Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: 1 Nephi with Kimberly Matheson

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. I'm here today with the amazing Kim Matheson, who is the Laura F. Willes Research Fellow and my colleague here at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Kim is an amazing Book of Mormon scholar. I'm so happy that she was willing to be here today and start us off on this new Book of Mormon Studies podcast with actually a very little known book Kim, right? The book of 1st Nephi. Most people have never heard of it, really aren't familiar with it at all, right? So let's dive right in. What context, Kim, should we have in mind as we open the book and start to read?

Kimberly Matheson: Right. Well, it's a little tricky with context because as we have the Book of Mormon, 1st Nephi is the very first book. So it's not like we come with a whole lot of narrative background to discuss, but there are some things we can say that might be useful to people. 1st Nephi is the first book of what Latter-day Saints know as the small plates. So these are the books from 1st Nephi through the words of Mormon, and we call them the small plates based on some internal clues. Nephites will tell readers that he made two sets of plates, one a kind of historical record that we think of as his large plates, but then he made what he calls his small plates, specifically designed for spiritual things, more spiritually focused matters, he says, and these are what got passed down to his brother Jacob and then through Jacob's line to a variety of other authors. They conclude with some explanatory comments editorially from Mormon at the very end in Words of Mormon, and this is the first book that inaugurates that small plates tradition. Yeah.

Welch: And it's interesting, isn't it, Kim, that in the small plates, whereas in the large plates, we always have Mormon's perspective overlaid over the text, right? Because Mormon has been abridging these. Here in the small plates, though, Mormon didn't ever really touch these until the words of Mormon, right? So we're getting kind of an unfiltered perspective of Nephi and then Jacob and then the other writers there in the small plates.

Matheson: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely, that's helpful. The other thing that I would say here that's important is that even though 1st Nephi comes first for Latter-day Saint readers of the Book of Mormon, the small plates were dictated last by Joseph Smith. Readers might naturally assume that Joseph translated in the same order that we have the Book of Mormon today, but we know actually that after he lost the 116 pages in 1828, he just picked up where he and Martin had left off. They started with Mosiah. They translated all the way through Alma and Helaman, all the way down through Moroni. And only then did Joseph then dictate what we know as the small plates, including 1 Nephi. Let's see, what else to say here? For readers, certainly, 1 Nephi does function to give us kind of the narrative beginnings of the Book of Mormon. This is where we get the story of Lehi's family. It's the story of getting to the promised land. And so it's very important to readers that way, to our experience of the Book of Mormon to give us the story of how Lehi's family got over to the Americas. But I would wager, I would suggest, let's say, that is not actually Nephi's purpose in writing these books. He had already done the narrative historical work in his large plates. And so for him, the small plates, including 1st Nephi, they serve a different purpose in their writing. And here I'm really convinced by the work of another of our mutual colleagues, Joe Spencer. You'll talk more about him, I imagine, with an episode on scholarship. But his claim, I think quite convincingly, is that 1st Nephi is written as a handbook to prepare readers for second Nephi, which especially means getting readers ready to understand all of the Isaiah stuff that comes in second Nephi. Nephi is a huge fan of Isaiah. He finds a pattern of redemption there that he wants to apply to his people, but he also knows that it's going to take some preparation and some training to help people see that pattern. So first, Nephi is where he gives us those tools and that training. And then second, Nephi is where he puts them to work. So I think that's what I have.

Welch: Yeah, that's really helpful. And it brings up another point related to Isaiah, which is that, yes, 1st Nephi is the first book in the Book of Mormon, but it has a kind of canonical or biblical context, right? 1st Nephi opens in a known time and place with a kind of identifiable context, which is the pre-exilic kingdom of Judah in the old world. And so we can kind of, for a moment, at the very beginning of the Book of Mormon, we can identify kind of these larger backgrounds of the Assyrian conquest of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, but with troubles on the horizon, right? And these troubles on the horizon are kind of the immediate context for the opening of the Book of 1st Nephi, where Lehi has a vision and sees the impending destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of his people. So we have that determinant context and of course Isaiah is in, as is a part of that world and is a part of that biblical contextual mix there. And part of, it seems like, what Nephi is going to grapple with is the reality that once the migration happens and Lehi's family moves to the new world, the context shifts. It shifts for Nephi's people and it also shifts for us because now, as readers, we're in... a text that doesn't have the same kind of biblical context that we had at the very beginning of the book of 1 Nephi. And similarly, Nephi's own people are now in a new place, and they've kind of lost the immediate context of that biblical world. And so part of what Nephi has to do, as you say, to prepare them to understand the words of Isaiah is to kind of create a new context for them, right? To create the conditions under which they'll be able to... understand the words of Isaiah and find meaning in them, find a way to pattern their own lives after the prophecies of the prophet Isaiah. Does that seem right to you?

