BOM 1 Nephi 15

Today’s reading is 1 Nephi 15.

I’m pressed for time at the moment, and will need to limit myself to a very brief comment.  So I think I’ll concentrate on something quite small that struck me during this reading, in 1 Nephi 15:5:

“And it came to pass that I was overcome because of my afflictions, for I considered that mine afflictions were great above all, because of the destruction of my people, for I had beheld their fall.”

One might have expected that, having just returned from one of the most spectacular visions and angelophanies ever recorded in scripture, Nephi would be exultant.  On top of the world.

Instead, he’s deeply depressed.  Discouraged.  Sorrowful and dejected.  He reckons himself to be, maybe, the saddest person on the planet.

Why?  Because he had been shown in his vision the catastrophic fate of his posterity — nearly a thousand years in the future.

This attitude seems to me to reflect something much more common among ancient Hebrews than it appears to be among those I know, and, certainly, much stronger than I sense it in myself.

The Old Testament is acutely aware of ancestry, far back into the past.  We modern Westerners might know the names of our great grandparents, but only if we’re family history enthusiasts.  Many, I’ve been shocked to learn, don’t even know — not even vaguely — where their ancestors came from.

Abraham and others constantly worry about, and rejoice in, their posterity into the indefinite future, and divine threats continually mention the third and fourth generation.  For most of us, though, our posterity are an abstraction with which we scarcely concern ourselves.  We may get to know our grandchildren, and some of us will briefly meet our great grandchildren.  But that’s about as far out into the future of our families that we can see or worry about, or take pleasure in.

I may be wrong, but Nephi’s mindset here seems much more like that of an ancient Israelite than it does like that of a modern American.  (For which, of course, I have a convenient and faith-promoting explanation!)