1 Nephi 8: Three People Standing at the Head of the River

Verse 14 of 1 Nephi 8 gives Lehi's wife and two of his sons one sentence, and it's an odd one.

...and at the head thereof I beheld your mother Sariah, and Sam, and Nephi; and they stood as if they knew not whither they should go.

I went through 1 Nephi in the spring and didn't give this chapter what it was owed, so I'm back for it. Most of us remember the vision as a sorting: the ones who hold the rod, the ones who lose the path in the mist, the ones who taste the fruit and then get embarrassed, the ones who walk into the building. Sariah, Sam and Nephi go in none of those, and they're sitting right in the middle of the chapter.

Who are the people standing at the head of the river?

Look at where they are first. Lehi has already reached the tree and eaten (verse 11), and only then does he look around for his family (verse 13), find a river, follow it with his eyes to where it starts, and there they are. Nobody in verse 14 is lost, because the mist doesn't arrive until verse 23. Nobody is scoffing or ashamed either. They're standing there, and the text says they don't know where to go.

A friend of mine from college, Gary Tolman, once stood at the edge of a ward barbecue in a Sandy parking lot for most of an hour with a paper plate he had no intention of eating from. He'd moved in the week before. He was not shy exactly. He had a plate and a spot against a fence post and he'd decided that was his spot. Nobody ignored him, but nobody walked over either, because he looked like a man who was fine. Then a woman I never did get the name of came across the asphalt with a folding chair, set it down next to the fence post, and said "This one's yours," and went back for her own. He told me years later he'd have stood there until they stacked the tables.

He took the chair.

That's the picture I get from verse 14, though I'm bringing it to the text and the text doesn't bring it to me. Sariah and Sam and Nephi aren't described as afraid or as refusing anything. They stand. Then in verse 15 Lehi "beckoned unto them" and spoke "with a loud voice that they should come unto me, and partake of the fruit." There's no argument in it. He doesn't explain why the fruit is good or what the river is. He says come, and the next verse is one flat sentence: "And it came to pass that they did come unto me and partake of the fruit also."

Verse 12 is what makes that possible, which is why I picked it to carry this post. Lehi doesn't think of his family while he's walking the path. He thinks of them after he tastes, when the joy has nowhere else to go. It's easy to read the order of those verses as incidental, but I don't think Nephi was careless with what he put down, and you do have to have eaten before you can call out that the fruit is worth the walk.

Verse 17 goes the same way, and Lehi does the same thing for Laman and Lemuel. He looks "towards the head of the river, that perhaps I might see them," which is the same direction he found the others in. Verse 18 says he saw them and that they would not come. It doesn't say whether he called, and it doesn't say he didn't. I'd like to know, and the chapter won't tell me.

What happened to the man in the white robe?

A man in a white robe stands in front of Lehi in verse 5 and bids him follow in verse 6, and by verse 7 Lehi is in "a dark and dreary waste." That's the last we hear of the man. Nothing in verses 8 through 38 mentions him again.

Lehi never says he lost the man, and what he does say, "as I followed him I beheld myself that I was in a dark and dreary waste," reads to me like a person looking up from the road and noticing the road is gone. Then he travels "many hours in darkness" and prays, and the sentence right after the prayer is "after I had prayed unto the Lord I beheld a large and spacious field." Verse 10 has the tree.

Lehi also never says he held the rod, which first appears in verse 19 when he's already standing at "the tree by which I stood," and from there it belongs to everybody else. The people in verse 24 who "caught hold of the end of the rod of iron" and pressed on through the mist are the ones the chapter says made it. Lehi got there a different way. He followed somebody, and then he prayed.

I don't want to build a doctrine on that, since Nephi says in verse 29 that he isn't giving all his father's words and the vision was Lehi's own, not a template anybody is told to copy. But the one man we get to watch closely arrives at the tree without the thing the chapter spends the most verses recommending, and that makes me a little less confident when somebody says there's exactly one way to be led.

