The four brothers, evidently, held a council meeting in which Laman made his proposition to return. Nephi opposed the motion in a speech that is well worth studying.
He begins his argument with a solemn assertion that there would be no return before the mission had been fulfilled. Then he proposes a plan whereby, Laman being willing, they might purchase the records. Lastly, he shows why it was necessary for them to obtain possession of them—That we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers, and the prophetic word spoken since the world began. Those records were really a question of life and death to the descendants of Lehi. Nephi’s eloquent plea won the day.
The land of our father’s inheritance. v. 16. This was the homestead of Lehi, which he had inherited. Generally, the land, which in Palestine always was considered as the property of the Lord, went, by the right of inheritance, to the sons, the firstborn receiving a double portion. If a man left no sons, the inheritance passed to his daughters; if there were no daughters, it went to his brothers; in case there were no brothers, it went to his father’s brother; the nearest kinsman was the heir. (23)
Such was the law in Palestine. It was a good foundation for a United Order.
Is it a mere accident that similar rules were observed by many of the inhabitants of America at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards?
Among the Zapotecs and Mixtecs, for instance, no one had a right to sell his land in perpetuity; the law forbade transfer out of a family either by marriage or otherwise; and if a proprietor was compelled by the force of necessity to dispose of his real estate, it returned after a lapse of some years to his son or to his nearest relative, who paid the holder the consideration for which it was pledged, or its equivalent. (Bancroft, Native Races, vol. 2, p. 228)
Down in South America, among the Peruvians, similar regulations were in force. “The whole territory of the empire,” Prescott says, “was divided into three parts, one for the Sun, another for the Inca and the last for the people. ... The lands assigned to the Sun furnished a revenue to support the temples and maintain the costly ceremonial of the Peruvian worship and the multitudinous priesthood. Those reserved for the Inca went to support the royal state, as well as the numerous members of his household and his kindred, and supplied the various exigencies of government. The remainder of the lands was divided per capita, in equal shares among the people. ... The division of the soil was renewed every year, and the possessions of the tenant were increased or diminished according to the numbers in the family… . The nearest approach to the Peruvian constitution was probably in Judea, where, on the recurrence of the great national jubilee, at the close of every half-century, estates reverted to their original proprietors.” (Prescott, Peru, vol. 1, p. 56)
The existence of such laws and regulations in America at that time suggests the probability that the original law makers were familiar with the Law of Moses and the history of the Palestine of the Hebrew patriarchs and the Egypt at the time of Joseph.