much later in his vision. Lehi follows the man in the white robe, wanders in the wilderness, sees the field, approaches the tree, partakes of the fruit, sees his family, invites them to partake, and watches some of his family partake while others do not—all without his seeing the rod of iron in the vision. It is not until we are leaving Lehi’s incorporation stage and are moving forward to the multitudes’ separation stage that Lehi sees the rod. This fact makes sense if we use the ritual paradigm to study the vision. Lehi does not need the rod of iron in the separation and threshold stages because he is directly relying on the Lord. He prays to the Lord after he has traveled alone in darkness for many hours (see 1 Nephi 8:8) during the separation, and he communes with the Lord when he partakes of the fruit of the tree of life in the threshold experience. And, in his incorporation stage, his family has the word of God when he, the prophet, beckons them to partake of the fruit. The prophetic word is, after all, the word of God.

The rod of iron is needed at this very specific point in preparing for the multitudes’ separation stage, when the larger society, represented by the various multitudes that appear, becomes a part of Lehi’s vision. The rod of iron is one of the things Lehi brings back with him from the threshold stage of his initiation—not the rod of iron per se but the idea of the word of God that is represented by the rod. Lehi interacts with the man in the white robe and with his family but never with the greater society represented by the multitudes. This greater society, then, will have the word of God in their world by virtue of the rod of iron.

If we see the rod of iron as representing the Savior as the Word of God, to hold to the rod is not only studying the scriptures but also entering into a meaningful relationship with the Savior and letting him be our guide throughout life. We hold to the rod, and, in a sense, the rod holds to us, protecting us and guiding us. Palmer speaks of this phenomenon: “By this understanding, I not only pursue truth but truth pursues me. I not only grasp truth but truth grasps me. I not only know truth but truth knows me. Ultimately, I do not master truth but truth masters me. Here, the one-way movement of objectivism, in which the active knower tracks down the inert object of knowledge, becomes the two-way movement of persons in search of each other. Here, we know even as we are known.” [42]

Through our holding to the rod of iron, we can know as we are known. It is a relationship with the Lord that takes us to the tree of life, not the mere reading or hearing of words. Of course, studying the scriptures is part of that relationship, as is participating in ordinances and making covenants. They are, in fact, a large part of how we come to know him. Seeing the rod of iron as symbolic of the Savior includes all that seeing it as the word of God would entail, plus much more. What has been written about the rod of iron could apply equally to living a life in which we follow the Savior: “It followed each turn, guided over each stumbling rock, and beckoned around each precipice of the deadly river. It led with secured, enduring strength through the spacious field to the tree.” [43] But it is important to remember that symbols often represent different ideas that are not mutually exclusive. Many are inclined to make a list of each symbol in the dream and what each one represents, as though they were making a list of mathematical formulas. Symbolism rarely works that way, however. Often symbols can have multiple interpretations. So the rod of iron could represent the Savior, and the tree of life could represent his Atonement. Or the rod could represent the commandments of God, and the tree of life, the Savior. There are other interpretations as well, and they can each be correct so long as each is in harmony with doctrine and is supported by the text. By saying that the rod of iron symbolizes the Savior, I am not saying that it does not symbolize the word of God as scripture or as guidance through the Holy Spirit. The symbol is simply not limited to the single interpretation of the rod as the written or spoken word of God.

As we consider the rod of iron as a symbol for the Savior, we can accept the message of the vision as including his role throughout our lives. He is not simply the tree—the end product of our journey through life. We are not required to make our way through the dangers along the path with only the scriptures at our side. Instead, the Lord can be with us throughout our lives; we can rely on him and all that he has to offer—grace, the Atonement, his personal guidance, the Holy Spirit, our knowledge of the Father, commandments, scripture, covenants, ordinances—to help us make it back to him and partake of the fruit of eternal life. Just as the fruit is “desirable above all other fruit” (1 Nephi 8:12), so is eternal life “the greatest of all the gifts of God” (D&C 14:7).

Jesus Christ, as we have seen, is Truth. If the rod of iron symbolizes the Savior, then to hold to the rod can mean to establish a relationship with the Savior. And, to establish a relationship with him is to relate with Truth. If true education is to “ create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced ,” then the vision of the tree of life is the ultimate education because it is the image of practicing obedience to the ultimate Truth—the Savior. Truth is throughout the vision, both as the tree of life and as the rod of iron. To enter into a loving relationship with the Savior requires obedience: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Obedience does not mean “slavish adherence to authority, but careful listening and responding in a conversation of free selves.” [44] The Lord does not ask of us blind obedience but rather visionary obedience. We follow him because we see who he is, we love him, and we want to be like him.

This type of obedience is key to teaching and learning. It requires humility and a willingness to submit ourselves to another—a teacher, a student, a subject, a truth, the Truth. The vision of the tree of life is the prototypical educational experience. It teaches us how to come to all truth by showing us how to come to the Truth. It teaches us how to learn calculus or literature or history by submitting ourselves to the truth that is in them, showing us how to learn through submitting ourselves to the Savior.

The path. In addition to seeing the rod of iron, Lehi also sees a path that leads to the tree. A path can represent “life, experience, learning.” [45] There is an element of choice involved with a path, as it is usually assumed that it is “the route or way which a person chooses to travel. His choice may be to journey on the ‘path of the wicked’ (Prov. 4:14), which is the way of darkness; or he may choose to walk the ‘path of the just,’ which is ‘as the shining light’ (Prov. 4:18–19).” [46] Paths are part of the typological world in scripture and secular literature. As the literary critic Northrop Frye notes, the “human use of the inorganic world involves the highway or road as well as the city with its streets, and the metaphor of the ‘way’ is inseparable from all quest-literature, whether explicitly Christian as in The Pilgrim’s Progress or not.” [47] Though many do not succeed, the people on the path in Lehi’s dream are on a quest for the tree of life.

This combination of the tree of life and the path is also archetypally significant. As historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade notes, the center is the “zone of the sacred,” and “the road leading to the center is a ‘difficult road.’” Similarly, the tree of life is at the center of Lehi’s dream, if not geographically, then, without a doubt, thematically and symbolically. And the path leading to that tree is made more difficult, even dangerous, because of the mists of darkness. According to Eliade, there is a reason the path is difficult: “The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, . . . from man to the divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective.” [48] The path is important in this moving toward the multitudes’ separation stage because it acts as part of this “rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred.” While the path was not a part of Lehi’s approaching the tree of life, nor was it part of his family’s, it is the very way by which the multitudes will try to progress toward the tree. It is how the multitudes can attain the center of this vision.

The Multitudes’ Ritual of Initiation

While it could be argued that the multitudes are part of the greater society to which Lehi returns as part of his incorporation stage, I consider them not to be part of that stage for Lehi because they have no interaction with him. He does not return to them as he does to his family; he is not incorporated back into their society. He sees them from a distance and notes what they do and what happens to them, but the multitudes are a new part of the vision and have their own rite of initiation.

The multitudes of people. Lehi saw a number of people who commenced on the path. The very act of beginning the journey along the path was a sign of the people’s willingness to follow God to some extent. Later in the vision there will be people who do not even attempt to follow the path, but the ones who do attempt have some desire to follow it, even for a short period of time. The path becomes a symbol, too, for dependence on the Lord. According to Book of Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley, Nephi generally sees the journey in the desert as “the most compelling image of man’s dependence on God.” [49] People who choose to follow the path acknowledge that this is the way to the tree of life, that they must depend on the path the Lord has set if they wish to partake of the fruit.

These people who start along the path are important to the symbolism in the vision. “The elements of wandering, deliverance, and coming unto Christ are all in the tree of life complex of symbolism.” [50] It is especially clear later in the Book of Mormon that the Nephites see themselves as wanderers, searching for the promised land that is beyond this life. [51] In this vision, the tree of life is the promised land, and those who seek it become pilgrims on a religious quest. From a symbolic perspective, there is no need for Lehi to see multitudes of people. He could have seen one person in each situation and that would have sufficed in terms of conveying the particular meaning. However, using the image of huge numbers of people adds at least two dimensions to the symbol. First, it reinforces the idea and feeling that this is indeed the world we are looking at, that everybody is part of this vision in one way or another (see 1 Nephi 8:20), that it applies to us. And second, what is going on in the vision at this point is a communal activity. This is not something people do alone.

