The Flight From Jerusalem

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.