Matheson: That seems so right. I wish I had more comments on that, but I'm glad that you picked up the biblical context there. I think that's something that carries through the whole Book of Mormon. It's important to remember. So thanks.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe just one last point, kind of the largest context of all, thinking about, you know, this opening of the Book of Mormon, is the context of continuing revelation, right? The idea that the canon is open. The body of scriptures that are authoritative for us, which we call the canon, is not fixed and is not closed, but is open. This is an important theme in the Book of Mormon and in...

Matheson: Mm.

Welch: 1st Nephi as well, that God is always speaking to his people. He's the same in all times and places. And just as he spoke to people in the old world and ancient times, he's still speaking now. So that's kind of how the Book of Mormon legitimizes itself and how it has the kind of audacity to present itself as new scripture or as additional scripture alongside the Bible, testifying of the Bible and interacting with the Bible. And of course, we'll see here in 1st Nephi that there are more books to come. It's not only limited to the Book of Mormon's Other Witness and Other Testament of Jesus Christ.

Matheson: Yeah, beautifully done.

Welch: Good. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about the structure of 1st Nephi. And this might be a little bit new to some of our listeners. I think we're used to reading the scriptures at a couple of different levels. One is the level of the verse. When you're going to share a comment in class, and you raise your hand, and you point to a particular verse, that's a really digestible unit. And I actually love a close reading of a verse of scripture. The other unit that we're used to reading is a chapter. Oftentimes we'll read a chapter at night before we go to bed. And that's kind of the amount that you can comfortably read often in one sitting. It's probably important to note that the chapters that we have in our current Book of Mormon are not the same length as the chapters in the original Book of Mormon. Maybe you'll talk about that a little more in a minute. Are you, were you gonna touch on that? Okay, okay. But, but.

Matheson: Maybe.

Welch: There's still and then we've gotten used to I think in the last couple of years a unit of a couple of chapters, right, because this is the unit that we typically study in a week with the come follow me curriculum So we've gotten used to reading a few chapters together but something different happens when you look at an entire book and the books within the Book of Mormon really are a unit that were original to Nephi's and Mormon's vision as they redacted and compiled the plates. So the unit of the entire book has a kind of authorial structure behind it. And when we look at the whole thing, sometimes we can see patterns that are invisible to us if we're only looking zoomed in at a verse or at a chapter. And it can be really enlightening to look at the whole book. And I've learned a lot about this from you. You're really good at analyzing the structure of different books. So I'd love to hear how you see the Book of 1st Nephi put together.

