Narrative: The vision of the fruit-bearing tree occurs in the vision-dreams of Lehi, Zosimus, and Joseph Smith Sr., but all represent slightly different contacts with the divine. For Lehi and Father Smith, the fruit of the tree communicates God’s blessing, while to Zosimus, the tree physically raises him to another level.
And suddenly two luxuriant and very stately trees, larger than any I had ever seen, appeared on the shore of the sea. And then one of the trees bent itself down and I securely grasped its branches. And it stretched out toward the height of heaven and lifted me up and carried me in its summit until the cloud was beneath me.
“The Narrative of Zosimus” is an obvious variant of the tree as a conduit through the planes of the universe. (See commentary accompanying 1 Nephi 8:2–3.)
Symbolism: Lehi does not give the tree a name although Nephi’s interpretative vision calls it the “tree of life” (1 Ne. 11:25). Nevertheless, Lehi could not have failed to see the symbolic confluence of his tree and fruit with the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, even though his vision does not repeat Edenic imagery. Like much Book of Mormon theology, Lehi’s dream is more clearly prescient of Yahweh’s role as savior.
The narrative does not explain how Lehi knows that the fruit is “desirable to make one happy,” although either the messenger told him or the context that identified it as a tree of life led to that conclusion. It is perhaps unfortunate that Joseph Smith chose the word “happy” here, because that word connotes too fleeting an emotion. It is more likely that this fruit provides the celestial emotions associated with “joy” (v. 12). (See commentary accompanying 2 Nephi 2:25 for a discussion of the use of joy in scriptures Joseph Smith translated or received.) And possibly Lehi did not really understand the distinction between the two until after tasting the fruit.