The other patriarch of the new world is named for the patriarch of the old wilderness — and is buried in the heart of the very Ishmaelite lands his name first marked.
The Patriarch Almost No One Names
When you ask a Latter-day Saint to list the founders of the Nephite people, the answer usually goes: Lehi, Sariah, Nephi, Jacob. The faithful brothers. The visionary father. The matriarch who came to the tree.
But the founding generation of the new world is not five people. It is two households. Lehi's household leaves Jerusalem first, with Sariah and four sons. Then the Lord sends those sons back, and a second patriarch leaves the city with them — Ishmael, with his wife, his married sons and their families, and his five daughters. From the moment Lehi's tents pitch beside Ishmael's tents in the valley of Lemuel, the Lehite colony is two patriarchs and two matriarchs, not one. The five daughters of Ishmael marry into Lehi's household. Every Nephite and every Lamanite ever born is descended from BOTH patriarchs. The man we politely call "the family friend" or "Nephi's father-in-law" — and walk past — is, by lineage, present in the blood of every later page of the Book of Mormon.
He receives almost no narration. His name appears about thirty times in 1 Nephi and not once after his death. He never gives a sermon. He never receives a vision the record preserves. He is named at his entry, named at his sons' and daughters' marriages, and named at his grave. That is almost all.
And yet the portrait, when you sit with it, is one of the quiet wonders of the small plates.
The Other Ishmael
Start with the name.
Yishmaʿel (יִשְׁמָעֵאל) — God hears — is the name Hagar gave to the firstborn son of Abraham (Genesis 16:11, 16:15). It is one of the oldest theophoric names in the Hebrew Bible. The Lord names a son for the proposition that He listens. Then He sends that son into the wilderness, twice — once with Hagar to Beersheba (Genesis 21:14–21), and once into the historical record where Ishmael becomes the father of twelve princes (Genesis 17:20, 25:13–16) and the eponym of the Ishmaelite tribes who inhabit the Arabian peninsula from the Bronze Age through the time of Christ.
Now consider what Lehi's colony is doing. They are crossing the Arabian peninsula. They are traveling south along the Red Sea, then southeast along the Frankincense Trail, then east across the south of the peninsula to the coast. Every single league of that journey is in the homeland of the descendants of the first Ishmael. The Lehite colony is moving through Ishmaelite lands.
And in the second year of that journey, in those very lands, a man named Ishmael — who himself is a Jew from Jerusalem, descended (the text strongly implies, and Joseph Smith later confirmed in addresses preserved in the journals of his contemporaries) from the tribe of Ephraim by way of the same prophetic lines as Lehi — joins the company, marries his daughters into the Lehite household, and is buried in the ground beneath their feet.
The new-world Ishmael is named, and the typology is doing exactly what biblical naming always does. The man who carries the Ishmaelite name is the patriarch who will hand over his children to the wilderness. He will die in the wilderness. He will be buried in the wilderness. His seed will inherit a wilderness. The naming of the man is the prophecy of his life.
The two Ishmaels meet, in a sense, at Nahom. The Jewish Ishmael is buried in the lands of the Arabian Ishmael. The old Abrahamic line and the new Abrahamic line touch in the same grave.
The Voluntary Leaving
Sit with 1 Nephi 7 for a moment, because it is doing something the text does not pause to admire. The Lord commands Lehi to send his sons back to Jerusalem — not for the brass plates this time, but for a household of women and men they have known only socially. Lehi and Ishmael had been friends in Jerusalem (this is implied by the ease with which Ishmael receives the sons, and is stated in some early LDS recollections of Joseph Smith). The two patriarchs had probably worshipped at the same synagogues, raised their children alongside one another, perhaps traded with each other in the merchant trade Lehi seems to have been in. They were neighbors and equals.
Then four young men appear at Ishmael's door with the strangest invitation in the history of Jewish wilderness journeys: come into the desert with us, leave your house, sell or abandon your property, bring your daughters and your sons and your sons' families, and we will never come back to this city.
And it came to pass that the Lord did soften the heart of Ishmael, and also his household, insomuch that they took their journey with us down into the wilderness to the tent of our father. (1 Nephi 7:5)
The Lord softened his heart. That is the same phrasing used of Nephi when his father's vision became his own (1 Nephi 2:16). It is the language of conversion. Ishmael, with no vision of his own preserved in the record, no angel narrated, no burning bush told of, receives a softening of the heart sufficient to leave his entire life behind on the word of a prophet from another household.
He goes. He never comes back.
This is, by the plain reading of the text, one of the most extraordinary acts of obedience in the entire Book of Mormon. Lehi at least had his own vision driving him into the wilderness. Sariah had her husband to follow. Nephi had the testimony of the Holy Ghost. Ishmael had — what? The word of his friend, conveyed by his friend's young sons, that a city he loved was about to be destroyed. And he believed it sufficiently to liquidate his life.
The text spends three verses on this. It deserves a sermon.
