To understand Lehi, you have to understand that the man who walked away from Jerusalem had been one of its citizens "in all his days." This was not the leaving of a stranger. This was the leaving of a son.
The Man Who Loved the City He Was Told to Leave
Open the first chapter of Nephi's record and you discover something the speed of the narrative tends to bury: Lehi was not a desert prophet. He was an urban man. "There dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days" — the phrase is offhand, but it tells you who he was. He was born inside the walls. He had walked the streets his whole life. He knew the Temple. He knew the priests. He knew which gate the wood was brought through and which prophet stood at which corner crying repentance into the wind. The Jerusalem that the Lord told him to flee was his city.
That changes how we read his obedience. Abraham was already on the move — already in a tent — when he was called to leave Ur. Moses was a fugitive from a kingdom that had cast him out before the burning bush ever flamed. Jonah ran from a city. Lehi ran out of one, and he ran out of one he loved. He did not leave Jerusalem as a man shaking dust off his sandals. He left it the way you leave a parent's house for the last time.
The Pillar on the Rock
The vision came as he was praying — and Nephi tells us that he prayed "with all his heart, in behalf of his people" (1 Nephi 1:5). He had heard the other prophets — Jeremiah was preaching within walking distance — and he had taken their words home with him and turned them into prayer. The Lord answered with fire.
There came a pillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock before him; and he saw and heard much.
Two phrases in that sentence deserve more attention than they usually get. Pillar of fire — ʿammûd ʾēsh in Hebrew — is not a generic image. It is the Exodus phrase. The pillar of fire is what led Israel out of Egypt, what stood between them and Pharaoh's army, what hovered over the tabernacle door. To say that what came down to Lehi was a "pillar of fire" is to mark him from the first verse as a second Moses — a man being commissioned to lead a covenant people out of bondage and across a wilderness, by the same divine presence that had led the first Israel.
And upon a rock. Read 1 Kings 19:11 and Exodus 33:21 side by side. To Moses: "behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock." To Elijah: "go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord." The pillar descends to the rock because the rock is the place of the prophet's commissioning. Lehi is being set in a line.
He is so overcome that he goes home and lies down upon his bed. That detail matters too — prophets do not stage-manage their visions, and Lehi did not pretend he was anything other than a man who had been undone by what he had seen.
The Throne Vision and the Book
What comes next — the second vision, the ascent — is one of the great hidden riches of the Book of Mormon, and the literature most people have never read makes it ring like a bell.
He thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God. And it came to pass that he saw One descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noon-day. And he also saw twelve others following him, and their brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament. (1 Nephi 1:8–10)
This is a throne theophany. The pattern is older than Lehi by centuries and reaches forward through him by millennia. Isaiah 6: throne, seraphim, the Lord high and lifted up. Ezekiel 1: throne, four living creatures, wheels of fire. 1 Enoch 14–15: a crystal palace, a throne, the Great Glory upon it, the prophet falling on his face. The Apocalypse of Abraham 17–19: Abraham carried up by an angel, shown the throne, given a book to read. The Book of the Watchers makes the throne-room scene the type-scene of prophetic call: the prophet stands at the threshold of the heavenly court, sees the assembly, hears the decree, and is given a book.
Lehi is given a book.
And the first came and stood before my father, and gave unto him a book, and bade him that he should read.
The motif is the heavenly-tablets motif, attested across the Enochic tradition and the Jubilees corpus and the Apocalypse of Abraham. A righteous one ascends, is shown the tablets of heaven, reads the decrees written there, and brings the word back to humanity. What is striking about Lehi's vision is who gives him the book. The one who descends "out of the midst of heaven" — whose luster is above the sun at noon-day — is, on any honest reading of the verses, the Lamb of God Nephi will see in fuller form in chapter 11. Lehi sees Christ before he has the words for it. He sees the Twelve before the Twelve are called by name. He is given a book by the same Lord whose book he is being commissioned to bring forth.
He is the first prophet of this dispensation, and the first thing he is given is a book to read.
The Name on the Jawbone
A footnote that is not really a footnote: Lehi's name.
In Hebrew, Leḥî (לְחִי) means "jawbone" or "cheek." It is the name of the place in Judges 15 where Samson, weaponless and cornered, picks up a jawbone of an ass and slays a thousand Philistines, then cries to the Lord, and water bursts from a hollow place. The site is afterward called En-haqqore — "the spring of the one who called." Lehi the place is a site of deliverance through a weak thing.
To name a man Lehi is, in the Hebrew imagination, to name him the bearer of an unlikely deliverance. The instrument that should not have worked. The jawbone in the open field. The prophet from a doomed city, called out by fire, who would never have been chosen by any council, whose own family is largely against him, who carries his people across an unknown sea in a ship built by a son who had never built a ship. The weak thing that becomes deliverance.
And then he opens his mouth — uses his leḥî, his jaw — and Jerusalem is warned, and his sons are taught, and a covenant people is conceived. The name fits the man.
The First Western Tree of Life
The third great gift of his prophetic life is the tree.
Lehi's vision in 1 Nephi 8 is the first western-hemisphere theophany of the tree of life — and one of the very few in the whole library of scripture that puts the tree of Eden back at the center of a prophet's call. The Eden tree had been guarded for centuries by cherubim and a turning sword. Lehi sees it again, with fruit on it, and the fruit is sweet "above all that I had ever before tasted" (1 Nephi 8:11). He sees a river. He sees an iron rod. He sees a mist, and a building in the air. He sees Sariah, and Sam, and Nephi come and partake; and he sees Laman and Lemuel stand off and refuse; and the agony of a father with two sons who will not eat the fruit is the agony of every parent who has ever watched a child step away from light.
