Narrative: Nephi’s small plates combine two types of information into a single narrative: his family’s history and his personal spiritual experiences. To this point, the events which shaped his spiritual growth were part and parcel of his family’s history (e.g., returning for the plates), so the connection has been a natural one. But after an extended narrative consisting of his father’s dream, his own vision, and his exposition to his brothers (which occurs in “real time”), Nephi must now return to his family’s more mundane travel narrative. As a transitional device, he repeats the marker he has used earlier: these things were done “as my father dwelt in a tent in the valley which he called Lemuel.”
This sentence closes the spiritual narrative and returns the reader to the time and place in which the spiritual narrative is embedded. It amounts to a self-quotation from 1 Nephi 9:1 (“And all these things did my father see, and hear, and speak, as he dwelt in a tent”), which marks the conclusion of Lehi’s dream. When Nephi finishes the narration of his own vision, he similarly ties it to the same time and place, thus communicating that the more mundane family history will continue. (See the commentary accompanying following 1 Nephi 2:15.)