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Transl. Joseph SmithThe Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
Nonfiction | Scripture | Adult | Published in 1830A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Book 1 Summary: “1 Nephi”
1 Nephi is the opening text of The Book of Mormon, leading a section of books transcribed from the Small Plates of Nephi. This book deals with the earliest chronological events and contains a mixture of historical narrative and prophetic teaching. It tells the story of Nephi and his family, headed by Nephi’s father Lehi, in the early sixth century BCE. God instructs them to flee Jerusalem before it falls to the Babylonians. The first seven chapters narrate the events surrounding God’s call for Lehi to leave Jerusalem and the actions of the family undertaken in obedience to God’s commands. The middle section of the book, in Chapters 8 through 15, is a series of visions and religious teachings—first those related to Lehi’s ministry, then Nephi’s—and the final Chapters, 16-22, return to the historical narrative of the family’s efforts to build a ship, along with continued teachings based around borrowed material from the biblical prophet Isaiah.
Upon God’s revelation to Lehi of the impending fate of Jerusalem, Lehi attempts to warn his fellow residents, but they reject his preaching. Forced to live in a camp in the wilderness, Lehi sends his sons back to the city to collect brass plates upon which are kept some of the records of the Jews, including biblical texts like the Books of Moses and of the prophet Isaiah. The brass plates are kept by a man named Laban, who refuses Lehi’s sons’ requests. Nephi returns after that refusal and finds Laban lying drunk in the street. Commanded by the Spirit of God, he kills Laban and then arranges to have the brass plates taken out of the city.
The text of 1 Nephi also relates dual visions by Lehi and his son Nephi, both of whom exercise a prophetic office by receiving God’s messages. The visions, which center on the symbol of the tree of life, deal with highly specific predictions of the coming of the Messiah and encompass much of history, including predictions about Christ’s visit to the Americas and the emergence of the Latter Day Saints. After the visions, the narrative of 1 Nephi returns to the wanderings of Lehi’s family in the wilderness, in which they are guided by the Liahona—a ball given to them by God, which functions as an oracular compass. They come to the shores of a great body of water, and there Nephi is commanded by God to build a ship. Nephi encounters resistance from his brothers (primarily Laman and Lemuel), but Nephi exhorts them with an account of the biblical exodus and convinces them to participate with him. They embark together, and after a long voyage arrive on the shores of a new land.
Book 2 Summary: “2 Nephi”
The second major work translated from the Small Plates of Nephi, 2 Nephi, picks up the narrative of Nephi’s family where 1 Nephi left off. In contrast to 1 Nephi, however, 2 Nephi contains more religious teaching and comparatively less historical narrative. It is also unique in that it copies over, largely verbatim, large tracts from the biblical Book of Isaiah as part of the teaching offered by Nephi and his brother Jacob. The first five chapters of the book are concerned with a continuation of the historical narrative, dealing largely with Lehi’s passing and the separation of his descendants, with the following chapters (6 through 33) being almost entirely composed of religious teachings.
The opening section of historical narrative describes the condition of the family as they begin to settle the new promised land of the Americas. As Lehi nears the end of his life, he speaks to his sons, encouraging them to follow God’s commands and offering specific blessings over several of them. Shortly after his death, however, some of the brothers—Laman and Lemuel foremost among them, as usual—chafe against their brother Nephi’s religious leadership. This leads to a split within Lehi’s descendants, with one group, henceforth called “Lamanites,” breaking off and choosing their own way rather than God’s, and the other, called “Nephites,” choosing to remain and follow God’s commands as passed down through Lehi, Nephi, and Jacob. Because of their rebellion against God and their warlike tendencies against the Nephites, the Lamanites suffer a divine judgment, which apparently changes their skin tone to make them less appealing to the Nephites: “that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them” (2 Nephi 5:21).
The Nephites, now unsafe in the original settlement area, travel into the wilderness and begin building a new civilization, complete with a temple modeled on the biblical temple of Solomon. The remainder of the text of 2 Nephi, after the historical narrative is complete, is concerned with long extracts of sermons and teachings from Jacob and Nephi, much of it consisting of near-verbatim presentations of prophecies from the biblical Book of Isaiah. Unlike the biblical Isaiah, however, 2 Nephi calls direct attention to the coming fulfillment of those prophecies in Christ, with Jacob and Nephi claiming to possess specific knowledge of Christ’s intentions from the visions and prophetic guidance given to them by God.
Book 3 Summary: “Jacob”
The Book of Jacob is relatively shorter when compared with 1 and 2 Nephi, totaling only seven chapters. Like 2 Nephi, it includes some brief accounts of the history of the Nephite settlement but is predominantly characterized by religious teachings. It concludes the narrative arc of the first generation of Lehi’s family, which began in 1 Nephi under Lehi’s leadership, then under Nephi, and now with the teachings of Nephi’s brother, Jacob.