Teaching and learning are communal acts. The community may consist of the family in informal settings, the classroom in formal education, or the community of the reader, author, and the people who inhabit the text in the case of an individual reading a book. [52] As a psycholinguist who has focused on the nature of teaching and learning, author and education scholar Frank Smith explains, “Learning is social rather than solitary. It can be summarized in seven familiar words: We learn from the company we keep .” [53] He calls these communal groups of learning “clubs” and writes of the importance of these clubs to our efforts to teach and learn:

These may sometimes be the formal organizations that we join and maintain membership in by paying a fee—the political clubs, sports clubs, and social clubs with which we might be affiliated. But clubs may often be the informal associations that we belong to just by sharing an interest and a sense of community—the metaphorical clubs of teachers, parents, students, book readers, gardeners, joggers, or cyclists—all of the different groups with which we identify ourselves. The way we identify ourselves is at the core of it all. We don’t join a club, or stay in it, if we can’t identify with the other members. We are uncomfortable if we feel the other members are not the kind of people we see ourselves as being. [54]

The relationship between learning and ritual, being established in Lehi’s dream, is even stronger when one realizes that, like learning, ritual is social in function. Ritual, even when practiced in solitude, is a communal event. It is a community that decides upon a ritual— deciding not only upon what the ritual elements are but also their meaning. The initiate is separated from community, and, once the initiation is complete, the initiated returns to community. Yet, as becomes clear in verse 30, Lehi does not just see one generic mass, but “multitudes.” Though the makeup of the groups is homogeneous (making them somewhat surrealistic), the groups may be distinguished by a characteristic or characteristics that define themselves along with the other members of the specific grouping.

The distinction between “numberless concourses of people” and “multitudes” can be found in the separation stage, where they are truly separated from one another into three primary groupings. Everyone in the first group does the exact same thing: they start on the path and then lose their way after the mist of darkness arises. The people in the second group make their way to the tree and partake of the fruit, then fall away because of the people in the great and spacious building. And, while the people in the third group actually comprise two subgroups, each of the subgroups is homogeneous—the first group partakes of the fruit and remains true, while everyone in the second group does not even try to make it to the tree and falls away in various ways. Though it would be unrealistic in the actual, physical world, in this visionary world there is absolutely no overlapping.

At first, it may seem surprising to consider the groups to be learning communities when it does not appear that they are organized for the purpose of learning, but it is important to remember that many of the clubs Smith writes about are not primarily organized for learning purposes either. (People usually organize a soccer team to play soccer, not to learn about soccer—though the players will naturally learn about soccer while they play it.) The central image of learning in the vision is the tree of life, so it is important to see how these learning communities relate to that image. Most of the groups never make it to the tree. In fact, several of the groups do not even seem to have the partaking of the fruit as their purpose. However, despite the fact that most of the groups never participate in the full learning experience made possible by the tree of life, they are still learning communities.

Though we often speak of one influence or another impeding learning, what we more accurately mean is that the influence is impeding learning the skill or idea that we wish to be learned. People learn all of the time; it is virtually impossible to stop a person from learning something, even if the only thing he or she is learning is that there is not much worth learning at the moment. Students who are frustrated over the multiplication tables may not be learning the multiplication tables, but they are learning something: memorizing the multiplication tables is frustrating, difficult work. “If there is interest and comprehension, then learning is inevitable and effortless. If there is no interest or comprehension, learning may still take place but with more difficulty and what is also inevitably learned is that the task or subject matter is uninteresting, incomprehensible, and not something anyone would normally do.” [55] The groups in Lehi’s dream are learning communities because they are grouped together for common purposes that center on the tree of life—either going to it or staying away from it. Though they may not be organized for the sole purpose of learning—or even for the primary purpose of learning—they cannot avoid learning as a community.

The first multitude. If we study the first group as a learning community we quickly see a fundamental quality to their experience as a group: despite the dangers of the mist of darkness, they do not even attempt to hold to the rod of iron. The mist would pose no danger to their progression along the path if they would hold to the rod, but they do not touch it. Perhaps they do not see the rod or they see it but do not believe it can help them. Perhaps they consider it too much work to hold to the rod. Though we do not know the specific reason they do not touch the rod, it is possible that the underlying principle could be lack of faith. Just as someone who has faith in Christ turns to him and relies on him, if this group had had sufficient faith they would have seen the rod and known its importance.

One of the elements of their experience that could have easily prevented or destroyed the group’s faith is the fear that the mist of darkness probably created in them. [56] It makes sense that a group of people traveling along a path would feel intense fear if suddenly a mist of darkness arose and they could no longer see where they were going. Such fear would have a devastating effect on their ability to learn. [57] Fear is often a daunting enemy to teaching and learning. Teachers may be fearful that they will not be liked, that they will look foolish for not knowing some answer, that students will be disruptive, that their jobs are in jeopardy for one reason or another. Students’ fears may often be similar to those of their teachers: they will not be liked, they will look foolish for not knowing some answer, the learning environment will be disruptive rather than safe, or their status may be in jeopardy for one reason or another. [58] Because of these fears, there is the danger that less teaching and less learning will take place. Teachers may be more prone to rely on old notes—and methods—that seemed to work last time, and students may find safety in not answering a question or answering in a safe way that the textbook supports despite their own thoughts.

The initiation of this first multitude ends with the separation stage. They do not have a threshold experience, as they never even make it to the tree of life. And they do not have an incorporation stage because they never return to society. They simply wander off and are lost.

The second multitude. While the first multitude never holds the rod of iron, this second group does take hold of the rod and makes it to the tree of life. They successfully complete their separation stage and do not get lost. And, since they partake of the fruit, they successfully complete their threshold experience as well—at least, at first it appears that way. Quickly they become ashamed and fall away because of the mocking of the people in the great and spacious building. [59] This second multitude apparently cares more about what others think of them than they do about the fruit of the tree of life. Unfortunately, they have not learned what these people about whom Palmer writes understand: “These are people who have come to understand that no punishment anyone might lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with the truth we know on the inside. As soon as we make that decision, amazing things happen. For one thing, the enemy stops being the enemy.” [60]

And who is the enemy of this second group? It is yet another group—a group not on the path but rather in the great and spacious building. Like the others, this group in the building represents another club, another communal learning group. Their “exceedingly fine” (1 Nephi 8:27) clothes and their relative seclusion up in the building are barriers to others knowing them for who they really are. As Elder Cook notes, “We want people to know us and love us for being ourselves, not for external adornments used to attract attention or perhaps even motivate some unrighteous feelings in those who might be influenced by us.” [61] These people are learning things while in that building, but they are not things of the heart. The people in the building have learned the power they may have through being critical of others, through mocking them. Perhaps these people secretly envy those who have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life, but they are determined to keep such a feeling a secret. “Fashionably dressed beautiful people,” Nibley writes, “partying in the top-priced upper apartments and penthouses of a splendid high-rise, have fun looking down and commenting on a bedraggled little band of transients eagerly eating fruit from a tree in a field.” [62]

Why do the people in the building persecute those who partake of the fruit? What difference does it make to them that there are those who have gone to the tree of life? The people who have been to the tree are not preaching against those in the building. They are not preaching against anything. So far as we know, they are not even speaking. Perhaps they are being persecuted for the same reason that prophets often are. Nibley writes that “a prophet is a witness, not a reformer. Criticism of the world is always implicit in a prophet’s message of repentance, but he is not sent for the purpose of criticizing the world.” The Lord and his Apostles were not persecuted for their ideas, but it “was as witnesses endowed with power from on high that they earned the hatred of the world.” The prophet Joseph Smith was likewise persecuted for his witness. [63] The people who have partaken of the tree do not have to say anything to be a threat to the people in the building; their simple existence stands as a witness against the flashier group up high. They show the world that there is a way other than that of the great and spacious building. They have learned what needed to be learned and have done what needed to be done. Despite their experience, however, those in the second group fall because of the persecution they receive. This experience of the second multitude is similar to what sometimes happens in our schools. People who care little for their studies and merely inhabit the halls of the school sometimes mock those who are the actual students, the diligent, dedicated partakers of the fruit of the tree. And some of these students, when they see what more popular people at the school are doing or when they tire of the pain of being ridiculed, choose to leave their “club” of learners and join some other group that is more socially acceptable.

