To understand Nephi, you have to understand that he was the third son — and that everything he ever became, he became against the grain of his birth order.
The Third Son
The Hebrew world ran on birth order. The eldest received the double portion. The eldest carried the family's name forward. The eldest stood between the patriarch and the world. Laman knew this and Lemuel knew this, and that one truth — more than any doctrinal quarrel — is the door through which the trouble with the older brothers enters the book. They were not insane to be angry. By the law of the world they had been born into, the throne and the rod and the blessing belonged to them. The youngest who climbs over the eldest is the most dangerous figure in any patriarchal household.
But the scriptures, when they are honest, are full of younger sons. Abel over Cain. Isaac over Ishmael. Jacob over Esau. Joseph and the coat. David, the smallest of the brothers, anointed in front of all of them. And now this third son of Lehi, sent into the wilderness with a bow and a record and a vision he did not yet know he was being given, who would lay aside his older brothers' inheritance and walk into his own.
It is the same pattern, and it is never any easier on anybody.
"Exceedingly Young"
The first thing he tells us about his soul, he tells us in seventeen words.
Having great desires to know of the mysteries of God, wherefore, I did cry unto the Lord; and behold he did visit me, and did soften my heart. (1 Nephi 2:16)
Read that slowly. He was, by his own confession, "exceedingly young." His father had just been driven from Jerusalem by visions Nephi could not yet see. His older brothers were already murmuring. The path that lay ahead of him was an unmapped desert and an unknown sea. And what he chose to do, before anything else, was kneel down. Not argue with his brothers. Not try to talk his father out of it. Not pretend he understood. He cried unto the Lord, and his heart was softened.
Every great thing in his life proceeds from that one verse. The endowment of vision he is given in 1 Nephi 11. The courage to return for Laban. The strength to make a new bow when his own broke. The patience to build a ship he had no idea how to build. The grief in the Psalm of Nephi. The temple he raised in the Land of Nephi. The thirty silent years before he was told to make the small plates. None of it would have happened to a man who had not first asked, while exceedingly young, to be given a softer heart. That is where prophets begin.
The Slaying of Laban
The moral hinge of his early life is the night in Jerusalem when the Spirit of the Lord said, "Slay him." (1 Nephi 4:12.)
The verses do not flinch and Nephi does not flinch in narrating them, but read them with sympathy for the boy — perhaps still a teenager — standing over an unconscious man with a sword in his own hand. He says he "shrunk." He says the Spirit constrained him three times. He says he reasoned with himself the logic that has unsettled readers for two centuries — better that one man should die than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.
That last sentence is the same sentence Caiaphas would later say of the Lord (John 11:50), with the valences inverted. The high priest says it to justify a murder against the Christ. The Spirit of the Lord says it to Nephi to bring forth the record that would later testify of the Christ. The same construction; opposite directions. One says it to keep a nation in unbelief. The other says it that a nation might come out of unbelief.
What the act cost Nephi, the text barely lets us see. He picks up the sword. He puts on Laban's armor. He talks Zoram into walking out of the city with him. He hands the plates to his father. And then, for a long time, he does not write about it. The grief of it surfaces later — in 2 Nephi 4, in the Psalm — when "the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me" press upon him hard enough to break a prophet open. We read the Psalm and tend to think it is about anger at his brothers. Maybe some of it is. But there is a man in those verses who took a life by command, and who has not stopped reckoning with it.
The Bow
Of all the small wonders of the wilderness narrative, the bow story is the one that ought to be taught in every priesthood quorum.
His steel bow breaks. The bows of his brothers lose their springs. The family is starving. His father — exhausted, hungry, grieving — murmurs against the Lord. This is the moment when, by every law of dramatic justice, the younger son should step forward and say I told you so. He does not. He makes a new bow out of wood. He makes an arrow out of a straight stick. And then, holding both — having done the very work his brothers could not — he goes to his father, the murmuring father, and asks him, "Whither shall I go to obtain food?" (1 Nephi 16:23.)
