The allegory of the olive tree is complicated because it tells a very long story. Jehovah has a work to do, and similar to the long earthly times required to nurture trees, nurturing the house of Israel will take a long time. Assuming that Lehi saw much of what Nephi did, and that Nephi recorded only the vision of the fruit of the tree of life, it is possible that Laman and Lemuel assumed that everything that their father had seen would be as relevant to their lives as the vision of them declining to partake of the fruit.
Therefore, it is probable that one of the questions they had was how the allegory was going to affect them personally. In the previous episode we examined the way the allegory fit into the future, and here Nephi clarifies that it is a distant future. Lehi’s family felt that they stood near the beginning of the allegory where the branches were separated. They looked forward to a reunification with the root of the tree (made clear in Jacob’s retelling of the allegory). That reunification will come, but it comes after the Gentiles have been adopted into Israel.
However, even though the final episodes still remain in our future, there were aspects of the allegory which were relevant to their lives, just as we can find ourselves in it. For them, it would become increasingly important to understand that the Gentiles were important, and that they would come under the covenant with Abraham. By the time Nephi wrote this, he was in a New World full of Gentiles—meaning those who were not born into the house of Israel. The survival of Lehi’s seed in the New World would depend upon the Gentiles they found there. Knowing that those Gentiles could also fall under God’s covenant made them part of God’s people and not irredeemably foreign.