Matheson: Yeah, you bet. I appreciate the compliment. Thank you. I may disappoint you here because I'm again just going to follow Joe Spencer's work. He's shown very convincingly, I think, the structure of 1st Nephi. And I said a minute ago, too, that part of what Nephi seems to be doing in 1st Nephi is getting us ready for Second Nephi. And we need two things to get ourselves ready. We seem to need a tool, and then we need coaching in how to use it. And the tool that Nephi wants to give us is his vision. The coaching then is how to weave that vision with Isaiah so that each one illuminates the other. And you can see him doing that right in the structure of 1 Nephi. Nephi tells us, excuse me, Nephi tells us that he's going to break his record into two parts. He says, I'm gonna do a quick abridgment of my father's record. Then I'll tell you about my own reign and ministry. And that first part, the abridging of his father's record, those were two original chapters in the 1830 edition. The very first chapter, which is our 1st Nephi 1-5, I believe, that's the story of how the family got the brass plates. It opens with a messenger coming down from heaven, carrying a record to Lehi that he reads, and it closes in our chapter 5 with his sons coming down into the wilderness carrying this record that they've just gotten from Laban. So it's the story of how the family gets the brass plates including then the record of Isaiah. The chapter following that the original chapter is the story of Lehi's vision. It's 1st Nephi 6 through 9. Which is where you know Lehi has his own vision in the wilderness. So two sources are given to us there from there Nephi goes on to talk about what he calls his own reign and ministry and that's the part of the book where two main things happen. First, he experiences a vision of his own, clearly related to Lehi's very similar in certain ways and very different in others, but he experiences something like that vision, and then he starts to do this weaving together with Isaiah that I've mentioned. And here it might be helpful to give some examples. So Nephi tells us, he recounts his vision, it runs for about four chapters, 1 Nephi 11 through 1 Nephi 14. The very next chapter, after the vision ends. So the first scene in our 1st Nephi 15 is Nephi going home. He finds Laman and Lemuel arguing over what their father's vision meant. So Nephi is going to explain it to them. But what he uses to explain the vision is very interesting. This comes in 1st Nephi 15 verse 20 and he says, I did rehearse unto them the words of Isaiah who spake concern the restoration of the Jews or the house of Israel. And the whole chapter then is Nephi explaining the scattering and gathering of Israel, which is the main theme of Isaiah. And he's doing it to explain the vision that he has shared with his father. On the flip side, he sometimes also explains Isaiah using his vision. And that's something we see at the very end of 1 Nephi. So if you turn to 1 Nephi 20 and 21, you'll notice that it's just two chapters of straight Isaiah, Isaiah 48 and 49 quoted in full. And the second he finishes quoting them, in the very next chapter, chapter 22, he starts to explain what he's quoted, but running all through the chapter are terms from his own vision. So verses seven and eight talk about the scattering and gathering of Israel in the New World, things that he has seen in his vision. There's talk of a great and abominable church in verses 13 and 14. The end of the chapter uses imagery from Christ's coming in 3rd Nephi, again, something that Nephi has seen in vision. So the vision can be used to understand Isaiah better, and then he sometimes also uses Isaiah to explain his vision. So if I had to kind of, it's hard to distill all of this structure into an audio format, but we can see that Nephi cuts his record in two halves. The first half gives us our sources. He tells us how the family got Isaiah, how the family experienced a vision. And then the second half of 1 Nephi, is Nephi showing us what it looks like to use each one to help explain the other. So that by the time we finish 1st Nephi and head into second Nephi, we know what technique Nephi will be using and how we should understand his project. And hopefully we know what themes to look for in Isaiah to get us ready.

Welch: That is so, so helpful. So, so just to reiterate, right at the very outset, we have two, um, sort of burning sources of revelation. One is, uh, the brass plates, right, especially including the words of Isaiah. So this is revelation through scripture in textual form. Then we have Lehi's dream in 1 Nephi 8, which is a kind of, um, visionary revelation, right, revelation that comes to us in this kind of living dreamlike form. So then these are almost like the two pillars of 1st Nephi. And then as the rest of the book continues, what you see is interpretation of that revelation and the struggle, I want to say the work that it takes to implement revelation, to understand it, to make it real in our lives. And so, and we see Nephi both doing that for himself and also teaching us how to do that and how the written word of scripture and the continuing revelation through a living prophet can be woven together and in that way can yield fruitful meanings for our lives. That is fascinating. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because you haven't mentioned a lot of kind of the narrative history that happens, because there's a lot of things that are happening in these chapters as well. Those are stories that are very well known, right? We know the story of the Liahona, we know the story of the rebellion in the wilderness and the rebellion on the ship. And so in some way you've given us a way to see the theological rather than the narrative structure here in 1st Nephi and see how it's structured in terms of ideas rather than only in terms of events.

Matheson: Yeah, and I think part of the reason that that's available to us in 1st Nephi is that it seems to be what matters most to Nephi as well. I mean, the vast majority of this book really is Isaiah and vision. And we as modern readers are very drawn to the narrative portions, and of course we are because that's the exciting stuff. There's a lot of drama to it. But I think one of the challenges of reading scripture well is to separate some of our questions and interests from the things that the prophets want to tell us. They have agendas, they have goals, they have content to communicate inspired by revelation for us. And while it's of course always beneficial to bring our own questions to scripture, we should also come ready to hear whatever the prophets want to teach us.

Welch: Yeah, I love that, Kim. And I think we'll get to talk about that more a little later. Let's talk about the characters in the book of 1st Nephi. They are so fun. Some of the best developed, most psychologically complex characters, I think, that we get over the course of the whole Book of Mormon. Although I will say, the Book of Mormon has amazing characters. Just a note. When I say the word character, I want to make it 100% clear that these were real people. And so when I say characters, I just mean the way that they function in the Book of Mormon, but they were real people. And they're mostly a family. So tell us about the family here at the center of 1st Nephi.