The patriarchal order is not contingent on the patriarch never stumbling. Nephi knew this in a way that ought to instruct any of us who have ever watched a parent fail and felt, in the failure, our chance to take over. He did not take over. He restored. He took the broken father back to the head of the table by asking him a question only the head of the table could answer. And the Lord, watching, used that act of filial honor to chasten Lehi, give him the Liahona's word, and lift the whole camp.
The bow is wood; the arrow is a stick; the doctrine is gold.
The Endowment of Nephi
It deserves its own name.
What happened to Nephi in 1 Nephi 11 through 14 is the western-hemisphere version of what happened to Enoch in 1 Enoch, to Abraham in the Apocalypse of Abraham, to Ezra in 4 Ezra 11–12, to John on Patmos. The pattern is consistent and ancient: a righteous one is caught up; an angelic guide is sent to interpret; the prophet is shown the tree, the city, the Christ, the apostasy, the restoration, the gathering, the end. Nephi gets all of it. He sees the virgin mother. He sees the Lamb. He sees the Twelve. He sees the great and abominable church. He sees the gathering of Israel in the latter days. He sees the wars that close the world. He is shown the entire arc of the plan of salvation, from creation to glorification, in symbolic form interpreted by an angelic guide.
What was given to him in 1 Nephi 11–14 is, in pattern, what the Lord would later restore to his Church in the upper room of the Red Brick Store and in the Kirtland Temple. It is the endowment, prefigured in vision, given to a prophet on the deck of a journey he had only just begun. Nephi saw the temple liturgy of the latter days as a young man in the wilderness, before there was a temple in the new world, before there was a new world worth speaking of, before there were even enough Nephites to make a congregation.
He saw the whole house of God from the ground floor up.
The Ship
When the Lord commanded him to build a ship, He gave Nephi an instruction we sometimes miss: "I will show thee" (1 Nephi 17:8). Not, I have shown thee. Not, find a shipwright. Not, consult the pattern of the ships of men. I will show thee. The ship was revealed in pieces. Nephi made his own tools; Nephi melted his own ore; Nephi looked to the mountain again and again and again. And the brothers stood off and laughed because they knew, with the worldly knowledge they were rightly proud of, that you cannot build a ship the way Nephi was building this one.
They were correct. You cannot — by the manner of men — build a ship the way Nephi was building it. That was the point. The ship was not after the manner of men because the journey was not after the manner of men. It was a journey across the deep, into a hemisphere no Israelite had stood on, carrying a covenant household toward a land "choice above all other lands." A ship after the manner of men would not have made the voyage. A ship after the manner of God did.
And when Nephi was bound on the deck of the very ship his hands had built — his wrists bleeding into the wood he himself had shaped — the Liahona ceased to work and the wind rose and the brothers found out, the hard way, what kind of vessel they had laughed at. The storm did not stop until they untied the boy who had built the boat.
The Psalm
Of all the things he wrote, the most exposed is 2 Nephi 4:15–35.
He has just buried his father. The vision of the tree is now a memory. He is the prophet in his own right, the head of a fragmenting household, with two elder brothers sharpening knives in the next tent. And what does he write?
O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities. I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me. And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins.
This is the prophet who saw the heavens opened. This is the man given the endowment of vision and the constraint of the Spirit and the ship after the manner of God. And he writes of himself, in his own scripture, that he is a wretched man. That he is angry. That his heart groans. That his strength slacketh because of his afflictions.
Read it for what it is. It is the most personal honest passage in any prophetic record in our canon. It is also a model of what to do when you are at your lowest. He names his wretchedness, names his Lord, names what the Lord has done for him, names what he refuses to give up on, and ends — not in despair, but in a settled, bracing kind of trust: "Yea, I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh." A man can be undone and not be unmade. That is the doctrine of the Psalm of Nephi.