The persecution the partakers of the fruit receive from the people in the building is relatively mild, especially compared to any kind of physical, violent persecution. We would like to believe that the experience of partaking of the fruit would be such an exquisite, life-changing moment that no amount of persecution would deter them from living righteously. But such is not always the case. Those who teach may wish to believe that if their students are exposed to truth they will embrace it and choose to live in harmony with it. However, the act of teaching and learning does not guarantee the integrity of the soul. Teachers may teach truth with power and authority, and students may even learn that truth, but living up to that truth is sometimes a different matter.

Though the second multitude completes its separation stage, it does not complete its initiation. The members of this group partake of the fruit but deny themselves the complete life-changing, threshold experience by feeling ashamed and falling into “forbidden paths”—lost. Like the first multitude, this second group fails their initiation.

The third multitude. The third group consists of two subgroups. This portion of the vision “appears to depict a polarization between the wicked and the righteous.” [64] The righteous subgroup partakes of the tree and remains faithful to the experience. The wicked subgroup has three smaller groups within it: the first feels their way to the building, creating the image of people groping in the dark, not being able to rely on vision because they are blind; the second drowns in the depths of the fountain; and the third wanders on strange roads, lost from Lehi’s view.

Interestingly, this first subgroup completes the separation and threshold experience stages of the ritual, but we are not given an account of their incorporation phase. We can assume they return to society as transformed individuals, ready to live up to their knowledge and experience, but the record ends with their threshold experience. In a way, this account is similar to the experience that many teachers have with their very best students. They see them successfully complete their separation stage as they grow more independent, and their threshold experience stage as they gain new knowledge and experiences that transform them for the better, but the teachers often do not get to see what their former students do with what they have learned.

The second subgroup barely begins their separation stage before they end up lost, without even trying to progress toward the threshold experience. Unfortunately, this story reminds teachers of the students they have often agonized over—the ones who, for whatever unseen reason, do not seem to try to learn and often give up, lost.

From an educational viewpoint, the nature of these three multitudes is fascinating. The fact that no group ever intermingles with another group, that each appears as a discreet unit with no variances within it, supports what Smith writes about learning clubs and Palmer about learning communities. There is nothing in the vision to indicate that the people are assigned to their respective groups, or that they are forced into them in any way. The people in the groups seem to be together because they choose to be together. And they learn from those within their group—for better or worse. Except for the one subgroup in the third multitude, the experiences of each of the groups and of Laman and Lemuel teach us that, unfortunately, there are students who fail—sometimes not because of being poorly taught, but because they choose not to experience what they could through wholly participating in the initiation process.

Lehi’s vision of the tree of life is a powerful passage of scripture on many different levels. Among its many lessons is what the careful reader can learn about how a great teacher may teach and how diligent students may learn through what can be called a ritual of initiation. The vision also shows us how students who refuse to embrace this kind of experiential learning can, as a result, end up failing. By reading the vision of the tree of life with the question of teaching and learning in mind, we can see it as a model of teaching and learning that reveres the importance of the spirit and not just the mind. “These terms would describe the roots of teaching and learning, not just the branches—words like faith, love, joy, reverence, discernment, and humility, or inspire, ponder, and edify ,” Osguthorpe writes. “These terms were once central to teaching and learning but have long since lost their place in our conversation about education.” [65]

[1] I rely upon Parker Palmer’s writings because he is recognized as one of the leaders in the movement to consider the spiritual qualities of teaching and learning. Rather than just focusing on how the vision might help us learn more about teaching and learning the gospel, this paper is also concerned with how it helps with teaching and learning in general. Palmer helps us to see that these principles do not just apply to teaching the scriptures in a religious setting; they are helpful in any educational environment.

[2] Joan Halifax, “Learning as Initiation: Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Healing,” in The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education , ed. Steven Glazer (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Putnam, 1999), 173.

[3] In fact, Van Gennep writes of these three stages as centered around the concept of thresholds, or liminality . The rites of separation are preliminal, the rites of transition are liminal, and the rites of incorporation are postliminal. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage , trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 11.

[4] Halifax, “Learning as Initiation,” 174. Halifax also correlates the rites of passage with phases of a particular Zen Buddhist order. “The first tenet of the order is ‘not-knowing’ and denotes separation from the familiar, conditioned world of knowing, the opening of the spontaneous mind of the beginning. The second tenet is ‘bearing witness,’ and emphasizes being fully present to the suffering and joy in oneself and the world. The third tenet is ‘healing oneself and others’ through returning to the world with the aspiration of liberating oneself and others from suffering.”

[5] Richard Dilworth Rust, Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997), 221. For more on this topic, see pages 221–28.

[6] For an informative discussion of Lehi, see H. Donl Peterson, “Father Lehi,” in The Book of Mormon: First Nephi, the Doctrinal Foundation , ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1988).

[7] Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III, eds., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 192.

[8] Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974), 129. It also symbolizes “mythic nothingness” and “the Great Void.”

[9] Wilfred L. Guerin and others, eds., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature , 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161.

[10] Richard Dilworth Rust, “Book of Mormon Imagery,” in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon , ed. John L. Sorenson and Melvin J. Thorne (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT FARMS, 1991), 137.

[11] M. Catherine Thomas, “The Provocation in the Wilderness and the Rejection of Grace,” in Thy People Shall Be My People and Thy God My God , ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 169.

[12] “Certainly there is no doubt at all that the Book of Mormon is speaking of desert most of the time when it talks about wildernesses.” Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon , 3rd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1988), 135. Nibley later observes that the “desert has two faces: it is a place both of death and of refuge, of defeat and victory, a grim coming down from Eden and yet a sure escape from the wicked world, the asylum alike of the righteous and the rascal. The pilgrims’ way leads through sand and desolation, but it is the way back to paradise; in the desert we lose ourselves to find ourselves” (148).

[13] Ryken, Wilhoit, and Longman, Dictionary , 944.

[14] Arnold Whittick, Symbols, Signs, and Their Meaning and Uses in Design , 2nd ed. (London: Leonard Hill, 1971), 349.

[15] Guerin and others, Handbook of Critical Approaches , 161.

[16] Whittick, Symbols, Signs, and Their Meaning , 349.

[17] Walter Lewis Wilson, Wilson’s Dictionary of Bible Types (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1957), 382.

[18] de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery , 388.

[19] “The Book of Mormon has a good deal to say about messengers in white. Lehi’s desert vision opens with ‘a man, and he was dressed in a white robe,’ who becomes his guide (1 Nephi 8:5). Lehi is shown ‘twelve ministers, . . . their garments . . . made white’ (1 Nephi 12:10), followed by three generations of men whose ‘garments were white, even like unto the Lamb of God’ (1 Nephi 12:11). Soon after, Nephi also in a vision ‘beheld a man, and he was dressed in a white robe,’ this being John who was to come (1 Nephi 14:19).

“‘There can no man be saved,’ says Alma, ‘except his garments are washed white’ (Alma 5:21). He tells how the ancient priesthood ‘were called after this holy order, and were sanctified, and their garments were washed white through the blood of the Lamb. Now they . . . [have] their garments made white, being pure and spotless before God’ (Alma 13:11–12). But the most moving and significant passage is his formal prayer for the city of Gideon: ‘May the Lord bless you, and keep your garments spotless, that ye may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham Isaac, and Jacob, and the holy prophets, . . . having your garments spotless even as their garments are spotless, in the kingdom of heaven to go no more out’ (Alma 7:25).” Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah , 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1988), 156.

