[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the fifth installment from a book entitled Labor Diligently to Write: The Ancient Making of a Modern Scripture. It is being presented in serialized form as an aid to help readers prepare for the 2020 Come Follow Me course of study. This is a new approach for Interpreter, and we hope you find it helpful.]

 

 

Chapter 12: Book of 2 Nephi

2 Nephi Chapter I (1–2)

The first, and perhaps most important structural element in 2 Nephi is that there is a 2 Nephi at all. The text we have from the small plates of Nephi are holographic. That is, they are in the hand of the original writers. There is no Mormon standing between the original text and our final version, such as we find in the material from Mosiah to 4 Nephi (or Moroni’s treatment of Ether’s record). We have the chapters just as Nephi created them. We also have the anomaly of two separate books by the very same writer, something that never occurs again in known Nephite history.

That Nephi intentionally planned the division into two books is verified in his synoptic header. With such a header, Nephi lays out what he planned for his second book, just as he did for his first book. The conceptual problem with the second book is that it describes only the events listed up to 2 Nephi IV (5). To make matters somewhat more difficult, the beginning of Nephi’s second book feels like a continuation of the first.

Nephi opens with: “And now it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had made an end of teaching my brethren, our father, Lehi, also spake many things unto them, and rehearsed unto them, how great things the [Page 222]Lord had done for them in bringing them out of the land of Jerusalem” (2 Nephi 1:1). This very clearly returns to the way Nephi ended 1 Nephi. However, as I noted for 1 Nephi VII (22), that ending is more likely to have been literary than a description of an actual event. When Nephi refers to it at the beginning of his second book, he is carefully linking the two books. They are his books and respond to his reasons for creating them.296

We cannot tell if Nephi began writing his second book soon after ending the first or if the link to the aside resulted from re-reading the material before beginning. Regardless of when he began writing 2 Nephi, the contents of the header strongly suggest that Nephi intended the second book to continue along the same historical themes as did the first. I suggest that Nephi viewed the books as being conceptually divided by events pertaining to the Old World in 1 Nephi and events in the New World in 2 Nephi.

The first book (after the obligatory identification and qualification of the author) began with Lehi. The second book begins with Lehi. Lehi’s Old World prophecy predicted Jerusalem’s destruction and set the family on their exodus to a land of promise. The second book also begins as a fulfillment of the promise to Lehi with the subsequent story of Nephi as the teacher and ruler of a new people.

Nephi understood that a destruction of his people would eventually come (1 Nephi 13:35) and perhaps saw Lehi’s discussion of the promise of the land as a similar prophetic promise for the future. After recapitulating the destruction of Jerusalem (2 Nephi 1:4), Lehi declared:

Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves. And if it so be that they shall keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of this land, and there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they sha...