The Crown He Would Not Wear
In 2 Nephi 5:18 the people came to him and asked him to be their king. Lehi was buried. The exodus was over. The Land of Nephi was new in the ground. The crown of leadership lay there on the table, and Nephi did not pick it up.
They would that I should be their king. But I, Nephi, was desirous that they should have no king; nevertheless, I did for them according to that which was in my power.
The line is buried under the chapter's other business — the temple, the swords made after the manner of Laban, the curse upon the Lamanites — but stop on it. Lehi's third son, who had carried the family across an ocean, who had been given the endowment of vision, whose own elder brothers had wanted to murder him to take what they thought was theirs, is offered the crown by the very people he had saved. And he says no. He becomes their king in function, but he will not be called by the name. He is sometimes referred to in the people's memory as a king, but he himself never claims the word.
Many centuries later, an Anti-Nephi-Lehi king would lay down his weapons and the people would call him "Anti-Nephi-Lehi" — like Nephi, like Lehi — and one of the things they meant, surely, was: like the king who would not be called king.
The Plates He Did Not Understand
Thirty years into the new world, the Lord spoke to him again: make another set of plates.
The Lord God said unto me: Make other plates; and thou shalt engraven many things upon them which are good in my sight, for the profit of thy people. Wherefore, I, Nephi, to be obedient to the commandments of the Lord, went and made these plates upon which I have engraven these things. … For a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not. (2 Nephi 5:30, 30 LDS edition; 1 Nephi 9:5.)
Which purpose I know not. He obeyed a command he could not justify. He had already made the large plates. He had already recorded the journey. He had a sufficient record. He did not need a second set. But he made them, because the Lord told him to.
Two thousand four hundred years later, a young man in upstate New York would translate one set of Nephite plates, and lose the manuscript pages, and weep for a season, and then be told to translate a different set instead. The 116 pages would never be recovered. And if Nephi had not, in 570 BC, obeyed a commandment he could not see the reason for, the entire opening of the Book of Mormon would have been lost in 1828.
That is what obedience without understanding is for.
The Egyptian Name
There is a small detail worth pausing on — the name Nephi itself.
In Hebrew it has no good parsing. In Egyptian it does. Most likely behind it is the Egyptian nfr, "good, fair, beautiful, perfect" — a vowel-poor consonantal root that comes into many Egyptian names and would, transliterated into Hebrew script and then into English, naturally come out as something like Nephi. The family's bilingual situation is announced in the opening verse of the book: "the language of my father … consisted of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians" (1 Nephi 1:2). Lehi is a Hebrew name. Sariah is a Hebrew name. Jacob and Joseph are Hebrew names. Nephi is the Egyptian one. The third son carries the Joseph-of-Egypt thread of the family's heritage in his very name — the Manassite lineage made audible every time someone spoke to him.
He is the bilingual son. The bridge.
Last Words
He ends his record in grief.
I cannot say more; the Spirit stoppeth mine utterance, and I am left to mourn because of the unbelief, and the wickedness, and the ignorance, and the stiffneckedness of men; for they will not search knowledge, nor understand great knowledge, when it is given unto them in plainness, even as plain as word can be. (2 Nephi 33:1, 4.)
The prophet who began the book by saying he had been "born of goodly parents" ends it by saying he has been left to mourn. The Psalm of Nephi never quite stops being audible underneath his writing. He saw the tree, and he saw the Christ, and he saw the end of his own people, and he carried that knowledge into the kingdom he refused to name, and he buried it in two sets of plates, and he laid down — old, having done all that was in his power — at last in the Land of Nephi.
He had been the third son, and he had become a man with the kind of weight no eldest son has ever quite known how to carry.
He cried unto the Lord while he was exceedingly young, and the Lord softened his heart; and it was that softened heart, more than the sword that slew Laban or the hand that drew the bow or the shoulder that loosed the ship from the shore, that built the kingdom he would not be called king of and the record he is still, after twenty-five centuries, asking us to read.