[20] I have written elsewhere about another possible identity for the man in the white robe:

“One more future historical event is part of the vision of the tree of life but is not included in either account: the end of the world. In his vision, Nephi sees John the Revelator and is told that John ‘shall see and write the remainder of these things; yea, and also many things which have been. And he shall also write concerning the end of the world’ (1 Nephi 14:21–22). In other words, Nephi is stopped from giving a complete account of his vision because it includes the end of the world, and the Savior has chosen John to write about that in the book of Revelation.

“The presence of John the Revelator in Nephi’s vision adds another element of historical reality to the vision. The way in which Nephi describes his vision of John is significant to the beginning of Lehi’s vision: ‘I looked and beheld a man, and he was dressed in a white robe’ (1 Nephi 14:19). Nephi’s prophetic vision, which forms an interpretation of his father's dream, drawing out its apocalyptic nature, now comes full circle, ending where his father’s dream began (see 1 Nephi 8:5). Though there have been other interpretations of whom the man in the white robe represents in Lehi’s dream, from a messenger to a Christ-figure to Moses, I believe that John the Revelator is one important possibility.

“Pursuing this idea, we find John greeting Lehi at the beginning of his vision and serving as his guide, taking him to the point when Lehi can turn directly to the Lord and see a vision that can be understood to concern not just his family, or even his descendants, but also the entire world and its ultimate destiny. Thus, when reading 1 Nephi 14:25—‘The Lord God hath ordained the apostle of the Lamb of God [John] that he should write [of the apocalypse]’—we are not surprised that the Lord would appoint the man he ordained for that purpose to begin and end the vision of the tree of life in the Book of Mormon. Lehi and Nephi may have experienced more in their visions than they recorded. For example, perhaps they both saw the man in the white robe at the beginning and end of their respective visions. However, if we consider what we do know from the record the Book of Mormon offers, it becomes significant that the man who appears at the beginning of Lehi’s account could also be the one appearing at the end of Nephi’s, thus emphasizing the relatedness of the two accounts.” Charles Swift, “Lehi’s Vision of the Tree of Life: Understanding the Dream as Visionary Literature,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 63.

[21] Gene R. Cook, Teaching by the Spirit (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000), 15.

[22] Russell T. Osguthorpe, The Education of the Heart: Rediscovering the Spiritual Roots of Learning (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 1996), 84.

[23] If we turn to an American dictionary in use at the time that the Book of Mormon was translated we find that waste has as its third definition a meaning that is remarkably appropriate for this vision: “A desolate or uncultivated country. The plains of Arabia are mostly a wide waste.” W aste can be another word for wilderness, so this waste could either be a part of the previously mentioned wilderness or a different one entirely. See Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, Facsimile Edition , 6th ed. (San Francisco: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1989).

[24] Osguthorpe, Education of the Heart , 84–85.

[25] Cook, Teaching by the Spirit , 15–16.

[26] Palmer explains the notion that “covering the field” may mean teaching less. “In every great novel, there is a passage that when deeply understood, reveals how the author develops character, establishes tension, creates dramatic movement. With that understanding, the student can read the rest of the novel more insightfully. In every period of history, there is an event that when deeply understood, reveals not only how historians do their work but also illumines the general dynamics of that epoch. In the work of every philosopher, there is a pivotal idea that when deeply understood, reveals the foundations of his or her system or nonsystem of thought.

“By teaching this way, we do not abandon the ethic that drives us to cover the field—we honor it more deeply. Teaching from the microcosm, we exercise responsibility toward both the subject and our students by refusing merely to send data ‘bites’ down the intellectual food chain but by helping our students understand where the information comes from and what it means. We honor both the discipline and our students by teaching them how to think like historians or biologists or literary critics rather than merely how to lip-sync the conclusions others have reached.” Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 123.

[27] Thomas, “Provocation,” 169.

[28] Nibley, Approach to the Book of Mormon , 253–54.

[29] Parker J. Palmer, To Know As We Are Known (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 121.

[30] M. Catherine Thomas, “Types and Shadows of Deliverance in the Book of Mormon,” in Doctrines of the Book of Mormon: The 1991 Sperry Symposium , ed. Bruce A. Van Orden and Brent L. Top (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 186.

[31] E. O. James, The Tree of Life: An Archaeological Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 1.

[32] A number of scholars have discussed the tree as a symbol of the sacred in various cultures, such as Thomas Barns, “Trees and Plants,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics , ed. James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 12:448–57; John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1985), 47; John M. Lundquist, “The Common Temple Ideology of the Ancient Near East,” in The Temple in Antiquity: Ancient Records and Modern Perspectives , ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1984), 53–76; C. Wilfred Griggs, “The Tree of Life in Ancient Cultures,” Ensign , June 1988, 26–31; John W. Welch, “The Narrative of Zosimus (History of the Rechabites) and the Book of Mormon,” in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins , ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997), 323–74; Irene M. Briggs, “The Tree of Life Symbol: Its Significance in Ancient American Religion” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1950); Allen J. Christenson, “The Sacred Tree of the Ancient Maya,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 1–23; Donald W. Parry, “Garden of Eden: Prototype Sanctuary,” in Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism , ed. Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1994), 126–57; Arnold Whittick, Symbols, Signs, and Their Meaning (cited above).

[33] Joseph Fielding McConkie and Donald W. Parry, A Guide to Scriptural Symbols (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1990), 104.

[34] “From the outset of their encounter Pilate tries to objectify Jesus by forcing him into the category of ‘king.’ He is trying to make Jesus a comprehensible and dispensable entity in the political terms of the time. But Jesus, the person, resists Pilate’s categories. He asks, ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?’ suggesting that Pilate’s opening question comes from impersonal caricature, not personal understanding. He says that his ‘kingdom’ is not of this world, that it cannot be comprehended in objective political terms. He puts forward a personal claim related to his very birth about his reason for being. But Pilate is incapable of knowing this personal truth because he holds the person at arm’s length, treating him as an object, a thing, a ‘what.’ By reducing truth to objective terms Pilate puts himself beyond truth’s reach. Eventually, he assents to murdering a personal truth that calls for conversion in favor of an objectivism that leaves him in control.

“The story suggests that in Christian understanding truth is neither an object ‘out there’ nor a proposition about such objects. Instead, truth is personal, and all truth is known in personal relationships. Jesus is a paradigm, a model of this personal truth. In him, truth, once understood as abstract, principled, propositional, suddenly takes on a human face and a human frame. In Jesus, the disembodied ‘word’ takes flesh and walks among us. Jesus calls us to truth, but not in the form of creeds or theologies or world-views. His call to truth is a call to community—with him, with each other, with creation and its Creator. If what we know is an abstract, impersonal, apart from us, it cannot be truth, for truth involves a vulnerable, faithful, and risk-filled interpenetration of the knower and the known. Jesus calls Pilate out from behind his objectivism into a living relationship of troth. Pilate, taking refuge behind the impersonal objectivist ‘what,’ is unable to respond.” Palmer, To Know as We Are Known , 48–49.

[35] Palmer, To Know As We Are Known , 69.

[36] Palmer, To Know As We Are Known , 31.

[37] Lehi’s desire to share what he has discovered with his family is not only a powerful illustration of a father and husband’s love for his family, but is also indicative of the feeling of a people. “Perhaps the most common and most touching theme in the vast corpus of Arabic desert inscriptions is the theme of longing and looking for one’s family. When the writer comes to water and rests, he wishes for his family, and is usually smitten with terrible longing to see them.” Nibley, Approach to the Book of Mormon , 255.

[38] One might argue that it is possible Lehi said quite a bit, but that it was simply not recorded. Perhaps Lehi, in telling his family about his vision, said that he had lectured them but Nephi just left if out of his account. Or, perhaps, Lehi did have more to say in the actual vision but did not relate that to his family. In any case, we are studying the account of Lehi’s vision as found in 1 Nephi 8. If more were said in the vision but the account does not include that, then that in itself is significant. Whether the lack of speaking can be attributed to what happened in the vision or to how it was recorded in the Book of Mormon, the fact remains that the text we have has Lehi saying very little—regardless of the cause, that fact is symbolically significant. This principle of interpretation holds true throughout our discussion of Lehi’s vision—we are discussing the text itself, not all of the possibilities we can imagine surrounding the events that actually occurred. Indeed, the only access we have to those events is through the text.