Matheson: Yeah, I mean this we can do probably really quickly. As you say, most listeners are probably vastly more familiar with these characters than maybe any others in the Book of Mormon. If I had to name kind of the key characters of 1st Nephi, certainly we'd start with Nephi. He's our protagonist, he's our narrator, and then he has this family around him as they head out into the wilderness, and the whole cast of that family serve really important roles. The most key, I think, of foils for Nephi individually. They are the wicked, murmuring brothers who then help offset Nephi's self-portrayal as righteous and obedient. They're also very important for the rest of the Book of Mormon, I think, because they are the ancestors of the Lamanites as a people. So they help set up the trajectory for the rest of the story of this book. I also think Laman and Lemuel function importantly in this book because they serve as Nephi's audience for all of this explanation of Isaiah and the vision. When he's explaining his vision he's explaining it to Laman and Lemuel. When he's reading Isaiah he's reading it with his brothers. So part of the role that they function in his life and in this book is to help Nephi model the interpretive method that we've been talking about here. We should say something about Lehi. He's important as the patriarch of the family, of course. It's also interesting to me that Lehi is the recipient of the two sources that Nephi is going to use in his project. He's the initial recipient of Brass Plates and The Vision. There are, of course, a really compelling cast of women who show up in the wilderness with all of these men. Sariah, Nephi's mother, and then the daughters of Ishmael. We know that there are some unnamed sisters in the mix. And that's important because 1st Nephi then ends up portraying some of the very few female characters that we have in the Book of Mormon. And they are important because they will serve to kind of inaugurate a lot of the gender dynamics that we'll see later among the Nephites and the Lamanites. We can trace those dynamics back to the interactions between men and women in 1st Nephi. We've got some other minor siblings too, minor in terms of verse time, not actual, historical importance, but Jacob, Joseph, Sam. I mean, who would you add? What else would you say there about family members?

Welch: Well, I want to go back to what you were saying about Laman and Lemuel because you've just kind of blown my mind here. I love the way you framed them. I think often we think about Laman and Lemuel as the antagonists or as the foil to Nephi, right? They're these, they can be seen as this kind of villain character, right? And we might be tempted to identify with Nephi and then with the Nephites throughout the rest of the narrative of the Book of Mormon. And that's... That's very understandable. I think just the way the Book of Mormon is structured, we have Nephi's first-person perspective, and then the rest of the book is told through the perspective of Nephites and the Nephite record. So it's understandable that we identify with Nephi and the Nephites. However, you've said something so interesting that Laman and Lemuel are the first, what we might call, interpretive community. They are the first, they're the first reception community. They're the first ones to receive, as you say, Nephi's teaching and his own revelation, his own exhortation. And so in a way, we actually stand in the position of Laman and Lemuel. As readers of the book, receiving from Nephi, we are in Laman and Lemuel's position. Now, hopefully, our interpretive practices will be a bit more savvy and a bit more charitable than Laman and Lemuel's will, but I think that gives me a really different way to understand who Laman and Lemuel were, how they function in the Book of Mormon, and maybe an in to understand them in a more charitable way than simply as the villains or the foils in a kind of black and white morality tale.

Matheson: Oh, that's fun. I hadn't even considered, yeah, putting us, yeah, we are sitting in the very same position as Laman and Lemuel trying to understand Nephi's interpretive project. That's beautiful. Thanks for drawing that out.

Welch: Yeah, good. Well, Kim, in a minute, I want listeners to know that we're going to be, we are going to be diving into some close readings of passages that you love and that I love. Oh my goodness, the light in my office just went out. We're going to, we're going to roll with it. But first, let's, just as we've kind of been getting an overview of the structure and the characters of the book. Let's do an overview of the important themes in the book of Nephi. What is it you talked about coming to the scriptures ready to receive from the prophets rather than imposing our own agenda on it? So what do you see as Nephi's agenda? What are the messages he is most keen to communicate to us?

Matheson: I have, I think, three that I've located that stand out to me. The first follows directly from everything we just said about structure, and that is the importance of using Scripture and modern revelation together, that both of them are necessary. So I think it's important that Nephi uses both Scripture, he uses Isaiah, and he uses personal and continuing revelation, his own vision. It seems that for him, neither alone is enough. He needs both, he weaves them together. And so I think that by extension for us one is also not enough. We need both scripture and prophecy, we need both modern revelation and the Bible in the Book of Mormon. And so I would imagine it this way if all that you had were the scriptures, you could learn a lot, but it wouldn't be immediately clear about how to apply it now or what God wants his people to be doing today. So you could learn a whole lot about the past, but if you're not careful, then that's all that the gospel would just stay locked in the past. By the same token, if all you had was general conference talks and personal revelation, you might know a lot about how to be a good person today and what God wants you to do today. But you might miss then the bigger covenant picture and a sense of what God has done through history. I think if we don't read the Old Testament, we're not going to understand the temple. If we don't read the New Testament, we'll never understand all the ways that Jesus is more challenging than we tend to think. And if we don't read the Book of Mormon, we're not going to understand why President Nelson stands at the pulpit and talks so intensely about the gathering of Israel. We need scripture to give us context and symbol and richness to understand how God has worked through history. And then we need the modern revelation to give us the application and the currency and the liveness for how we apply both those things. So that's one theme I take from 1st Nephi. Prophecy and scripture need to be woven together. That's how we do the life of faith.

