Lehi's Blessing and Legacy

Partway through the journey Lehi receives a vision of a tree whose fruit is white and sweet above any other taste, reached by a path beside an iron rod that travelers must hold to avoid being lost in a mist of darkness, while a great and spacious building full of mockers stands apart, symbolizing pride and worldly judgment. He tells the vision to his family and interprets its central image, the fruit, as the love of God, making it one of the most quoted passages in Latter Day Saint scripture.

Once the family reaches the promised land, Lehi lives to see his children grown and delivers a final set of blessings and warnings to each of his sons in turn, urging Laman and Lemuel toward the obedience they have resisted and setting Nephi apart as a ruler and teacher over his brethren, a designation that becomes the seed of the later Nephite and Lamanite division. Lehi dies shortly after these blessings, and the record his family keeps from his departure from Jerusalem onward, first on the brass plates and then on additional plates of their own, becomes the founding portion of the record the Book of Mormon presents as translated from that lineage.