[39] Susan Easton Black, “‘Behold, I Have Dreamed a Dream,’” in The Book of Mormon: First Nephi, the Doctrinal Foundation , 118.

[40] Palmer, Courage to Teach , 120.

[41] McConkie and Parry, Guide to Scriptural Symbols , 94. Though I quote this passage from Revelation, I do not imply that the Greek word translated into iron rod means the same thing as iron rod in the Book of Mormon. One of the unique qualities of the Book of Mormon is that it is an ancient text that was translated by the inspiration of God directly into nineteenth-century American English. Regardless of original Greek meanings, the Lord knew when he inspired the translation of the Book of Mormon that the term iron rod was also used in the English version of Revelation. That fact alone warrants a comparison regardless of what the Greek word originally meant.

[42] Palmer, To Know As We Are Known , 59.

[43] Black, “‘Behold, I Have Dreamed a Dream,’” 118.

[44] Palmer, To Know As We Are Known , 65.

[45] de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery , 359.

[46] McConkie and Parry, Guide to Scriptural Symbols , 89.

[47] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 144.

[48] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return , trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 17–18.

[49] Nibley, Since Cumorah , 157.

[50] Rust, Feasting on the Word , 209.

[51] Bruce J. Boehm, “Wanderers in the Promised Land: A Study of the Exodus Motif in the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3, no. 1 (1994): 187–203.

[52] Reading “is not a solitary activity. Readers are never alone. Readers can join the company of the characters they read about—that is the reason we read stories of people with whom we can identify or of situations in which we would like to be.” We do not only join the company of the characters, but also of the authors. “We can share ideas and experiences with them, often in considerably more comfort and security than the authors were in when they had their ideas and experiences or wrote their books. We can also employ authors as guides to help us to learn new words, to sharpen our skills of reading and writing, and to augment our abilities in the expression of ideas, in argument, and in thinking creatively.” Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 24.

[53] Frank Smith, Between Hope and Havoc: Essays into Human Learning and Education (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 40.

[54] Smith, Book of Learning and Forgetting , 11.

[55] Smith, Book of Learning and Forgetting , 54.

[56] After the disciples on the boat awoke the Savior because they feared the storm, he drew a relationship between fear and faith: “And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” (Matthew 8:26).

[57] Palmer, Courage to Teach , 36–38. Palmer identifies four particular fears that hurt us in education: fear of diversity, fear of conflict, fear of losing identity, and fear of changing our lives. Each of these fears is part of what he calls the “fear of the live encounter.”

[58] “Space itself is often frightening. Students are threatened by an open invitation to learn for themselves and to help each other learn; they would much rather have their education packaged and sold by the teacher. They are threatened by the strangeness of what they do not know, by the thought of having to expose their ignorance, by having to relate to their peers in ways that would hardly occur to them outside the classroom, and by the possibility of a failure that will mar their self-esteem and careers. Students come into a classroom with these fears close to the surface. If they are not acknowledged and addressed they will close down the space for learning.

“But teachers, too, enter the classroom with fears; at least I do. I am afraid of being inadequately prepared, of having my own ignorance exposed, of meeting the glazed eyes and bored expressions of some of my students. Behind my role and my expertise, I wonder what they think about me as a person. They may be afraid of my power over their lives, the power of the grade and credential, but I am afraid of the negative or ambivalent feelings my power creates in them. I need their affirmation as much as they need mine; I need a sense of community with them that our roles make tenuous.” Palmer, To Know As We Are Known , 84.

[59] Hugh Nibley discusses an historical account of a similar situation in which someone in that area of the world felt extreme distress over public humiliation. “If this seems an extreme reaction to a little loss of face, we need only contemplate a touching inscription cut in the rocks by one who ‘encamped at this place . . . and he rushed forth in the year in which he was grieved by the scoffing of the people: he drove together and lost the camels. . . . Rest to him who leaves (this inscription) untouched!’” Approach to the Book of Mormon , 260.

[60] Parker J. Palmer, “The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning,” in The Heart of Learning , 32.

[61] Cook, Teaching by the Spirit , 168–69.

[62] Hugh Nibley, The Prophetic Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1989), 503.

[63] Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1987), 13, 14, 15–16.

[64] Corbin T. Volluz, “Lehi’s Dream of the Tree of Life: Springboard to Prophecy,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 2, no. 2 (1993): 27.

[65] Osguthorpe, Education of the Heart , xxiv.

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Speeches > Susan Sessions Rugh > Our Journey into the Wilderness

Our Journey into the Wilderness

Susan sessions rugh.

October 13, 2009

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. And I’m grateful to my family, my students, and all of those who have supported me in this effort. I’ve been part of the BYU community much of my life, from the time my father taught here while I was growing up to when I was a student here in the 1970s to my return as a professor a dozen years ago. It’s been a great privilege for me to be associated with BYU and the fine people who are committed to learning in the light of the gospel—a meshing of the Spirit and the intellect.

As I look back to my college years a long time ago, I realize that my BYU education prepared me to become not only a scholar, a citizen, a wife, and a mother but also a Latter-day Saint. My hope is that my words today will especially help you students in your spiritual training that is an integral part of the educational enterprise at this university.

Today I will talk about the crossroads of my scholarly and spiritual lives by pondering the idea of life journeys. I study the history of travel and tourism, and in my most recent book I wrote about the history of family vacationing in post–World War II America. Studying travel and tourism provides a lens through which I view the currents of change, and it allows me to better see how those changes came about and what they mean to us today.

In preparing this talk I realized that the scriptures are replete with stories of travel—defined as moving through space over time in a departure from daily routine. Some scriptural journeys begin as rather everyday pedestrian trips but become momentous through miracles. My first thought was of Paul’s trip to Damascus, when he lost his sight and became converted to Christianity, as told in Acts 22. Other journeys, like the flight of Mary and Joseph with the infant Jesus, are undertaken to escape enemies. Perhaps the greatest journeys are the migrations of an entire people—like the pioneer trek of our ancestors from Illinois to here in the West to build Zion.

By studying these journeys we can gain new insights into our own life journey: from the premortal existence to our birth, our maturation into adults, and our eventual return to our Father in Heaven after we die and are redeemed by the sacrifice of our Savior.

Today I want to focus on a particular kind of travel experience that we read about in the scriptures: a journey into the wilderness. While not all of you will have traveled in an area uninhabited by humans—the definition of wilderness— all of us travel into an unknown future, a figurative wilderness. By considering our journeys into the wilderness—whether literal, such as a weekend camping trip, or figurative, such as our future—today I will draw upon scripture and my own experiences to discuss how we can prepare now to find our way through the unknown territory through which we will travel in our lives. I believe that by so doing we can derive greater meaning from our own journeys into the wilderness.

So I want to divide my topic today into three stages of travel: first, we prepare for the journey ahead; second, we undergo the journey into the wilderness; and third, like historians, we reflect back on our journey to make meaning out of our experience.

Stage 1: Preparing for the Journey

By now all you freshmen taking Religion 121 are well versed in the particulars of Lehi’s journey that open the Book of Mormon. If we read carefully from 1 Nephi 2, we gather that preparations were brief:

And it came to pass that the Lord commanded my father, even in a dream, that he should take his family and depart into the wilderness.

And it came to pass that he was obedient unto the word of the Lord, wherefore he did as the Lord commanded him.

And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness. And he 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 2:2–4]

From these verses we understand that the Lord commanded Lehi to take his family and journey into the wilderness, that Lehi was obedient, and that the whole family (his wife, Sariah, and their four sons—Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, and Sam) went together into the wilderness. We know very little about Lehi’s preparations, but we can make some assumptions. We can assume he sold or gave away his house, the land he had inherited, his silver and gold, and all “his precious things.” Lehi and Sariah left everything and took only tents and provisions—probably food, cooking utensils, tools, and maybe seeds. In fact, so total was Lehi’s commitment to leave it all behind that later the Lord commanded him to return for the plates of Laban. I don’t know how he got hold of the gold he’d given away to get those plates, but somehow he—or his sons—did.