The Rebellion on the Road
The journey from Jerusalem back to the valley of Lemuel was hard. Somewhere in those days, two of Ishmael's sons — both married, both with families — joined Laman and Lemuel and two of Ishmael's daughters in binding Nephi to a rock and leaving him to die (1 Nephi 7:6–16).
Read 1 Nephi 7:6 carefully: Laman and Lemuel, and two of the daughters of Ishmael, and the two sons of Ishmael and their families, did rebel against us. The text gives us the breakdown. Two of the daughters rebelled — almost certainly the ones who would marry Laman and Lemuel. The two sons of Ishmael, with their wives and children, also rebelled. That is half of Ishmael's living adult children, with their families, going against the Lord's prophet on day three or four of their journey out of Jerusalem.
Then verse 19:
And it came to pass that they were sorrowful, because of their wickedness, insomuch that they did bow down before me, and did plead with me that I would forgive them of the thing that they had done against me. (1 Nephi 7:20)
The pleading came from the rebels themselves, but verse 19 names the intercessors first: one of the daughters of Ishmael, yea, and also her mother, and one of the sons of Ishmael. Three Ishmaelites — the daughter who would marry Nephi (almost certainly), her mother (Ishmael's wife), and the one son who had stayed faithful — wept for Nephi and pleaded for his release. The rope was loosed by family members crossing the camp's political lines.
What of Ishmael himself in this scene? The text does not name him. He was probably elderly, probably exhausted, probably watching his own children split into two parties — half rebelling, half pleading — within days of leaving the only home he had ever known. He had given up Jerusalem on the strength of the Lord's softening, and the first sustained drama after his obedience was the spectacle of his own household tearing itself in two. There is no record of his words. There rarely is.
But this is what it cost him to come. The text would have us see it.
Nahom
Six chapters later, the text gives us the line.
And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom. (1 Nephi 16:34)
Ten words. The single longest piece of biographical information given about Ishmael in the entire Book of Mormon is that he died and was buried at a place called Nahom. The word Nahom appears once and is never used again.
Sit with that name.
Naḥam (נחם) in Hebrew is the root for to mourn, to lament, to console, to be comforted. It is the root of Nahum the prophet's name (comforter); of Menaḥem (consoler); of tanḥumim (consolations); of Naḥamani (the Lord has comforted me). The basic semantic range of the root is sorrow and the consoling that follows it. The verse names the place using exactly the verb the daughters' grief will need a few lines later: And it came to pass that the daughters of Ishmael did mourn exceedingly, because of the loss of their father (1 Nephi 16:35). The place where the grief happens is called the place of grieving.
This kind of naming wordplay is a fingerprint of Hebrew composition. The Hebrew Bible does it everywhere. Beersheba (well of seven, or well of the oath) is named at the scene of an oath between Abraham and Abimelech (Genesis 21:31). Peniel (face of God) is named where Jacob saw God face to face (Genesis 32:30). Rehoboth (room) is named where Isaac said now the Lord hath made room for us (Genesis 26:22). The place takes its name from the event that occurs there. The biblical author is doing both at once — telling you what happened and showing you, in the name itself, what the event meant.
1 Nephi 16:34–35 is doing exactly that. He died and was buried at the place of grieving. And his daughters grieved exceedingly. It is a Hebrew wordplay. It is the kind of thing a Hebrew author writes and an English reader, unless he knows the root, walks past entirely.
Joseph Smith did not know Hebrew when he translated 1 Nephi 16:34. He would not study it until Kirtland, six or seven years later, and even then his Hebrew tutor (Joshua Seixas) taught him basic vocabulary, not the kind of literary wordplay buried in a place name. The wordplay was there before the translator could have appreciated it. It was in the record. It came through.
The Stones at Marib
And then the rest of the world caught up.
In the 1990s, archaeologists working at the ancient temple site of Marib in Yemen began publishing inscriptions on three stone altars dedicated by an official whose tribal affiliation was, in the South Arabian consonantal script of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, NHM. (Old South Arabian, like Hebrew, writes only consonants; the unwritten vowels could yield Nahm, Nihm, Nehem, Nahom — any of these.) The altars are dated by epigraphy to roughly the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. NHM is also attested in classical Arab geography as the tribal name of a confederation that lived in the same region in the same period. The Nihm tribal territory is located on the ancient Frankincense Trail running south-southeast from Jerusalem along the western edge of the Arabian peninsula, at exactly the point where a traveler would need to turn east toward the coast of southern Arabia.
Compare 1 Nephi 17:1: And it came to pass that we did again take our journey in the wilderness; and we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth.
There is one and only one place in the entire Book of Mormon Arabian itinerary where the text gives both a directional change (south-southeast turning to east) and a place name. That place is Nahom. The only externally corroborated proper-name location in the Book of Mormon's pre-American narrative is the place of Ishmael's grave. The chronology, the geography, the directional pivot, the tribal name, the consonantal spelling — all align. The stones at Marib were unearthed in the 1990s. Joseph Smith had been dead for a century and a half.
