Abstract: Commentaries on Nephi’s first book tend to interpret the fraternal struggles it reports as historical facts that are meant primarily to invite readers’ evaluative responses. While recognizing the historical character of the facts marshalled by Nephi, this paper will argue that the author transposes that history into an allegory meant to inspire his readers in all times and places to abandon prevailing metaphors of life that are focused on the attainment of worldly goods and pleasures. In their place, Nephi offers the revealed metaphor of life as a day of probation taught to him and his father in their great visions. God’s plan of salvation revealed to them made it clear that the welfare of each human being for eternity would be determined by a divine judgment on how effectively their lives had been transformed by their adherence to the gospel of Jesus Christ in mortality. The message of 1 Nephi is that all men and women are invited to let the Spirit of the Lord soften their hearts and lead them into his covenant path wherein he can prepare them to enter into his presence at the end.

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From the time Lehi and his family fled from Jerusalem, Nephi kept their record on what we now call the Large Plates of Nephi, an enormous record that was maintained by Nephi’s successors for a thousand years — with the final pages being written by Mormon and Moroni at the end of Nephite times.1 But after thirty years, the mature prophet-leader Nephi tells us that “the Lord God said unto me: Make [Page 232]other plates” which would focus on the divine revelations and spiritual teachings of the Nephites (2 Nephi 5:30). It took at least a decade for Nephi to compose and inscribe this second record on what we call the Small Plates of Nephi (cf. 2 Nephi 5:34). Nephi’s purposes and guidelines for writing in these Small Plates are mentioned several times but are most fully articulated in a transitional explanation penned by Nephi’s younger brother Jacob, who inherited the responsibility of maintaining and extending them after Nephi’s death.2

The ten years or more that Nephi devoted to writing the Small Plates gave him ample time to think carefully through both the content and the rhetorical structure of this 154-page composition. While scholars have commented on Nephi’s writing from a variety of perspectives, we do not yet have a serious investigation of the following question: Why does Nephi begin this second record by recounting six stories of the earliest years of the family’s flig...