So now let me switch gears and juxtapose this scriptural story with an account of my own journeys into the wilderness. For the past 15 years I have made a summer trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota on the Canadian border. My friends and I travel through the wilderness in canoes, and when we travel from one lake to another, we portage our canoes and belongings over land. An average day includes five to seven such portages, following trails created by French voyageurs who brought in furs to sell at military forts in the 18th century.

For part of our journey we are quite alone, and on rugged routes deep in the wilderness we can travel all day without seeing another person. Each lake is inhabited by a pair of loons, and the birds’ dances across the water at sunset are a treasured sight. We occasionally see dangerous wild animals, black bears, and moose, but the worst wilderness threat in Minnesota, as you all know, is the mosquito! I can see some of you are familiar with the mosquitoes in Minnesota.

Preparing for this trip takes time and effort. Each January I plan my trip by buying a permit through an outfitter and gathering some girlfriends and unsuspecting female relatives like my loyal daughter-in-law to go with me into the wilderness. The next six months I work to stay in good shape and lose those Christmas pounds I gained from eating too much chocolate so that I will be able to carry the 60-pound canoe myself on the portages. It’s important to me to pull my weight and do my fair share of the hard work. I study the map, get used to my hiking boots again, and pack my personal gear: a change of clothing, rain gear, swimsuit and towel, reading material, and strong, 100 percent–DEET mosquito repellent. Our outfitter supplies us with canoes, camping gear (like tents and cooking equipment), and dehydrated food. Like Lehi, we know that since we will carry everything ourselves, we want to pack light—but we must also be prepared to travel alone in the wilderness.

Stage 2: The Journey

Let’s return to the Book of Mormon to learn about the journey of Lehi’s family in the wilderness. When they left their camp by the borders of the Red Sea to move into the unknown, they were given a navigational tool. We read in 1 Nephi 16:

And it came to pass that the voice of the Lord spake unto my father by night, and commanded him that on the morrow he should take his journey into the wilderness.

And it came to pass that as my father arose in the morning, and went forth to the tent door, to his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness. . . .

And it came to pass that we did take our tents and depart into the wilderness, across the river Laman. [1 Nephi 16:9–10, 12]

The “round ball of curious workmanship” led them along the best route, where they hunted wild beasts and found fertile areas that provided plant food. Nephi observed that the pointers in the ball “did work according to the faith and diligence and heed which we did give unto them” (1 Nephi 16:28). We do not really know the size of the ball, but we can surmise that it was relatively small, since Nephi wrote, “And thus we see that by small means the Lord can bring about great things” (1 Nephi 16:29). It was like a compass, and if they did not heed it with faith and diligence, it would not work for them.

As in any journey, things go wrong. Nephi’s steel bow broke, his older brothers became angry with him, and everyone was tired and hungry and began murmuring. Only then did the travelers begin to fully appreciate how the “round ball of curious workmanship” guided them. At first they thought the ball was mainly like a compass, but it turned out to be much more than that. And I read again from the scriptures:

And there was also written upon them [the pointers] a new writing, which was plain to be read, which did give us understanding concerning the ways of the Lord; and it was written and changed from time to time, according to the faith and diligence which we gave unto it. [1 Nephi 16:29]

When they paid close attention to the ball, they could see writing that helped them understand the ways of the Lord. The writing changed according to the degree of attention they gave it and according to the circumstances they faced. Thus the “round ball of curious workmanship” gave them direction not only in the way they should travel but also in how they should live. By providing the “round ball of curious workmanship,” the Lord was able to guide them through the wilderness, but only to the degree that they took heed of the ball’s instructions.

I can find parallels to their experiences in my own journeys in the wilderness. Like Lehi’s family, when we go to the Boundary Waters, we go without a guide. We do have a map and a compass, but, like the “round ball,” they are useless unless we actually pay attention to them. Now you might ask yourselves, how could we not pay attention? Well, if you put two good friends in a canoe, and they get to talking, or become so absorbed in the lovely scenery that, behold (and it came to pass, we might say), they can be someplace and not know where they are! Not knowing where you are, obviously, is the definition of being lost.

I have had more experiences of being lost in the wilderness than I care to admit, but let me tell you about the most recent one. A few years ago our group of six took a trip up the Magnetic River to the Saganaga Lake. This is one of my favorite routes, and although it was the third time for me, it was the first time for the others. We were on our final day of the trip, and we were running a bit behind. Our stove had caught on fire in the morning (the fuel hose was not placed properly when we cooked our pancakes), so breakfast was delayed, and we had encountered a few rough portages at midday.

So we arrived on the lake late in the afternoon. Those of you who are sailors will know that late afternoon is when the winds come up, and we were paddling westward directly into the wind. It was a tough paddle, and with the wind in our faces, at times it felt like we were paddling in peanut butter. Two very strong paddlers manned one of our four canoes, and as they got out ahead of us, I noticed that they missed the turn.

Now, this is an easy mistake, because as we looked west there were many islands. If they had read the map more closely or had used their compass, they would have known where to go, but for some reason they lost track of where they were. Yelling into the wind at them would have been futile, and they did not look back to see signals we were giving them with our paddles. (In case you students don’t know, cell phones do not work in the wilderness.)

At that moment I was faced with a dilemma. Should I take the other three canoes the right direction, or should we follow our first canoe off course? What would you do? Because their physical safety was my first concern, I reasoned it was better to be off course together than apart in the right place. We followed them for another half hour before they realized they were lost and pulled over to wait for us. We all pulled up, glad to have a little rest on the island’s mossy bank after an afternoon of paddling into the wind. We gathered around a map, but only after we aligned our intended route on the map with the compass I carried were we able to head off in the proper direction.

But the story does not end here. Because we were wandering in the wilderness for an extra three hours, the campsite we had selected was already taken. It was after seven o’clock and the sun was sinking in the sky when we finally found a less preferable site that was still vacant. Totally exhausted, we disembarked and unloaded our gear, and some set up tents while the others cooked dinner over an open fire. It was eight o’clock when we finally ate our dinner. That night as we lay in our sleeping bags listening to the lullaby of the loons, we were glad to be safe and sound despite our misadventure. It was a hard lesson, but we learned the lesson Lehi’s family learned. Things will go wrong, but if you pay attention to where you are going, use the compass, and stay together, you will complete the journey.

Stage 3: Making Meaning of Our Journey

Like Nephi, I tell you about my journey some time after it has happened. As historians, we know that memories are imperfect and that no two persons remember the same event the same way. What we choose to remember can be more interesting than knowing what really happened. Let’s turn to Alma to understand how Lehi’s descendants made meaning of the great journey to the promised land. First, take note that as modern readers we do not know the name of the “round ball of curious workmanship” until we read Alma’s explanation to his son Helaman over 500 years later. In Alma’s day, Lehi’s descendants were making meaning of the journey. I read from Alma 37:

And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the thing which our fathers call a ball, or director—or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it. . . .

. . . And behold, it was prepared to show unto our fathers the course which they should travel in the wilderness.

And it did work for them according to their faith in God; therefore, if they had faith to believe that God could cause that those spindles should point the way they should go, behold, it was done. [Alma 37:38–40]

Alma explained to Helaman that the Liahona showed them the course that they should travel in the wilderness and that it worked only if they had enough faith to take a look at it and to follow it. Furthermore, as Alma told Helaman, when

they were slothful, and forgot to exercise their faith and diligence . . . then those marvelous works ceased, and they did not progress in their journey;

Therefore, they tarried in the wilderness, or did not travel a direct course, and were afflicted with hunger and thirst, because of their transgressions. [Alma 37:41–42]

What was their transgression? It was that they didn’t exercise faith in the Liahona, didn’t look at the guide the Lord had given them, and lost their way.

