Lehi

The Book of Mormon opens with Lehi as a prosperous man in Jerusalem during the reign of Zedekiah, shortly before the Babylonian conquest the text places around 600 BCE. Prophets are warning the city of coming destruction unless it repents, and when Lehi joins that warning after a vision of his own, the people threaten to kill him for it, prompting a second vision in which he is commanded to take his family and flee into the wilderness. He leaves his wealth behind, and his sons Laman and Lemuel resent both the disruption and their father's authority over it from very early in the account, a tension the narrative treats as the root of the later split among Lehi's descendants.

Nephi is sent back to Jerusalem more than once, first for the family's genealogical and legal records kept on brass plates, held by a man named Laban, and later to persuade another family, that of Ishmael, to join them so that Lehi's sons will have wives. The extended family departs together into the Arabian wilderness and eventually builds a ship, at Nephi's direction and by divine instruction, to cross the ocean to a promised land.

Partway through the journey Lehi receives a vision of a tree whose fruit is white and sweet above any other taste, reached by a path beside an iron rod that travelers must hold to avoid being lost in a mist of darkness, while a great and spacious building full of mockers stands apart, symbolizing pride and worldly judgment. He tells the vision to his family and interprets its central image, the fruit, as the love of God, making it one of the most quoted passages in Latter Day Saint scripture.

Once the family reaches the promised land, Lehi lives to see his children grown and delivers a final set of blessings and warnings to each of his sons in turn, urging Laman and Lemuel toward the obedience they have resisted and setting Nephi apart as a ruler and teacher over his brethren, a designation that becomes the seed of the later Nephite and Lamanite division. Lehi dies shortly after these blessings, and the record his family keeps from his departure from Jerusalem onward, first on the brass plates and then on additional plates of their own, becomes the founding portion of the record the Book of Mormon presents as translated from that lineage.