The Book of Jacob tells of how Nephi passes away, with the task of keeping the records on the brass plates falling to Jacob. Now serving in the temple, Jacob preaches a sermon to the Nephites, which points out how quickly they have fallen away from God’s commands, to the point where even the Lamanites compare favorably against them. Jacob targets several notable vices that have crept up among the Nephites, including an excessive desire for wealth and the practice of polygamy. On the issue of money, Jacob notes that building up wealth can be laudable if it is used for noble and charitable ends, but the Nephites are merely seeking it for their own pleasure. “But before ye seek for riches,” he tells them, “seek ye for the kingdom of God” (Jacob 2:18). Regarding polygamy, Jacob points out that the practice of polygamy by the biblical kings David and Solomon led to the eventual downfall of their families and reigns, and he exhorts the Nephites not to indulge in polygamous unions.
The Book of Jacob also contains a famous allegory: the parable of the Olive Tree, reputed to be taken from an otherwise unknown biblical-era prophet, Zenos, which shares similarities to biblical texts from the New Testament, such as Jesus’s parable of the unfruitful tree (Luke 13) and Paul’s allegory of the olive tree (Romans 11). The book closes with a brief historical narrative concerning Jacob’s contention with Sherem, an antichrist figure (that is, a denier of Jesus Christ) who objects to the prophecies about Jesus’s coming. Jacob successfully refutes him, which leads to a revival of faith among the Nephites and an effort (largely unsuccessful) to reach out to the Lamanites again.
Books 1-3 Analysis
The first three books in The Book of Mormon constitute a discrete section, focusing on the events and teachings that fall within the experience of the patriarchal family of Lehi and his children. Within this opening section, many of the major narrative points of The Book of Mormon are already established, including the recurring motif of visions and prophecy, the important role played by the custodianship of sacred records on engraved metal plates, and the division of the main people group into mutually hostile camps, the Nephites and the Lamanites.
Like the biblical Old Testament, these opening books are characterized by a balanced mixture of historical narrative and prophetic exhortations. The events of 1 and 2 Nephi, in particular, appear to mirror various points in the Old Testament tradition. The account of Lehi’s attempt to preach to the citizens of Jerusalem before the Babylonian invasion, and the rejection he experiences, broadly replicates the ministry of the biblical prophet Jeremiah in the same historical context. Later, the stories about Lehi’s family wandering in the wilderness echo the experience of Moses and the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings in the biblical Books of Exodus and Numbers. Similarly, God’s command to Nephi to build a ship finds parallels in God’s commands to Noah in the biblical book of Genesis. And when Lehi speaks to his sons as he approaches death in 2 Nephi, the passage recalls a similar pattern in the biblical patriarch Jacob’s words toward his own sons at the end of the Book of Genesis, a pattern that was expanded in later Jewish tradition into a whole genre of so-called “testaments of the patriarchs.”
In contrast to the Old Testament’s diversity of literary styles and variety of themes, however, The Book of Mormon is thematically unified, which is striking for a corpus of separate documents ostensibly created over the span of a thousand years. Most of the collection’s major themes appear already fully formed in the first books of the canon. This thematic uniformity supports the book’s view of The Progression of History Along God’s Plan of Salvation. In The Book of Mormon, history is always moving forward along a highly specific trajectory devised and overseen by God, and if this plan is invisible and incomprehensible to most people, it is nonetheless made known to some of the prophets in considerable detail. The visions at the end of 1 Nephi, for example, are highly specific in predicting events scheduled to occur far in the future: “Yea, even six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem, a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews—even a Messiah, or, in other words, a Savior of the world” (1 Nephi 10:4). The prophecies in The Book of Mormon include significantly more specificity regarding the identity of the Messiah than do corollary messianic prophecies in the biblical Old Testament, so exhortations to believe in the coming Messiah are very often associated with a specific identification of Jesus. References to Jesus appear as early as the preaching of Nephi himself (see, for example, 2 Nephi 25:19) and also occur in the messages of Jacob. The prophetic exhortations to follow God’s commandments are set in the context of preparing for the coming salvation, which will be revealed through Jesus.
Another major theme, The Necessity of Obedience to God’s Commandments, receives its first treatment in these texts, with obedience leading to blessings and disobedience leading to judgment and punishment. In 1 Nephi, the separate fates attached to obedience and disobedience are usually attached to different groups of people: Nephi and his supporters as the obedient ones, and Laman, Lemuel, and their supporters as the disobedient ones. This separation is later extended to their respective descendants, the Nephites and Lamanites, but the lines begin to blur by the time the narrative reaches the ministry of Jacob, who must rebuke the Nephites for their backsliding from the commandments of God and warn them of the possibilities of judgment if they indulge in vices of greed and lust.
Structurally, these opening books make clear that the overarching story will be one of The Progression of History Along God’s Plan of Salvation. From the beginning of The Book of Mormon, the characters (particularly the prophets) show an awareness that their story is part of a much longer historical arc of what God is planning to accomplish for the salvation of the world. Their own actions are set in the context of calls to repent and prepare for the coming of Christ in six centuries’ time, as well as references to events even further along the line of God’s plan in history: the ministry of Joseph Smith, the rise of the LDS movement, and the preaching of the gospel to all nations. Prophetic voices like Nephi and Jacob continually remind the people of their place within that overarching narrative, and their expected responses are dictated by an awareness of their place in God’s plan of salvation.
