What is the significance of dwelling in a tent in the ancient Near East?

Thomas R. Valletta

“With the announcement that his ‘father dwelt in a tent,’ Nephi serves notice that he had assumed the desert way of life, as perforce he must for his journey. Any easterner would appreciate the significance and importance of the statement, which to us seems almost trivial. If Nephi seems to think of his father’s tent as the hub of everything, he is simply expressing the view of any normal Bedouin, to whom the tent of the sheikh is the sheet anchor of existence” (Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, 58).

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