Welch: Yeah, oh I love that, yeah.

Matheson: My other two themes that I get from 1st Nephi are a little quicker. The second is I guess I want to say something about Exodus and covenant. There are a lot of parallels with the Exodus story, which Nephi himself draws out at several points as he's teaching his brothers. This is the story of a family being led through a wilderness to a promised land, also that their unique covenant with God can flourish. I don't know that I have a lot to say here, but there are a lot of general patterns that we could play with. How following God often looks like wandering through a desert, the way that covenants require special places in order to be nurtured, and I think here of the recent church emphasis on a home-centered kind of gospel focus, we need a specific place to nurture covenant. So I think there are bits and pieces of that throughout 1st Nephi. And the third theme I would mention here is a bit more tragic, and that's the fracturing of a family, both at a large scale when Nephi talks about the scattering of Israel, and then of course at the smaller scale of Lehi's nuclear family. There's that friction between Nephi and his brothers that eventually breaks the family in two. So one of the other themes that we can get out of this book, I think, is how a family breaks apart, the kinds of things that erode relationships. So for instance, one of the things that Nephi shows us in this book, from the perspective of a mature adult several years later in life, he's reflecting some 30 years later on how his teenage zeal sometimes pushed his brothers too hard. Laman and Lemuel were stuck in the same problem. They were often so committed to their own worldview that they couldn't see what God was doing through their family. But I read 1st Nephi in part as the story of a young, well-intentioned teen who insists so stubbornly in his own rightness that, even if he is right at a certain level, he ends up doing harm to the relationships with the people he loves. As I was reflecting on this, I was reminded of Sister Runia's talk from the October General Conference about families and about the importance of prioritizing our families as sites of love and welcome because that's the proper context then in which correction can come. But unless teaching comes on a solid foundation of unconditional love, it can sometimes do more harm than good, and I think there are lessons for us in 1st Nephi along those lines too.

Welch: Yeah, I think that's right. And it brings up a larger point about how we read the scriptures and how we draw application lessons to our own lives. Sometimes the prophets directly exhort us, and they tell us exactly how to live the life of faith, how to walk the Christian walk, meekness, long-suffering, gentleness, all those ways. Sometimes we have to draw the inference by observing them. And sometimes characters in scripture give us great examples of how to live in this way. Sometimes characters in scriptures give us flawed examples. They are flawed people just like we are. So we can learn from their mistakes exactly as Book of Mormon narrators often say. We are not perfect. We hope that you will learn from our mistakes and be better than we were. That's why we're going to all the trouble of writing this down. So I think that's a really good point. And you're right that there's a lot of sadness. There's a lot of sadness in the Book of Mormon generally and in the Book of 1st Nephi. There's conflict, there's misunderstanding, there are some deep and as will prove to be intractable divisions that are put into place. There's also, supernal moments of light and of joy. But we won't understand the book in its fullness if we don't also see the places of pain and the places of suffering. You know, as you talked about a family that is torn apart, if you'll indulge me, a theme that really captures me from 1st Nephi is the idea of texts and peoples being torn apart in the same way. I think especially in 1 Nephi 13 as a part of Nephi's own great vision, he sees a text that is suffering. He sees the Bible, right? The Bible that has the record of the Jews that is being torn apart and crucial parts are being separated from it. And we're kind of left with this vision of a text that has been abused and is in tatters and is in need of healing and is in need of restoration. And I think as I've read this, Nephi develops a kind of ethics of how to read and how to treat sacred texts. And what I'll take from him is that the way we treat a sacred text is deeply connected to the way we treat the people from whom that text comes, right? So he sees his work here in his record keeping as a way to restore the plain and precious parts that were, or that would be taken away from the Bible, from the record of the Jews. And likewise, he exhorts his people to look upon the Jewish people with gratitude and with great respect and to reconcile with them for the sake of their sacred records also coming together and being reconciled in that way. So just as we see a nuclear family kind of fracturing and we long for that reconciliation, in the same way we see sacred texts fracturing, we long for their reunification, and we see whole peoples fracturing and splitting, and we long and trust in the promises of the Lord that they will be gathered and reunified together.

