The Book of Mormon: 1 Nephi 1

Today we’ll be studying First Nephi Chapter 1.

The first thing I note about 1 Nephi 1 is that Nephi begins his account about the same way I have started many of my own journals, namely with his reasons for keeping a record.  Here’s my list.

1. He has good parents.
2. He was taught in all the learning of his father (good education).
3. He’s seen lots of trials and afflictions in his life.
4. He’s been highly favored by the Lord all his life.
5. He has had a great knowledge of the goodness and mysteries of God.

It occurs to me that these are good reasons for each of us to keep journals.  There isn’t one of us that doesn’t have at least two or more of these reasons for keeping a personal record of our lives.  There are other reasons, of course, but these, I think, are the primary ones.

Nephi also tells about how he’s keeping his record, in a language that consists of the learning of the Jews and the language or writing of the Egyptians.  Egyptian writing of the day was in modified hieroglyphs called Demotic and, as a result, easier to use when writing on sheets of metal especially when combined with the learning of the Jews to create what Book of Mormon scholars and later chapters of the book itself refer to as Reformed Egyptian. It’s worth noting here that Hebrew, the language of the Jews, isn’t written left to right, the way English is.  It’s written right to left.  Egyptian, however, can be written right to left, left to right or even top to bottom, so it’s very practical to keep records in Demotic, especially if you’re writing it on sheets of metal.

Nephi notes that he knows his record is true, that he is making it with his own hands, and according to his own knowledge.  That’s a nod to a practice that was relatively prevalent in 600 BC of hiring a scribe to write a record for you, as I can assume Laban and his family must have done with the plates of Brass, mentioned in another chapter.  Nephi, here, is saying that there’s no middle man between us and his story.  It’s just us and him and it’s not just a story, either.  This really happened.

We now move down into the beginning of Nephi’s narrative.  Here, Nephi provides a time reference: The first year of the reign of King Zedekiah of Judah.  For that, we have to go to the Bible.  In 2 Chronicles 36:9-11 we learn a few things about this King Zedekiah.  First of all, the king before him, Jehoiachin was only eight years old and reigned for all of three months and ten days.  The scripture says “he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.”  However, I note that, since the kid was only eight, he probably had some counselors that led him pretty far astray and/or his parents brought him up the wrong way.  In general, I’ve found that eight-year-olds, though capable of telling right from wrong, still look to their adult keepers for direction.  About eight years previous to that, Nebucadnezzar, king of Babylon had conquered Judah and taken away several young men, among which were four boys (Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah or Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego).

Anyway, at the end of the year, Nebucadnezzar sent people down and they grabbed him and brought him back to Babylon, along with all the “goodly vessels” (read gold cups and jars and things of that nature) in the temple.  Then Nebucadnezzar made Zedekiah, who was Jehoiachin’s brother, king over Judah.  I don’t know why Zedekiah wasn’t king already if he was older than Jehoiachin (he was twenty one when he came to the throne). We do know, however, that Nebucadnezzar made him swear by God that he wouldn’t rebel against Babylon.  Zedekiah reigned all of eleven years and also did evil in the sight of the Lord “his God,” which I take to mean that he knew he was doing something wrong.  Then, stupidly, to my mind, he decided that he would break his promise to the king who had set him on the throne and rebelled (v. 12-13), even after the Lord sent his prophet, Jeremiah, to warn him to stick close to the gospel or Jerusalem would be destroyed.  He refused to humble himself (which I suppose means that he let his new office get the better of him and forgot that he was nothing more than a puppet king) hardening his heart and stiffening his neck. 

Just a quick note here: a hard heart cannot learn and a stiff neck will not bend.  So, when it says he stiffened his neck and hardened his heart, that simply means he refused to humble himself.

This wasn’t all, however. Not only did Zedekiah rebel, the high priests in the temple and almost everyone else weren’t following the gospel, either.  Verse 14 tells us, “Moreover all the chief of the priests, and the people, transgressed very much after all the abominations of the heathen; and polluted the house of the Lord which he had hallowed in Jerusalem.”  They were following idol worship in the Lord’s temple. 

As usual (v 15) he sent prophets to warn them that Jerusalem would be destroyed if they didn’t repent.  But (v 16) the people abused these messengers and mocked them.  The Lord won’t put up with that for very long at all and, in this case, He didn’t.  He sent the King of the Chaldeans, who wasn’t like Nebucadnezzar at all.  He and his armies didn’t just kill men, they killed boys, girls, old men, young men and children (v17).  So, as was promised, Jerusalem was destroyed. 

Now, way back in the first year of Zedekiah, prophets, including Jeremiah, who was sent specifically to the king, were rising up and commanding the people to repent or the city of Jerusalem would be destroyed.  Lehi, who, we assume, must have been a trader or merchant at the time, must have heard one of these prophets speak.  So, troubled, he was walking along, praying to the Lord for his people, whom he must have loved deeply.  I found this particularly interesting.  It says, “as he went forth [he] prayed unto the Lord.”  That means he was walking and praying.  This is something I frequently do myself.  So I found it interesting to note that I’m not the only one who does that.  So, he’s walking along and praying fervently for his people when, out of nowhere, a pillar of fire comes down from the sky and lands on a rock in front of him.  I don’t know about you, but that would scare me to death.  In the fire, Lehi saw and heard a great deal, so much that Nephi notes “he did quake and tremble exceedingly.” So, if he wasn’t trembling already, what the fire showed him definitely made sure he was.

Then, exhausted, he went home and collapsed onto his bed where, overcome by the Spirit, he had a vision in which the Lord showed him a book that detailed the sins of Jerusalem, or why it would be destroyed unless people repented.  After he’d read the book, he praised the Lord, exclaiming that he believed in the Lord’s mercy to all those who were righteous and repented in his sight, that they wouldn’t die. 

Here, Nephi breaks off to say that he’s not going to write everything his father wrote.  We believe that this record mentioned by Nephi was contained in the first 116 pages translated by Joseph Smith Jr.  These were the pages Martin Harris took to his wife, ostensibly to prove that he wasn’t wasting the family’s money.  She, in her turn, stole them with the hope that Joseph would retranslate them and then they would bring out the originals, cleverly altered of course, to prove that the work was false.  Joseph never retranslated those pages, however, so they are lost to us.  I can only assume that Lehi’s complete genealogy and a complete accounting of all his visions was likely contained in those 116 pages.  By the commandment of the Lord, not knowing why, Nephi abridged this account and then wrote the story of his own life. 

Anyway, Lehi lost no time in becoming one of the messengers mentioned in 2 Chronicles.  Nephi says he went out and began to prophesy about the things he read in the book and that a Messiah would come to redeem them.  Like many of us, the Jews didn’t like being told that they needed to repent.  They got angry and began to plot the murder of Lehi.  Nephi, however, points out that the Lord is merciful with everyone he has selected because they have faith in Him and he can save them from destruction.  We’ll learn more about that in chapter 2.

I apologize for the length of this post.  If you managed to get all the way through it without getting bored, I applaud you.  Until tomorrow.