This is not a proof of the Book of Mormon. The Lord does not prove His word; He invites belief. But it is the kind of detail that says, with the quiet undeniable voice of stones, this record knows what it is talking about. This was not invented in upstate New York. Ishmael was buried in real ground. His daughters wept in a real place. The altars are there. The grave is there, somewhere within thirty miles of those altars, with the bones of a Jewish patriarch from Jerusalem and the name of the place where his daughters mourned.
The Lord, who is good at His work, set the corroboration into the stones two and a half thousand years before anyone had the means to read it.
The Seed That Outlasts
Now go forward a thousand years in the record.
By the closing books — Mormon, Moroni — the Nephite nation has been destroyed. The Lamanites alone remain. Mormon 8:7: And there are none save it be the Lamanites and robbers that do exist upon the face of the land. The covenant population of the new world, the people whom the Book of Mormon is written for, is the Lamanite remnant.
Now go back to 1 Nephi 7. The two sons of Ishmael who rebelled were the sons whose families joined Laman and Lemuel. Through those marriages, the bulk of Ishmael's seed was carried into the Lamanite line. And through the faithful daughter of Ishmael who married Nephi, and the faithful daughter who married Sam, Ishmael's blood was also carried into the Nephite line. Whichever side of the dispensation lasted, Ishmael's seed was in it.
In the long run, the Nephite line died and the Lamanite line endured. The covenant peoples whom the Restoration gathers in our own century — the indigenous peoples of the Americas to whom the Book of Mormon was first promised — are, by lineage, descendants of Ishmael every bit as much as they are descendants of Lehi. The 2 Nephi 30:6 promise that the Lamanites will become a white and a delightsome people (rendered pure and a delightsome people in some later printings) is, by genealogy, a promise to Ishmael's seed as much as to Lehi's. The Book of Mormon is, demographically, an Ishmael-record as much as a Lehi-record. We only call it Lehite because the plates were Lehi's.
This is what the Lord does. He puts His covenant in the blood of two patriarchs at the beginning of a dispensation so that no rebellion of one line can ever wipe the covenant out. Lehi sends his sons back for Ishmael in 1 Nephi 7 because the Lord knew that without the second household, the first household's failures would have ended the dispensation. Ishmael is the redundancy the Lord built into the covenant. The man who barely speaks is, in the long arithmetic of the record, the man whose seed outlasts everyone else's.
The Mother-in-Law of Prophets
A footnote that is not a footnote: every prophet who writes on the small plates after the founding generation is descended, on his mother's side, from Ishmael. Jacob's mother was Sariah, but Jacob's brothers Sam and Nephi married daughters of Ishmael — so Enos (son of Jacob) is half-Ishmaelite, half-Lehite. So is Jarom. So is Omni. So is every Nephite king after Nephi. So is Mosiah. So is Benjamin. So, eventually, is Mormon. So is Moroni.
The mother who is unnamed in the text — Ishmael's wife — is the matriarch from whom the entire prophetic line of the Nephite small plates descends. She is the woman in 1 Nephi 7:19 who pleaded for Nephi's life on the road. The faithful matriarch of the second household, weeping for the prophet, sets the line that will produce every prophet after her. The Book of Mormon does not name her. The Lord knows her name. So, by now, do the bones of her husband at Nahom.
What He Was
He was a man of Jerusalem in his sixties — perhaps older — who left his city forever on the word of a friend's prophecy, watched half his children rebel within days of leaving, gave his five daughters in marriage to the prophets of another household, walked through eight years of wilderness, and was buried in a stone-marked grave on the edge of the Arabian highland, in a place his daughters named with the Hebrew word for grief. He never wrote a verse of scripture. His sermons, if he gave any, are not on the plates. His private prayers are not preserved. We do not know if he lived to see the Liahona, the broken-and-mended bow, or the family's arrival in Bountiful — the text says only that he died in the wilderness, and that his daughters wept.
But his blood is in every page of every record that follows him. The covenant that began with two patriarchs in Jerusalem ends, in the Restoration, in two patriarchs' seed — the indigenous peoples to whom the book was given. Lehi's hand is on the small plates. Ishmael's hand is on the genealogy. Both of them, when the gospel is at last preached unto the remnant of Jacob (3 Nephi 20:16), will look down on a people whose covenant began at their grandfathers' tents in the valley of Lemuel.
He is the other patriarch. The record does not say enough about him. The record does not need to. He left his city and gave his daughters and was buried at the place of grieving, and that is, in the Lord's own arithmetic, more than enough.
He was named for the wilderness-son of Abraham and lived the wilderness-son's life — leaving the land of promise, walking the trade roads of the Ishmaelite tribes, and dying in the heart of those same lands. The stones at Marib know his place. His daughters knew his grief. And every covenant child of the new world, faithful or rebellious, carries his blood — the second patriarch the Lord put in the camp so that the dispensation would not depend on one household alone.