Culture: Nephi gives little space to the marriages solemnized between the two families. Because Zoram marries the eldest of Ishmael’s five daughters, he is presumably older than Lehi’s sons.
Elder Erastus Snow remembered a little of the information from the lost book of Lehi. (See commentary accompanying 1 Nephi 7:2–3.) The essential information for us in Snow’s recollection is that the daughters of Lehi married the sons of Ishmael. This information is not available in the translation of the small plates. Snow’s point in making the statement, however, is only concerning the combination of the two lineages, Ephraim and Manasseh. As the inheritors of Joseph’s lineage, they carried Yahweh’s promise that they would become numerous. As part of the northern ten tribes which were carried away during the Assyrian conquest, it might be questioned whether this prophecy concerning them in Genesis 48:4 was ever fulfilled. However, because the two lineages are represented in Lehi’s colony, we may understand that, at the very least, the persistence of the Lamanites continues this conceptual, if not genetic, lineage into the present.
At this point, the group consists of, at a minimum, Lehi and Sariah, Ishmael and his wife, the two sons and five daughters of Ishmael, the four sons of Lehi, and Zoram. Lehi’s sons married four of Ishmael’s daughters, and the fifth married Zoram. The sons of Ishmael were already married and brought their families with them (1 Ne. 7:6).
The sisters Elder Snow refers to are probably the same ones that Nephi mentions much later (2 Ne. 5:6). John L. Sorenson speculates:
The two (or more) daughters of Lehi and Sariah I presume, on the basis of Erastus Snow’s statement, to have become wives of Ishmael’s sons. They were minors at the beginning of the account; otherwise there would be no way to place them in Sariah’s birth history. I suppose that one was around twelve and the other around nine. When they arrived in Bountiful they would have been twenty and seventeen.
It is logical that in the intimate circumstances of the camp, youths approaching sexual maturity would be in a socially awkward position. Likely, the adult role of wife would be arranged for the two daughters as soon as feasible, say around age sixteen for each in turn, but whom would they marry? The sons of Ishmael alone seem of an age to be possible husbands. Lehi’s first daughter may then have become the second wife of Ishmael’s first son at about the time they were in Nahom. The second daughter could have become the second wife to Ishmael’s second son no later than the time the party reached Bountiful.
This scenario takes the Erastus Snow statement at face value. I realize that to suppose that the daughters became second wives appears to contradict Jacob 2:34; 3:5, where it is said that Lehi was commanded that there should be no plural wives. But perhaps Lehi received that commandment only in the promised land after, and partially because of, bitter experience with the second wifehood of his two daughters, which had led to their separation from Ishmael’s sons. Or, these cases may have been covered under the “escape clause” of Jacob 2:30 (“For if I will… raise up seed unto me, I will command my people” to make polygamous unions), the daughters having no other prospect of marriage within their party.
Still another possibility is that the arduous wilderness experience had caused the (unmentioned) death of the original wives of the sons of Ishmael, whereupon Lehi’s daughters were taken as replacement spouses. A final possibility is that the Snow statement was in error in the recollection of the detail about the daughters and that they never married at all due to lack of partners of a suitable age. Obviously, we cannot settle these details on the basis of so few bits of information given us by Nephi in his record. We may wonder about such matters but ought to restrict our guesses to those with some basis in the text, not simply out-of-the-blue speculations.
Of course Sorenson’s speculation is based upon the premise that the sisters had to be minors. If they are older, then we need not have recourse to the controversial practice of polygamy in this small group. As Sorenson notes, these births extend Sariah’s birth history, but perhaps not as badly as he speculates. Both options must be considered.