Abstract: The Book of Mormon begins at a pivotal point in Israelite history and in the history of the ancient Near East more broadly. With the fall of Assyria and the power vacuum that grew out of Assyria’s demise, questions of sovereignty were of paramount concern. It was at that time that Lehi led his family into the wilderness after witnessing the impending destruction of Jerusalem in vision. Nephi, “desir[ing] to know the things that his father had seen” (1 Nephi 11:1), describes his own vision, where he saw the coming of the “Son of God” (1 Nephi 11:7), the destruction of his own people, and the “formation of a great church” (1 Nephi 13:4) that would “destroy the saints of God” (1 Nephi 13:9). These elements, along with others in Nephi’s vision, seem to reflect the underlying insecurity of the time concerning divinely appointed sovereignty and the right to rule. Because of the deeply personal nature of Nephi’s vision and its pressing relevance, we might expect it to contain elements that represent the cultural and social realities of his time. When we approach Nephi’s vision in this way, surprising parallels can be found between the “great church” of his vision and the Assyrian Empire. These parallels help provide a new context for viewing Nephi’s vision that can heighten our awareness of the loving kindness the “Son of God” displays as the universal sovereign.

For centuries, the recording and transmission of Assyria’s ideology played an important part in maintaining Assyria’s dominance in the ancient Near East. This has led many scholars such as Lawson Younger to assert that the history of Israel and Judah1 “is inextricably bound to the history of Assyria … and is profitably analysed in this light.”2 Prior to the Babylonian exile, Biblical writers often used the Assyrian Empire as the dominant foil when crafting their records.3 Shawn Aster points out that Isaiah uses a “sort of ‘replacement theology’ in which [Page 2]the universal sovereignty of YHWH is imagined and described based on Assyrian claims of universal dominion.” Aster further claims that there is a “consistent use of Neo-Assyrian4 royal motifs throughout [Isaiah,] … motifs which are borrowed, subverted, and adapted to fit the prophet’s message.”