What the other prophets of the period do not have is precisely this scene. Jeremiah does not see this tree. Ezekiel sees a wheel, not a tree. Isaiah sees a throne. Lehi sees the tree, and he sees his family — and that is the scriptural innovation. The vision is not abstract. It is domestic. The tree is real, but the iron rod is the path for his children, and the great and spacious building is the laughter his children will hear, and the dark mists are what his children will walk through. The Eden tree is reset at the head of a covenant household, and the patriarch's first concern is whether his sons and his wife will reach the fruit.
What other prophets see, Lehi gets to live. He is shown the tree as a father.
The Liahona, the Bow, and the Boat
The wilderness narrative is sometimes read as a string of complaints — Laman, Lemuel, broken bow, broken steel, broken sons — but read it again with Lehi at the center and a different shape emerges. He is a man who walks into the wilderness without a map, and the map is given to him one piece at a time. The Liahona appears at his tent door (1 Nephi 16:10). He does not strike the rock to make a road. He waits for a brass ball to point him along it. He is fed by what the Lord provides on the journey, and what the Lord provides arrives in the form of a compass, a brass record, an Ishmael, a son who can build a ship, and finally a coast called Bountiful.
When Nephi breaks his bow in 1 Nephi 16, Lehi murmurs. The text is honest enough to record it — a prophet murmuring at hunger — and the moment is one of the most quietly humanizing passages in scripture. The aging father, hungry, watching his strongest son shoulder the responsibility of feeding the camp because the father's own hand is no longer strong enough to draw the bow that broke. He repents. He inquires of the Lord. He receives a chastening. And then — and this is the part that does not always come through — Nephi brings the venison home and Lehi is restored to the head of the family. The father is allowed to keep his place even after he has stumbled.
That is its own doctrine.
The Patriarchal Blessings
The book closes him gently. 2 Nephi 1 through 4 is the patriarchal blessing scene of the Book of Mormon — the new-world correspondent, on the other side of the ocean, of Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33. Lehi gathers his sons and daughters and grandchildren around him, and he speaks the blessings of Israel onto them by name.
To Laman and Lemuel he gives a blessing that is also a warning, and the warning is delivered with the love of a father who is trying, even at the end, to save the sons he could not bend. To Jacob he gives the deepest doctrine in the book — the necessity of opposition, the freedom of the will, the Fall as gift, the Atonement as the answer to a question the Fall asked: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25). To Joseph he gives the prophecy of the latter-day seer, Joseph the son of Joseph — Joseph Smith named on the page two and a half millennia in advance of his coming (2 Nephi 3:14–15). To Sam — and this is the line almost no one notices — he gives the same blessing as Nephi. "Blessed art thou, and thy seed; for thou shalt inherit the land like unto thy brother Nephi. And thy seed shall be numbered with his seed; and thou shalt be even like unto thy brother" (2 Nephi 4:11). The middle son who never quarreled, who never shone, who simply followed, inherits the same promise as the prophet-king. The Lord blesses the quiet brother the same as the loud one. Lehi's last act on the page is to make sure Sam knows it.
And then he is gathered. "Stricken in years … laid in the grave" (2 Nephi 4:12). The text is sparse. A man who began the book in a city, kneeling by his bed, hearing the cries of Jerusalem in his ears, ends the book in a strange land, surrounded by grandchildren, having brought half a covenant household across an ocean. He left a temple to find one. He left a city to plant one.
Joseph Seeing Joseph
One more thing must be said before we leave him — because if you miss it you miss what kind of prophet Lehi was.
In 2 Nephi 3, quoting "the prophecies of Joseph" — Joseph of Egypt, the patriarch — Lehi reads onto his youngest son a prophecy that is not preserved in our Old Testament. Joseph of Egypt, in Egypt, in the seventeenth century before Christ, foresaw "a choice seer" to be raised up in the last days, who would be called Joseph after the name of his father, and who would do "a great and marvelous work." Lehi reads these words to his son Joseph in roughly 588 BC. Joseph Smith is born in 1805 and called in 1820.
Three Josephs. The one in Egypt sees the one in Palmyra. The one in the promised land hears it from his father and writes it down. The one in Palmyra finds it on plates of gold and translates it and reads his own name in his own scripture.
That is the kind of bridge Lehi is. The first prophet of the new world hears the voice of the oldest prophet of his lineage and speaks the name of the prophet who will close the dispensation. Lehi is standing on a ridge from which he can see both ends of the Restoration at once.
What He Was
He was a husband whose wife rebuked him, and he received her rebuke. He was a father whose elder sons rebelled, and he kept blessing them anyway. He was a prophet whose city would not hear him, so he carried the message to a continent where it would. He was a man who lost a country and gained a covenant. He was the jawbone — the unlikely instrument — and the spring broke out of him.
He did not see what would come of his obedience. He saw a tree, and a book, and a Son descending out of heaven, and twelve who followed; and he went home and lay down, and he never again belonged to the city he had loved. The fruit he tasted in the vision did not grow at Jerusalem. It grew on the other side of the world, and his great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren picked it.