1 Nephi

1 Nephi opens the Book of Mormon with the family of Lehi, a prophet in Jerusalem around 600 BCE by the text's own internal chronology, who is warned to flee the city before its destruction. Lehi's son Nephi becomes the book's narrator, and the early chapters follow a mission back into Jerusalem to obtain a set of brass plates, a genealogical and scriptural record, from a official named Laban, an episode that includes Nephi's account of being commanded to kill Laban to obtain them, a passage that has drawn sustained ethical discussion both inside and outside the tradition.

The family then travels through the wilderness, gathers another family led by Ishmael whose daughters marry Lehi's sons, and eventually crosses the ocean by ship to a promised land, which Latter-day Saint tradition situates somewhere in the Americas without committing to an exact location within the text itself. Along the way Nephi records visions of his own, including an extended vision paralleling material his father Lehi received concerning a tree of life and the future of Lehi's descendants. The book ends with Nephi reflecting on the record he is keeping and the divided relationship already forming between his own line and that of his elder brothers Laman and Lemuel.

1 Nephi belongs to what is called the small plates of Nephi, a set of plates Nephi says he made specifically for spiritual and prophetic material, distinct from a fuller political and military record he also kept. This distinction matters for how the Book of Mormon as a whole is put together: everything from 1 Nephi through Omni descends from these small plates, written directly by their original authors, while most of the rest of the book is presented as Mormon's later abridgment of the larger record, compiled centuries afterward.

Because Nephi is writing in his own voice about events he lived through, 1 Nephi has a personal, testimonial quality that distinguishes it from the historical narration found later in the book. Latter-day Saints hold this record to be an authentic ancient document engraved on metal plates and translated by Joseph Smith; historians and scholars outside the tradition generally treat the text as Smith's own nineteenth century composition, drawing on the religious and literary culture of his time. The atlas records both positions rather than adjudicating between them, since the question is a matter of religious commitment and historical argument rather than a fact that further philology alone can settle.