Lehi’s Journey from Jerusalem

The Book of Mormon opens with a journey: an Israelite family leaving Jerusalem in its final years, the wilderness wearing them down long before they ever reached the ocean they'd have to cross to find a promised land. This is the story of Lehi — and it's the reason the record is, at its root, a Hebrew record carried into a new world.

The record begins “in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah” — the last king of Judah before the Babylonian conquest, and the same period as the prophet Jeremiah. Lehi, a resident of Jerusalem and a descendant of Joseph through Manasseh, is warned in a vision that the city will be destroyed for its wickedness. Like the prophets of his day, he preaches repentance; like them, he is rejected, and his life is threatened.

Commanded by the Lord, Lehi takes his family and departs into the wilderness, leaving behind his house and possessions. His sons later return twice to Jerusalem — once for the brass plates containing the Hebrew scriptures, and once to bring the family of Ishmael, so that the travelers will have families of their own.

The family travels south through the wilderness, near the borders of the Red Sea, enduring hardship and internal conflict along the way. The record describes their route, their trials, and the tension between Lehi’s faithful younger son Nephi and his rebellious elder brothers, Laman and Lemuel — a tension that will echo through the rest of the book and, indeed, through the whole history of the two peoples descended from them.

After a long journey they arrive at a place of abundance on the seashore, which they name Bountiful. There, following the Lord’s instruction, Nephi builds a ship.

One stop along the route is worth pausing on. Nephi records that his father-in-law, Ishmael, died and “was buried in the place which was called Nahom” (1 Nephi 16:34). The phrasing is notable — Nephi says the place was called Nahom, implying the name already existed and wasn’t one the travelers gave it themselves.

In 1999, archaeologists working at a temple site near Marib, in modern Yemen, published an inscription on a stone altar naming a donor from the Nihm tribe — a name built from the same Semitic consonants, N-H-M, and dated to roughly the seventh century BC, the approximate era of Lehi’s journey. The Nihm tribal region sits in the right place on the map: south-southeast of the area Lehi's family would have crossed, along the old incense-trail route paralleling the Red Sea, and — as Nephi specifies — nearly due west of the fertile coastline where Bountiful would have to be (1 Nephi 17:1). No other NHM place-name has been documented anywhere else in Arabia.

Mormon scholars, including historian S. Kent Brown and others writing for BYU Studies and the Interpreter Foundation, regard this as the closest thing available to an independent, on-the-ground confirmation of a specific Book of Mormon location — details Joseph Smith could not plausibly have known in 1829, when almost nothing about interior Arabian geography had been mapped by outsiders. Non-Mormon critics respond, fairly, that a tribal name surviving in a region proves the name is old and the region is real — it does not prove that Nephi, Lehi, or Ishmael ever set foot there. A shared name is suggestive, not conclusive. It's real evidence of something — just not proof of everything critics want it to settle.

From Nahom, Nephi says the family turned and traveled “nearly eastward” until they reached the coast (1 Nephi 17:1). Researchers have used Nephi’s own details — fresh water, timber suitable for shipbuilding, ore for tools, a cliff, a place remote enough to build a ship undisturbed — to narrow the candidates along the southern Arabian coastline in Yemen and Oman down to a handful of possible inlets.

The most widely cited candidate, proposed by researcher Warren Aston after years of fieldwork, is Khor Kharfot, at the mouth of Wadi Sayq in southern Oman — an unusually green, spring-fed inlet in an otherwise arid coastline, with iron ore deposits nearby suitable for toolmaking. A smaller number of researchers, including George Potter, argue instead for Khor Rori, roughly 60 miles to the east, citing its harbor and shipbuilding history. Both sites plausibly fit the text; Mormon scholarship has not settled on one, and the debate between their proponents continues in specialist journals.

As with Nahom, none of this proves the narrative — it shows that Nephi's account of the Arabian leg of the journey holds together as real geography, described by someone who plausibly knew the region, however that knowledge came to him.

From Bountiful the family sets sail across the “large waters.” The crossing is another trial — storm, rebellion, and deliverance — before they reach the promised land, understood in the record to be in the Americas. There the family divides, and the story of the Nephites and Lamanites begins.

This voyage is the hinge of the entire Book of Mormon: a branch of Israel, carrying Hebrew scripture and covenant, transplanted across the world. Everything the record becomes grows from this journey out of Jerusalem.

Lehi’s journey fills the early chapters of 1 Nephi. Read it in Hebrew and English, verse by verse.