Matheson: Yeah, beautiful.

Welch: Maybe I'll just, I have one more. Will you indulge me with one more theme? Okay. This is something that over the last couple of years has become more and more meaningful to me. And that is, well, Lehi's vision in 1st Nephi 8 and what is really communicated to the reader in the vision of the shining tree with the brilliant white fruit. In some ways in 1st Nephi, as you say, we're set up to understand the work of Christ in the world in these large-scale ways as gathering whole peoples together. And salvation looks like the work of Christ to reconcile us. And we see that is worked out in history, right? We see that on the large scale in Nephi's vision and the Book of Mormon often comes back to this idea of the sacred history of the world in which God's work is accomplished by whole peoples learning of Christ, remembering their identity as parts of the house of Israel and coming together. But there's another model of salvation in Christ that is very personal, it's very private, and it's something that can happen now. It isn't something that has to wait until the distant future for all these events to transpire. It's, it's an experience that is available to us now. And I think it is captured and symbolized in Lehi's dream of the fruit. And the experience, the thing that sticks out most to me in that whole dream is the description of the fruit itself, how sweet it is, how bright and brilliant and shining it is, how much it appeals to our desire. It draws us to it with love. And I think that is another model of what it means to be saved by Christ that we will also then see played out throughout the Book of Mormon, alongside these other kind of models of what it means to be gathered in. But I think we're started out here in 1 Nephi with that really beautiful promise and vision of the experience of oneness in Christ.

Matheson: Oh, that's really beautiful. It makes me think about how significant it is in 1st Nephi that we have two accounts of very similar visions, Lehi's and Nephi's. Nephi's seems to tend more toward the big communal picture of redemption, but you're right that Lehi's starts with just him at the tree tasting its sweetness, and I think that actually really nicely prefigures the whole trajectory of the Book of Mormon which culminates with Christ's coming, where it is a crowd of people who see him at his appearing, but he gives them experience one by one. We have both communal and individual there in an experience of Christ.

Welch: Oh, thanks, Kim. Okay, well, let's get to the best part now. Let's look at some particular passages, and I asked you to pick out one or two passages that are interesting, but more than that, that build your faith, Kim, that inspire you in that same way to that stimulate your desire and your imagination. So share with me what you've picked out here.

