Leaving Jerusalem For A Promised Land

1 Nephi opens the Book of Mormon with the family of Lehi, a prophet in Jerusalem around 600 BCE by the text's own internal chronology, who is warned to flee the city before its destruction. Lehi's son Nephi becomes the book's narrator, and the early chapters follow a mission back into Jerusalem to obtain a set of brass plates, a genealogical and scriptural record, from a official named Laban, an episode that includes Nephi's account of being commanded to kill Laban to obtain them, a passage that has drawn sustained ethical discussion both inside and outside the tradition.

The family then travels through the wilderness, gathers another family led by Ishmael whose daughters marry Lehi's sons, and eventually crosses the ocean by ship to a promised land, which Latter-day Saint tradition situates somewhere in the Americas without committing to an exact location within the text itself. Along the way Nephi records visions of his own, including an extended vision paralleling material his father Lehi received concerning a tree of life and the future of Lehi's descendants. The book ends with Nephi reflecting on the record he is keeping and the divided relationship already forming between his own line and that of his elder brothers Laman and Lemuel.