Redaction: The historical elements in Nephi’s narrative are a frame for nonhistorical events—the spiritual messages to which he gives priority. The results yield detailed recitations of visions but narrative descriptions that are painfully terse for historians, geographers, and anthropologists. In this single verse, Nephi describes a change of direction, a fairly lengthy journey, afflictions, and the births of children. All of these events have stories behind them, but Nephi does not record them. Later (v. 4) he mentions that their travel consumes eight years. Nephi has earlier marked the passage of time as a “space of days.”
Geography: Nahom is an important marker in the journey that eventually leads to Bountiful. It is Ishmael’s burial place and the point at which the party turns “nearly eastward.”
The Astons argue that, while the trade routes turn at this point, the Lehites would not have followed those routes from this point to the end of their journey across the peninsula:
If we take literally Nephi’s statement that they traveled “nearly eastward” to Bountiful, the trade route is ruled out, for it soon veers in a pronounced southeast direction. Also, had Lehi taken the trade route to the coast via Shabwah, the few opportunities for then passing through the coastal mountain ranges would have led to locations too far south of Nahom to be referred to as “nearly eastward.” Instead, Nephi’s repeated emphasis on the hardships and difficulties of the journey are unmistakable hints confirming that a course almost due east from the Jawf was maintained. The direction took them somewhat north of the trade route, traveling first across the band of wasteland that lies between the shifting sand dunes of the southern edge of the vast “Empty Quarter” and the smaller Saba’tayn desert, then onto an extended area of plateau. Here they would have been moving in areas far from known routes.
From this time onward, the Lehite group traveled cautiously in a remote region, eating their meat raw as the smoke or light from fires would have invited Bedouin attack. Travel through this region—the still almost totally isolated and forgotten northeast plateaus of modern Yemen—certainly occupied the most arduous part of their eight-year journey in the wilderness. The Liahona, which earlier had led them to the “more fertile parts,” now likely functioned in directing them to scarcer water sources until Bountiful was reached. Water wells are almost nonexistent in this remote region, but huge standing pools of water sometimes last for months after rain has fallen.