Then Lehi had another revelation: the sons must go back to the land of Jerusalem once again. Yet another test! But the record does not say that they murmured about having to return for their future brides; that was a fairer proposal—bringing marriageable women into the growing colony was apparently worth the aching bones and muscles of an additional long journey.
We might wonder how another family, without direct revelation from the Lord, would be so willing to abandon their home and all they had known to join these refugees in the wilderness. We can only surmise from the record of Nephi that Ishmael believed the words of the Lord that Jerusalem would soon be destroyed by the enemy armies who already occupied the city. Besides, Lehi’s sons had quite a story to tell about how an angel had appeared and how the Lord had miraculously made it possible to secure their genealogical and scriptural records. The one reason given in Nephi’s account for the family’s willingness to go was that “the Lord did soften the heart of Ishmael, and also his household, insomuch that they took their journey with us down into the wilderness.”
Our tradition that Ishmael’s ancestry went back to Ephraim, son of Joseph, is based on a discourse given by Elder Erastus Snow in Logan, Utah, on 6 May 1882. He said, “The prophet Joseph informed us that the record of Lehi was contained on the 116 pages that were first translated and subsequently stolen, and of which an abridgement is given us in the first Book of Nephi, which is the record of Nephi individually, he himself being of the lineage of Manasseh; but that Ishmael was of the lineage of Ephraim, and that his sons married into Lehi’s family, and Lehi’s sons married Ishmael’s daughters.” 14
From Elder Snow’s statement and from 1 Nephi 7:6 we may suppose that two of Ishmael’s sons had married daughters of Lehi and Sariah. That would mean the two families were already related by marriage, which might explain Lehi’s seeming nonchalance about instructing his sons to bring Ishmael’s family down into the wilderness. Those married children of Lehi and Ishmael could already have had some daughters of their own who could later marry Lehi’s sons, Jacob and Joseph, born in the wilderness. There might already have been additional marriage plans between the two families—only the setting for the ceremonies would now have to change from the city to the desert. Another reason why Ishmael’s family in particular was elected to join Lehi’s was that Ishmael had five unmarried daughters; the four sons of Lehi along with Zoram would in time marry Ishmael’s daughters—a perfect five-way match set up in advance by the Lord.