A Passover Setting for Lehis Exodus

by Don Bradley

Overview

Abstract: Later in his life, former Palmyra resident Fayette Lapham recounted with sharp detail an 1830 interview he conducted with Joseph Smith Sr. about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Among the details he reports that Lehi's exodus from Jerusalem occurred during a "great feast." This detail, not found in the published Book of Mormon, may reveal some of what Joseph Sr. knew from the lost 116 pages. By examining the small plates account of this narrative in 1 Nephi 1−5, we see not only that such a feast was possible, but that Lehi's exodus and Nephi's quest for the brass plates occurred at Passover. This Passover setting helps explain why Nephi killed Laban and other distinctive features of Lehi's exodus. Read in its Passover context, the story of Lehi is not just the story of one man's deliverance, but of the deliverance of humankind by the Lamb of God. The Passover setting in which it begins illuminates the meaning of the Book of Mormon as a whole.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940163191871
Publisher:	Interpreter Foundation
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Series:	Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship , #34
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	337 KB

About the Author

Don Bradley is an author and independent historian specializing in the beginnings of the Restoration. He completed a Bachelor’s in History at BYU and a Master’s in History at Utah State University, where he wrote his thesis on “American Proto-Zionism and the ‘Book of Lehi’: Recontextualizing the Rise of Mormonism.” Don has performed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project working with the earliest Joseph Smith sources. He was the primary researcher for Brian C. Hales’s Joseph Smith’s Polygamy series. He has published on the translation of the Book of Mormon, plural marriage before Nauvoo, Joseph Smith’s “grand fundamental principles of Mormonism,” and the Kinderhook plates. He has forthcoming works on the Kinderhook plates and the First Vision. His first book is The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Lost Stories (Greg Kofford Books, 2019). Don does historical research on his own projects and for clients. He lives in Springville, Utah.