Matheson: You bet. So the I've been finding a lot of inspiration lately from 1st Nephi 16 which is the story of the family's journey to the promised land and there are two vignettes in there I'd call them that I think have a lot to teach us about faith. So the first is the story of the Liahona where I learn a lesson I'll say about what faith is not and the second is the story of the broken bow. Where I learn something about what faith is. So it's my turn to ask for indulgence and maybe walk through these two vignettes. Starting first with the Liahona in 1st Nephi 16. So in verse nine, the Lord speaks to Lehi and says, it's time to go, pack it up tomorrow, we're headed to the promised land. And that's kind of all that we have recorded about this conversation. And I have to imagine that at this point, Lehi has several questions. Questions that as far as we know have not yet been answered by the Lord. Questions like, okay, where do we go? For starters. Or, last time we were on the move, it almost fractured the family. So how do I keep my older sons from murdering their younger brother? Right? We could think of several questions that Lehi might have at this point. But all we're told is that Lehi is not given any answers. God just says it's time to go. And instead of giving Lehi answers, here's what he gives him instead. This is 1 Nephi 16 verse 10. “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 a fine brass." This is a verse that you have written a great article on as well, so I imagine you might have thoughts at the end of all this. But what strikes me lightly about this verse is that Lehi certainly has questions, but God does not give him an answer per se, especially if answer means rational content communicated intellectually. Instead, God gives him an object. And we need to notice too what kind of an object it is. Verse 10 says that it arrives to his great astonishment. It's described as curious, which means that it surprises Lehi. He does not have an established framework for making sense of this object. If it were recognizable and he knew something about it, we wouldn't be seeing this level of surprise. So when this brass ball shows up at Lehi's feet, the only reason he can be greatly astonished, I think, is if it exceeds his conceptual framework. So I want to take those two data points and just boil them straight down to a lesson, which is first, God does not answer Lehi's questions in anything like the shape that he first asked them. God sends him an object rather than an answer. And second, He sends him something surprising, astonishing, something he doesn't understand. And so the lesson that I draw from this is that faith then is not primarily a cognitive attitude, which is to say that faith has a lot less to do with our brains than we tend to think. In the 21st century, that's usually our model of faith, is very cognitive. We think that faith is about what we believe in our heads, the ideas that we hold true in our minds. But interestingly, the Book of Mormon never uses faith in that way. It never describes faith as a kind of cognitive attitude. I just think it's so clear that faith is not about our brains. And we can tell because here with Lehi, when it's time for him to have faith, the Lord's first step is to kind of break with his intellectual way of engaging the world. God sends him an object, a confusing, surprising object instead of rational contrast, content. So from that first vignette, if that sets up the question of like, or tells us what faith is not, what then is faith about? And for me the lesson, I learned that lesson in the second vignette, the story of Nephi's broken bow. The family gets moving, they gather their seeds and provisions in verse 11, in verse 12, they take down camp, they head into the wilderness in verse 13. And already we can start to see a little bit of what faith looks like there. It looks less like rational content and more like movement. Lehi gets this weird object. He trusts it. He has questions, but he moves in line with what he's received. So faith looks more like movement than it does like an intellectual attitude and revelation looks like an object that prompts a certain way of moving and responding to the world. Then in verse 15 we start to get information about how they procure food in the wilderness. We're told it's primarily by hunting, bows and slings, and the reason we're told this quite famously is because in verse 18 Nephi says, I did break my bow. And immediately everyone else in the family starts to fall apart. Verse 20 says that, “Laman and Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael did begin to murmur exceedingly, and also my father began to murmur against the Lord his God.” And I have a lot of compassion for the family in this moment. They're facing down starvation. I get why their faith starts to waver. Mine would too. But I do think it's interesting the way that Nephi phrases it. He says they murmur against the Lord in verse 20. They're complaining against the Lord again in verse 22, and then in verse 25 again. They're murmuring against the Lord. What's breaking down here among the family is again not a cognitive attitude so much as it is a relationship. It's a relationship of trust with God that has broken down, not some kind of rational belief. I think if you were to poll Lehi and Laman and Lemuel in this moment and ask them, do you believe in God? They would say, yes, of course. Lehi would say, I've had visions. Laman and Lemuel could point to angels they've seen. They have the belief in their head. What's breaking down is a relationship of trust. And so the lesson that I learned here is that faith looks like a relationship of fidelity. And my kind of handy go-to whenever I start to think about faith as an intellectual brain kind of thing, as simple rational belief, the quick fix is to replace the word faith with faithfulness. And the metaphor that I will forever use with my students on this is with a marriage. What does it mean to have faith in my marriage to be faithful? Does it mean that I believe in my brain that my husband loves me? I mean, to a certain extent, that's got to be a part of it. But if that's all that faith in a marriage means, my marriage would crumble. If I tried to reduce my fidelity to simply assenting to a proposition in my head, faithfulness in my marriage means so much more. It means being faithful to another person, to the covenants we made. It means helping with the dishes. It means making sure I'm home in time to help wrangle kids at the end of the day. Sometimes it means I stay up till one in the morning because we have an issue that we need to work through. And that relationship comes first before anything else in my life, including sleep, right? It means I wear a wedding ring in public and I don't flirt with other people at the gym and I'm around the house and I offer emotional support, et cetera. Fidelity, faithfulness. in a marriage is so much more than just a cognitive attitude. And it would be a very impoverished view of faith if I were to reduce it to that. So, what I learned from Nephi here, especially in verse 23 when he goes on to make a new bow from the materials he can find, what's exemplary about Nephi is that he keeps moving. He stays in the relationship with the Lord. He knows that the only way for God to weigh in in their life is if he stays in contact with God, if he keeps moving forward in the relationship. So in the end, that's how I'd phrase that lesson. Faith is a lot more like making a bow than it is like believing in your head that God will give you food. You need both, but faith is more like maintaining that relationship with God than it is like believing that God exists.