As I have made meaning of my own journeys through my photo collections and writings, I have derived lessons that I have only come to understand with the passage of time. Today I realize that Alma’s words certainly applied to my friends and to me in our wilderness journey: We were lost because we were “slothful” and forgot to read the map. So we did not travel a direct course, and we had a very tough go of it. Luckily, with the use of a compass we were able to get back on course and safely make it to our destination.

The experiences of our literal journeys in the wilderness can be applied to our journey through life. Alma explained this to Helaman:

And now, my son, I would that ye should understand that these things are not without a shadow; for as our fathers were slothful to give heed to this compass (now these things were temporal) they did not prosper; even so it is with things which are spiritual. [Alma 37:43]

As Alma reminded Helaman, if we do not heed the direction of the Lord, we will not progress in our journey of life. We can easily lose our way and take unplanned and costly detours, and we might not get back on course to our destination. In our journey of life, we do not have the Liahona, but we do have the Lord to guide us if we will pay heed. Alma assured us that it is easy for us to follow the Lord:

For behold, it is as easy to give heed to the word of Christ, which will point to you a straight course to eternal bliss, as it was for our fathers to give heed to this compass, which would point unto them a straight course to the promised land. [Alma 37:44]

We can find the Lord’s guidance by reading the scriptures, listening to our latter-day prophets, and heeding the counsel of our Church leaders and those who love us. In our recent general conference, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf addressed this subject. At times we may wander away from the gospel and away from gospel principles, and we may feel unworthy to be found. He said:

Though we are incomplete, God loves us completely. Though we are imperfect, He loves us perfectly. Though we may feel lost and without compass, God’s love encompasses us completely. [“The Love of God,” Ensign, November 2009, 22]

By living worthily and seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will have a successful journey in the unknown wilderness of our future. As Alma clearly stated:

And now I say, is there not a type in this thing? For just as surely as this director did bring our fathers, by following its course, to the promised land, shall the words of Christ, if we follow their course, carry us beyond this vale of sorrow into a far better land of promise. [Alma 37:45]

I will close by referring back to my own experience. When I return from my journey in the wilderness each year, the first thing I do, even before I get cleaned up, is call my husband on the telephone. I tell him: “I am back. I am safe. I love you.” I can only imagine that it must be like that when we return to our Heavenly Father. After our life’s journey, we will be reunited with Him and our loved ones, and we can say: “I am back. I am safe. I love you.” It is my hope that we will give heed to the word of Christ to carry us beyond this “vale of sorrow” to live with Him again. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

© Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.

Susan Sessions Rugh was associate dean of the BYU College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences when this devotional address was given on 13 October 2009.

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From a Tiny Island in Maine, He Serves Up Fresh Media Gossip

Rusty Foster could never live in New York. But his hit newsletter, Today in Tabs, is an enduring obsession of the city’s media class.

Rusty Foster in his element at his home in Peaks Island, Maine. Credit... Greta Rybus for The New York Times

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By Steven Kurutz

Reporting from Peaks Island, Maine

• April 17, 2024

In a time when the headlines are dominated by wars and a divisive presidential campaign, the magazine-world rivalry between The Atlantic and The New Yorker doesn’t amount to much.

So you might have missed it when, on April 2, The Atlantic beat The New Yorker in three big categories at the 2024 National Magazine Awards .

But to Rusty Foster, who chronicles the media industry and internet culture in his daily newsletter, Today in Tabs, The Atlantic’s victory was big news.

Shortly after the awards ceremony, which took place at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, Mr. Foster tapped out a fanciful report for his audience of media obsessives. Under the headline “Shutout at the TK Corral,” he wrote that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “solemnly folded up and ate each of his prepared speeches as he watched The Atlantic win every category.”

Mr. Foster then turned his attention to Anna Wintour, the editorial director of Condé Nast, the publishing giant that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and other publications, writing that she “donned an emergency second pair of sunglasses” in reaction to the company’s poor showing.

A surprising thing about Today in Tabs — which has a knowing, satirical tone that has made it an enduring hit among media insiders — is that Mr. Foster writes it from the bucolic setting of Peaks Island, Maine, which is where he was when the National Magazines Awards ceremony took place.

He says he finds New York’s nonstop noise and crowds tiring, and his most recent visit to the city was last May, when he and the youngest of his three children stayed at a Times Square hotel and saw “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway.

One of his friends, Paul Ford , a writer, editor and tech entrepreneur, noted that Mr. Foster, the person, seems to have little in common with the media chronicler of Today in Tabs. “He’s a very New England guy,” Mr. Ford said. “When you meet this guy, if he told you he’s going to make a wooden canoe, you’d go, ‘Alright.’”

A Peaks Islander

Mr. Foster, 47, started Today in Tabs in 2013, when the industry he covers with a mix of affection and scorn was going through a crisis brought on, in part, by the rise of digital technology.

The news media business is in even worse shape now. The Los Angeles Times recently announced that it would slash its newsroom by more than 20 percent, Sports Illustrated has been gutted, and more than 400 union staffers at Condé Nast walked off the job this year after the company announced it planned a layoff. Vice , a onetime colossus of digital media, has filed for bankruptcy; and Gawker and The Awl , a pair of online publications that had an influence on Today in Tabs, are gone.

Amid the economic gloom, Mr. Foster has what many media outlets crave: a devoted readership willing to pay for content.

Around 10 percent of his 36,000 subscribers are paying readers, he said, who fork over $6 per month or $50 per year. That’s not quite three-bedrooms-in-Cobble-Hill money, but it allows Mr. Foster to make a living in media at a time when many veteran journalists are struggling to find jobs.

From the start, he has written Today in Tabs from Peaks Island, a nearly one-square-mile patch of rocky land in Casco Bay. Reachable only by ferryboat, it has roughly 900 full-time residents. Aside from a few homey dining establishments (including Milly’s Seaside Skillet Kitchen and the Cockeyed Gull Restaurant) and a basic supermarket, there’s not much commerce to speak of.

The locals have an independent character. Many live in weather-beaten cottages and drive junker cars that don’t require a state inspection sticker if kept on-island. Since the 1880s, Peaks Islanders have mounted six unsuccessful campaigns to secede from Portland , which is three miles away and governs the island.

On a cool, breezy morning, Mr. Foster led me from the ferry to his 2001 Chevy Suburban, which he had converted to an “overlander” vehicle to take his family on road trips to Yellowstone National Park and other sites. The interior had built-in beds. The roof held two elongated water storage tanks.

He didn’t say much during the short drive. The pavement gave way to a dirt road, and he came to a stop in front of a modest two-story fixer-upper built in the early 1900s.

In the back yard, Mr. Foster’s island car, a Jeep Liberty, was up on jacks. Nearby was a chicken coop he had built for the flock of laying hens his family kept when the kids were little.

Inside, he sat at the kitchen table and unwrapped a croissant that I had brought along from Portland. As his Rhodesian Ridgeback, Sam, shuffled underfoot for crumbs, he spoke in quiet tones about growing up in Massachusetts and spending happy childhood summers on Peaks Island, where his grandparents had a cottage.

At the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., he was all set to major in film studies, only to drop out during his senior year. While there, he met Christina Fischer, a history major. They married and moved to San Francisco in 2000. Mr. Foster worked as a programmer for an internet startup in the waning days of the dot-com bubble, but he didn’t care for the city or the tech scene, and the couple made the move to Peaks Island in 2001.

“A lot of things happened in a very short period of time — and then we moved here, and nothing happened,” Mr. Foster said with a laugh.

He recalled his first brush with the internet in the late 1980s, when his father, who worked as a franchise developer for Dunkin’ Donuts, signed up for CompuServe, one of the first online services. Mr. Foster learned to type on its chat function, CB Simulator. For a self-described shy, nerdy teenager, the ability to meet people online was revelatory.

“What I discovered was that writing is the easiest way for me to talk to people,” he said. “And it’s the way I feel the most that I’m expressing myself.”

Mr. Foster is something of a Zelig-like figure in internet history, popping up in key roles at various stages in the web’s development. He was an influencer long before that was even a thing. A group blog he created in 1999, Kuro5hin (motto: “Technology and Culture, from the Trenches”), was one of the first sites that allowed users to post comments and create their own blog pages.

