Come, Follow Me February 12-18: 2 Nephi 3-5
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Exodus
by Terryl Givens
"And it came to pass that the Lord did warn me, that I, Nephi, should depart from them and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me." (2 Nephi 5:5)
The central fact in the history of Israel is the exodus from Egypt and the settling of the Promised Land. Millennia later, the Puritans who settled in America would see themselves as exiles from the Old World, figurative Israelites who were guided to this Promised Land to establish a spiritual Zion.
The Jewish scriptures have no more pervasive and unifying theme than the covenant made with Abraham. It is the basis of both collective and individual identity. It is the foundation not just of a particular status vis à vis other peoples, but it is principally and primarily the guarantee of God’s constant love. A woman may forget her nursing child, the Lord assures them through Isaiah, “yet I will not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:15-16). A central component of God’s covenant relationship with Israel was the assurance of a home in a Land of Promise.
Only in this context does the dominant emotional tone of the Book of Mormon have a recognizable resonance. The Book of Mormon begins with an event that must have been traumatic to the principal actors in the drama: exodus. Not an exodus from bondage and wilderness exile to the land of promise, but an exodus away from the land of promise, from Jerusalem, from the people of the covenant, from the temple, and into the wilderness. This is why the form of so much of Nephi’s preaching in the early days of exile is reassurance and consolation. He invokes Isaiah repeatedly, precisely in order to convince his people that they are “a remnant of the house of Israel” and that, though broken off, they “may have hope as well as [their] brethren” (1 Nephi 19:24).
Lehi is consoled in his flight from the promised land of Jerusalem because he and his clan are promised a new one—“a land of promise; yea, even a land which I have prepared for you; yea, a land which is choice above all other lands” (1 Nephi 2:20). The new Zion comes at great cost—years of suffering in the wilderness; a traumatic sea crossing; dissension and violence within the family. But landfall is achieved more than a dozen years after the original departure, and the clan turns to farming, husbandry, and metalworking. It is with remarkable understatement, then, that Nephi notes in his record that soon after establishing themselves in the new land of promise, traumatic exile must now repeat itself. “The Lord did warn me, that I, Nephi, should depart… and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me” (2 Nephi 5:5).
What is happening here, and how is an understanding of what it means to inhabit a promised land, or to find Zion, being successively and emphatically reshaped? A few hundred years later, the pattern repeats. The Lord directs a subsequent king, Mosiah, to depart “into the wilderness” with “as many as would hearken” (Omni 1:13). Arrived in Zarahemla, Mosiah and his people encounter another remnant from Jerusalem who “journeyed in the wilderness” to this New World Zion. Other iterations of this theme will include the newly converted Alma the Elder’s flight from the court of King Noah and his founding of a church in the wilderness, and yet another people descended from Old World exiles, who cross the sea in barges after being commanded to “go forth into the wilderness” at the time of the Tower of Babel. Most poignantly of all, the record will close with the spectacle of a lonely Moroni, the sole survivor of his people. Finding in his wilderness exile that he has neither family, friends, nor “whither to go,” the successive chain of Zion-building finds its definitive end, and the record closes thereafter.
The Book of Mormon is, in this light, as the story of the volatility and fragility of lands of refuge, a testament to the portability and ceaseless transmutations of Zion, with the only constant being the eternally present promise of a special relationship to God and direct access to his power and truth. Nephi’s personal witness is, in this regard, the more compelling: “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh” (2 Nephi 4:21).
These lessons would undoubtedly have been especially poignant for the first readers of the Book of Mormon, nineteenth-century religious refugees who persisted doggedly and tragically in attempts to realize their own earthly Zions in a trail from Ohio through Missouri to Illinois and the Great Basin of Utah. In our case, as in theirs, hoped-for Zions turn out to be realized not in place but in community.