Welch: Yeah, I love that reading. And it has my mind spinning in so many ways. The Liahona is a really mysterious object. It's mysterious to Lehi when he first sees it and it still is mysterious to me. And it shows up in lots of different ways in the text. At one point, Nephi does call it a compass. And it sounds as though it kind of gives them direction and guides them. As I see, especially when they're on land, during their land migration, it actually doesn't seem to function so much as a compass as a kind of, in other words, as an instrument that gives them information, right? Instead, it says that it leads them into the more fertile parts of the wilderness. And this is chapter 16, verse 16. “We did follow the directions of the ball, which led us in the more fertile parts of the wilderness.” So the ball mostly is God's way of nourishing them, right? It's his way of leading them and guiding them as the good shepherd into the green pastures where they will be able to find the sustenance that they need. And it seems to me that is a slightly different thing than a compass, right? That just kind of gives you the information that you need to know. It seems more along the lines of the faithfulness that you were describing, that the Liahona is a means of creating a nurturing relationship between the Lord and this family here in this moment. The other thing that's so mysterious about the Liahona is that it functions in more than just one way. It has these two spindles and each of the spindles perhaps give different information or can be used for different ways, but it also serves as a place for writing to appear, right? And we see here in chapter... Where is it? It's here at the end, I think, of chapter 16. Yes, when Lehi is in despair and he is murmuring and brought down into the depths of sorrow. And here in verse 26, the voice of the Lord said unto him, look upon the ball and behold the things which are written. And so he looks at the ball. What's interesting is that we never see what was written. We don't know, we're never told the content of that. Later on in verse 29, “there was also written upon them a new writing, which was plain to be read and 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. And thus we see that by small means, the Lord can bring about great things.” So there's that one lesson, which is that through these small ways, the Lord can accomplish his great purposes. But to me, there's another lesson here, which is that, again, as you say, it's not so much that we need to know exactly what was written on the ball. The fact is that writing was going to change. This was a kind, it was sort of like the brass plates, but a brass plates that could be erased and rewritten again and again and again. What was written in the brass plates was fixed. What was written on the brass ball was always changing. And to me, that speaks of this kind of continual, growing, organic relationship that God wants to have with us. And as you say, it's not about giving us a list of things that we have to say yes to, it's about being in relationship with us, leading us and guiding us as we grow. And his communications with us will be that kind of dynamic, ongoing flow rather than a kind of fixed body. Now, I think there's value in having the fixed body. And so I love that we have the two models of the brass plates and the brass ball, both show different ways in which the Lord wants to communicate with us through language.

Matheson: Yeah, and I think to your first point about verse 16, you've really nicely articulated the real rigor of having both, but especially this more organic, constantly changing relationship with God. I had not noticed this until you said it, but verse 16 talks about the more fertile parts of the wilderness, that's where it's leading them. That's in the context of talking about where they go to get food. They've just mentioned that they hunt and the brass ball leads them to the more fertile parts and they obtain food that way. So how much more devastating than when the bow breaks and when suddenly no one can get food, when God has been leading them systematically to all the places to get food. Providentially he's led them to the places where animals are more plentiful and now all of a sudden the bow breaks and what on earth could God be doing? Does he want us to get fed or not? That would be all the more difficult I think to face as a trial, if I had been led to the more fertile parts first.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. And I really like what you said that all throughout this, this whole wilderness journey, it's about teaching us to develop trust, develop trust in the Lord. Maybe we can just conclude here. I love, I've come to love Nephi, the prophet Nephi. As you say, he's young. He's overzealous sometimes. He's learning. And he's growing too. And it's easy, I think, for us, especially as modern readers, to, to see the way in which he needs to continue to grow, especially in his relationship with Laman and Lemuel. But I love Nephi for two reasons. First is his prodigious gift, his revelatory gift. He has a spiritual capacity that I have to believe includes his imagination and his mind and his soul that allows him to be in this open and vivid communication with the Lord. That is truly a spiritual gift and he cared for that gift, he valued it, and he shared it by writing and engraving a great effort, right? What it was that was shared with him and what he received through Revelation. So I love Nephi for his epical revelatory gift. And I love him for his trust in the Lord. Through the ups and downs, through the steps and the missteps, he is led by his shepherd to trust him. And whenever the Lord gives him an invitation, Nephi responds. He responds in trust, and he responds willingly. We see that from the very beginning with the story of the story of Nephi of obtaining the brass plates, how he is willing to open himself to failure, to take the risk of making a wrong step, but to trust the Lord and to step forward. So for those reasons, I've come to see the powerful example that Nephi is and come to value him, I think, for what is most precious and rare in him as a prophet.

Matheson: Yeah, agreed. I couldn't say it better. Agreed, agreed.

Welch: Wonderful. Kim, this has been so great. I've loved everything you've shared. Do you have any last words or last thoughts? Or you have your piece?

Matheson: No, you just did them. You did the last words.

Welch: All right. Well, thank you so much. I think this has been a great introduction to the book of 1st Nephi. I hope that our listeners will be excited to dive in, to read it on their own, and to see what it is that they can find there. Thanks for being with us and join us next time for a deep dive into the scholarship on the book of 1st Nephi. Bye bye.