Kuro5hin became a gathering place for early adopters and — along with Slashdot and Wikipedia — helped shape the open-source culture of the early internet. Mr. Foster, then known as “Rusty from Kuro5hin,” made plenty of friends online as he built a career as a freelance programmer.

He was an early shareholder in Sports Blog Nation, the precursor to Vox Media. In 2013, he was hired by Stephen Colbert and the comedy writer Rob Dubbin to help develop Scripto , a scriptwriting software used by “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show.” Now and then, those jobs took him to New York. But even in his coding days, Mr. Foster found that he got along better with journalists than tech people.

“There aren’t a lot of tech leaders that I find interesting,” he said in his kitchen. “I’m a language person. Media people come from words. I like their approach to the world. They have skeptical curiosity.”

He started Today in Tabs almost on a whim, thanks to the encouragement of Caitlin Kelly, who was then a senior web producer for The New Yorker. (The newsletter’s keyword, “tabs,” is internet shorthand for browser windows as well as slang for the latest articles and memes that people were getting worked up about online.) Mr. Foster laid out the Today in Tabs origin story in a 2021 edition of his newsletter.

“One day in 2013, underemployed and wasting time on Twitter, I tweeted ‘Today in Tabs,’” he wrote. In reply, Ms. Kelly tweeted, “wait is this a e-newsletter I can subscribe to?”

Mr. Foster continued: “‘A e-newsletter?’ I thought, in the amusing old-timey patois of 2013, ‘Why ever not?’ So that afternoon I sent the first Today in Tabs to 25 subscribers, beginning with this NY Post story about love and misogyny and sandwiches.”

Soon enough, he was tracking “the insidery squabbles and hate reads and high-minded-if-fleeting-feuds” in the media world, as The New York Observer put it in a 2014 profile. Today in Tabs quickly became a favorite of the web-savvy journalists who worked at Buzzfeed, Vox and other digital outlets.

Mr. Foster shut it down in 2016 because his job at Scripto demanded too much of his time. By 2021, he was back up and posting, first on Substack and then on the publishing platform Beehiiv. Restarting Today in Tabs, he said, was his attempt to leave programming behind and make a living as a writer.

Though he has written for The New Yorker, The Awl and other publications, Mr. Foster has never held a staff position as a journalist. And although he now makes his living tracking the media, he said he still thought of it as a hobby — “and it’s a weird hobby to have.”

Some people golf or sport-fish. Mr. Foster likes immersing himself in burn reviews of the new essay collection by Lauren Oyler and going down the rabbit holes of the Kate Middleton saga . In other words, putting together a newsletter about the media and online life comes naturally to him.

“It’s not a job so much as a thing my brain does,” he said. “If I read a certain amount of content every day, then my brain will produce 800 words about it. As long as I can sit and write that down, I’m good.”

Deadline Days

Unlike other industry newsletters, Today in Tabs, which is published four or five days a week, does not deliver scoops or exclusive interviews with boldface names. Billed as “your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletter,” it is an 800-word snapshot of what people (mostly journalists) are talking about in the moment.

What readers are really paying for is Mr. Foster’s sensibility.

He writes in a cynical but still bright-eyed, quirkily punctuated, jokey style — internet voice — that will be recognizable to anyone who remembers Gawker, The Awl or, further back, Suck.com.

Matt Levine, an opinion columnist for Bloomberg, called Mr. Foster “a tremendous stylist,” adding that Today in Tabs was an inspiration for his own newsletter, Money Stuff . “I’m on the internet all day, on Twitter all day, and it’s this shared psychosis,” Mr. Levine said. “Rusty captures the nonsense of the day but in a stylistic way that makes it seem like literature.”

Elizabeth Lopatto , a senior writer for the Verge, says Mr. Foster’s appeal lies in his geographic and psychic remove from what he writes about. “As much as I love media reporters, there’s something to be said for that outside perspective,” Ms. Lopatto said.

“People read to have fun,” she added. “I get the sense that Rusty is writing that newsletter trying to make himself laugh.”

Though a creature of the internet, Mr. Foster is not unlike an old-school newspaper reporter in his adherence to a daily deadline.

Mr. Foster’s wife works as a data systems specialist for the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, a nonprofit, working from home or in Augusta. His three children, Mica, 19, Calvin, 16, and Ash, 11, are all in school. That leaves him padding around the house for much of the day.

He gets up around 8 a.m. and moseys down to the kitchen to make coffee. He takes a mug upstairs and gets back in bed, where he sits with his laptop, catching up on what’s happening online. If something piques his interest, he bookmarks it in a file.

“That’s my notebook,” Mr. Foster said. “It’s really just a list of links. And hopefully I remember why I bookmarked it.”

He checks in with a Slack channel that includes reporter friends who give him a sense of what journalists are talking about. A group of Today in Tabs enthusiasts on the social media platform Discord drop off more links — in effect, they are Mr. Foster’s volunteer stringers.

He makes lunch and takes Sam for a walk down the dirt road. He aims to start writing by 1 p.m. and to post by 4 or 5. If he hasn’t gotten going in earnest by 3, panic sets in.

He writes at a small desk in his bedroom. On the wall is a plaque he had made that says: “Rusty Foster, Weird Media Gremlin.”

Tabs is structured like a late-night talk show, starting with a monologue that allows Mr. Foster to riff on a trending topic at length. One day in February, his opening subject was the financier Bill Ackman, whose public fight against his alma mater, Harvard, had made him the subject of several articles , a phenomenon Mr. Foster dubbed “ the Ackmanaissance .” Mr. Foster wrote that a Washington Post profile of Mr. Ackman made him seem like “an overconfident dimwit”; from there, he dove into a New York magazine piece on the man to come up with “the eight best New York Magazine roasts of Bill Ackman that he won’t understand.”

The Today in Tabs opener is followed by a middle section of rapid-fire links to articles and news items, many of them written in insidery lingo. Here, Mr. Foster might also reveal his pet causes and pet peeves (One hyperlink reads: “Molly White On Chris Dixon’s Dumb Crypto Book”). Each installment of the newsletter ends with a musical guest — or, rather, an embedded song video, usually by an indie band.

His fellow Peaks Islanders have little idea what he does for a living or that in certain circles he is known as “Rusty from Tabs.” He has not been profiled in The Portland Press Herald or The Peaks Island News. He tells people who ask that he’s a writer. When they ask him what he writes about, he struggles to explain what it is that a weird media gremlin does.

“I usually tell them, ‘I make jokes about the news,’” he said.

For someone who has been online 35 years, Mr. Foster retains a remarkable ability to disconnect from the machine. He’s an engaged parent, as well as an avid kayaker and hiker. He also belongs to a wilderness search-and-rescue team that does summer shifts in Baxter State Park, in northern Maine. On weekends, he mostly stays off the internet.

“I compartmentalize a lot,” he said. “I try to be doing the thing that I’m doing when I’m doing it.”

His readers will soon have to match his ability to manage an online obsession. Starting July 2, Mr. Foster is taking a break from Today in Tabs to hike the Appalachian Trail with his oldest child, who is set to graduate from college in May and move overseas in the fall.

In addition to a good pair of trail runners and a waterproof tent, Mr. Foster plans to pack a six-ounce folding keyboard and his smartphone for the 2,200-mile journey. As he has already informed his subscribers, he will start a new newsletter called Today on Trail. More than 2,000 people have signed up to pay Mr. Foster a to-be-determined fee for his “chronicle of what happens in my brain on a five-month hike.”

As he spoke further of his planned hiatus from Today in Tabs, he considered what it would be like to spend several months without a Wi-Fi signal, a prospect that might strike terror, and perhaps a bit of envy, into his readers.

“I was like, What if I got offline a little bit to see what’s in my own head?” Mr. Foster said. “It’s been about three and a half years of doing Tabs consistently. I wonder if there’s something else for me to discover that I could write, if I were not constantly living in that information-soaked environment.”

Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times. More about Steven Kurutz

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When an illegal smoke shop opened across the street, an Upper West Side councilwoman, vowed to close it. What happened next was “like a Fellini movie.”

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