Nephi does give us the rod's meaning, and he gets it in his own vision. In 1 Nephi 11:25 he beholds that the rod "was the word of God." In 1 Nephi 15:24 he says it again to his brothers, who have just asked what the rod means. So the rod is for people already in the mist, while Lehi, in his own dark, had a guide and then a prayer.

Why does the shame come before the building?

I'd have underlined this part in the spring if I'd slowed down. Read verse 25 and then verse 26 right behind it.

And after they had partaken of the fruit of the tree they did cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed.

The building doesn't show up until the next verse, so the text gives the shame first and the reason second. These people have the fruit in them, and they look around "as if" they're ashamed, which sounds to me like checking for who's watching. Only then does Lehi turn his own eyes and see the great and spacious building, "high above the earth," with its crowd in "exceedingly fine" dress.

Look at what that crowd actually does. Verse 27 says they were "in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers." An attitude and a pointed finger, and nothing reported that anybody said. In verse 33 the multitude that enters the building points "the finger of scorn," and the response, in the same verse, is "we heeded them not." Verse 34 puts it plainly: "as many as heeded them, had fallen away."

So what separates the ones who stayed from the ones who left isn't the fruit. Everybody in verse 28 had already tasted it, since the verse opens "after they had tasted of the fruit." They'd had the best thing they ever ate and they still walked off, because somebody pointed. What set Lehi's group apart was whom they were paying attention to. I'd have guessed something bigger.

I wrote about Paul's hope that "in nothing I shall be ashamed" in Philippians 1 earlier this week, and I think Paul would have recognized this crowd. He was writing from custody and the thing he named was shame, with pain and death coming after. The people in verse 28 don't lose the path in a storm. They lose it at a party they weren't invited to, watching from across a river.

Others turn up in verse 31, "feeling their way towards that great and spacious building." Feeling means they can't see where they're headed any better than the ones in the mist, and verse 32 says many were drowned in the fountain and many were "wandering in strange roads." Nobody is described as marching in. The building draws people who are already unsure, which brings me back to the head of the river.

Why wouldn't Laman and Lemuel partake of the fruit?

Verse 35 says "Laman and Lemuel partook not of the fruit, said my father," which is two names and a verb, and the chapter ends the way a hard conversation ends. Verse 36 says Lehi "exceedingly feared" for them. In verse 37 he exhorts them "with all the feeling of a tender parent," and his hope is put as "perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them." Verse 38 says he bade them keep the commandments "and he did cease speaking unto them."

Then the chapter stops.

I'd push back on the tidy reading of "would not" in verse 18. They would not come. That's their choice and the text is plain about it. But they were also, by 1 Nephi 15:21 among the brothers who asked Nephi "What meaneth this thing which our father saw in a dream?" Whatever else they were, they cared enough to go find the interpreter. Fair enough, I don't know what to do with that either, except to stop drawing them as cartoons. In the vision they're near the same river as Sariah and Sam and Nephi, and the difference is in what each of them did when it was time to walk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the tree, the rod and the mist stand for?

Nephi gives the key later and it's worth taking from him and not from the chapter. In 1 Nephi 11:22 the tree is "the love of God," in 11:25 the rod is "the word of God," and in 12:17 the mists are the temptations of the devil. For a first pass I'd keep Lehi's chapter and Nephi's explanation in separate piles, because Lehi only says what he saw.

Is the great and spacious building a church or a place full of bad people?

Neither, going by verse 27. The people in it are described by their clothing and their posture and nothing else. Nephi's own vision labels it later, but in chapter 8 all you can say is that it's high up and full of people who look expensive.

Do the people who fall away in verse 28 ever come back?

The chapter doesn't say, and it calls them "lost," which is a past tense inside a vision and not a verdict on anybody's life. I'd read it as a description of where that road goes and leave the rest to God.

How do I teach Lehi's vision to kids without a matching worksheet?

Skip the worksheet. Caleb's Primary class did one and he can point to the rod on it but can't say why anybody needed it. Ask who's standing at the head of the river in verse 14 and what they're waiting for. An eight-year-old will have an answer before you finish the question.

The first crabapples came down on the trampoline this afternoon, and every one of them has rolled to the middle, where the mat sags.

— D.