BOM Jacob 1

In today’s reading, Jacob 1, the torch is passed.  Not quite to a new generation, but to Nephi’s younger brothers, Jacob and Joseph.  They had never known Jerusalem, but had been born during the journey down the Arabian coast to the New World.

There is a division, at the death of Nephi, between the secular government, which is granted to one line of men, and spiritual leadership, which continues within the family of Lehi.  Whereas Nephi had exercised both secular political and religious functions, there is now a separation between the two.

The political successors to Nephi are given the title of “Nephi,” much as, in the secular history of the Old World, successors to Julius and Augustus Caesar — at first members of the family, but later quite unrelated — continued to bear the title of Caesar (and, eventually, of Kaiser and of Czar or Tsar [цaрь]).