Jacob

Jacob, a younger son of Lehi and Sariah born during the family's wilderness journey, narrates this book in a voice distinct from his brother Nephi's: less narrative, more sermon. Jacob addresses his people directly on themes of wealth, pride and fidelity, and includes some of the small plates' sharpest social criticism, condemning the accumulation of riches and the mistreatment of women within the community he is addressing.

The book's best known section is an extended allegory, which Jacob presents as a quotation from an otherwise unknown prophet named Zenos, describing the owner of a vineyard who grafts branches from a wild olive tree into a tame one and tame branches into wild trees in an effort to preserve the vineyard's fruit. The allegory runs for an entire chapter and is generally read within the tradition as a figure for the scattering and eventual gathering of the house of Israel. Because Zenos is not otherwise attested outside the Book of Mormon, the allegory has drawn particular attention from scholars studying the text's use of unknown or unattested sources.

The vineyard allegory is unusually long for the small plates, running to a full chapter of sustained metaphor rather than the shorter prophetic bursts more typical of the surrounding text, and later Latter-day Saint commentary has treated it as a structural key to how the whole Book of Mormon frames Israel's scattering and gathering.

Where Nephi's books emphasize personal narrative and vision, Jacob's book reads as collected preaching, closer to sermon transcription than autobiography. Jacob identifies himself as having been consecrated a priest and teacher by Nephi before Nephi's death, and he writes with the authority of that office rather than as a witness recounting his own journey. His condemnation of plural marriage practiced without divine sanction, delivered directly to the men of his community, is among the most pointed ethical material in the small plates and has been read by later Latter-day Saint commentators in connection with the church's own later and contested history with plural marriage.

Jacob's book is short relative to Nephi's two books, and its final chapters shift briefly into further historical notice before Jacob explains that he is passing the record to his son Enos, setting up the sequence of brief, personally authored books that follows through the remainder of the small plates.

Jacob also records a visit from a figure named Sherem, who challenges Jacob's teaching about a coming Christ and demands a sign, a confrontation that ends with Sherem's death shortly after receiving one; the episode is one of the small plates' few extended dialogues between named individuals rather than sermon or narration alone.