One question that I’ve had in my mind for a long time about
the story in 1 Nephi is, "Why it took Lehi's people eight years to journey in the
wilderness to the seashore at Bountiful?"
I ran across a chapter online recently called “Sojourn,Dwell, and Stay: Terms of Servitude”
from the book From Jerusalem toZarahemla: Literary and Historical Studies of the Book of Mormon
by S. Kent Brown that makes a case from scattered references that Lehi and his
family members were brought into servitude or under the domination of desert
tribesmen either for protection or for food and this is what took up the eight years.
His evidences of this are built upon the following factors:
1)
Nephi uses the term “sojourn” which is also
connected in Bible text to the experience of living as a resident alien in
territory where one owns no property.
(Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph in Egypt, and the children of Israel all
sojourned at various points.)
2)
Laman and Lemuel all speak in retrospect of
their sufferings being so great that it would have been better to have died
than to leave Jerusalem. (A
difficult period of servitude would naturally cause this kind of evaluation, as
it would be a definite drop in status.)
3)
Lehi speaks of this period as “the wilderness of
mine afflictions” and “the days of my greatest sorrow” even though he was well-equipped
for desert living. Something even
greater than family tensions and physical difficulties seems to weighed him
down.
4)
Alma speaks to his son Helaman about the
necessity of remembering how the Lord brought their fathers out of Jerusalem
and delivered them out of bondage and captivity, which suggests there was at
least one incident of divine deliverance from bondage in the story of Lehi and
Nephi and that it wasn’t referring to the much more reent deliverance from
slavery to the Lamanites.
5)
The time it takes a loaded caravan of camels
travel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian ocean is measured in weeks not
years, which suggested that they had to have stayed in one or several places
for extended periods of time.
6)
When Lehi teaches his sons in the promised land,
he uses imagery of freedom and bondage to teach about the importance of
choosing Christ . (I counted eleven major instances in 2 Nephi 1-2 where this is
the case.) This imagery would lack power if they hadn’t experienced some sort
of servility, but if they had experienced it, then Lehi’s admonitions would be
all the more penetrating.
I have an additional supporting point. When Nephi confronts his brothers over
their lack of faith to help build the ship, he uses in his arguments references
to the exodus of the children of Israel out of bondage to counter their
assertions that it would have been better to stay in Jerusalem or to have died
than to have suffered as they had.
He leaves this reference about the good of coming out of bondage hanging in
the air without any textual attempt to liken it to his hearers, and if we
assume that Lehi’s family never experienced bondage or servility, this seems
off topic, but if they did experience
it, then Nephi clearly expected his brothers to get his point without having to
even say, “..and just like it was good for them to escape, it was also a good
thing for us to get out of bondage!”
Brown's thesis makes a lot of sense to me and it sheds light
on some things that were previously puzzling, but it also brings me to wonder
why Nephi would have left such something so big out of his record. Perhaps it was featured more prominently
on his first set of plates but he didn’t consider it as much a sacred thing to
recount...? Maybe he wanted the room for his prophecies?
I don’t know.
What do you think?
2 comments:
I've thought a lot about all that Nephi left out of that record, and I think there is reason that the Lord asked him to write it at the particular point in his life that he did. 30 years after the fact, just before he was to become the prophet-leader, and the things he's noting are important not only for us, but for his people. This writing was making him as much as it was making a record, I think, and we're piecing things together after the fact.
For instance, there is some pretty good evidence that he had struggled with depression. The first part of his record is devoid of references to his thinking patterns, but I can imagine what his journals would have sounded like. We have to search to imagine the differences between what he wrote and how he must have felt *when he was in the experience* and that process is good for us.
I think Brown makes some good points and it's a good hypothesis. I think there's a whole lot that's not recorded, some of which might have been clearer to Joseph because of his reading of the 116 pages.
I suppose that you're referring to the Psalm of Nephi in 2 Nephi 4 when you say he struggled with depression? Any other references that demonstrate this to you?
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