“Born of Goodly Parents”

Jana Reiss

It’s important to note the very first thing Nephi tells us about himself: he has been born “of goodly parents.” He paints Lehi and Sariah, his father and mother, as righteous individuals who dared to defy society’s expectations in order to obey God’s commands.

Readers of the Book of Mormon should always remember to ask themselves who is speaking, since the book is a complex amalgam of many different authors and editors. Here, history has been written by the winner, Nephi—or is he really the winner? Although Nephi wins the immediate battles against his almost comically unrighteous brothers, Laman and Lemuel, he knows it’s a Pyrrhic victory, because by the time of this writing he has been privileged to glimpse the future and knows what is coming. Centuries before it happens, he sees the destruction of his own people, the Nephites, at the hands of his brothers’ descendants, the Lamanites. So it’s no accident that out of all the many ways he could have opened his narrative, he chooses to reaffirm the fundamental goodness of his parents, whose decisions resulted in the eventual wedge between the brothers.

The Book of Mormon: Selections Annotated & Explained

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