According to Potter and Wellington, Nephi’s record gives some clues that there were non-family members in his party. First, the Lord refers to Nephi’s party not as his “family” or “families,” but as “thy people” (1 Nephi 17:8). After reaching the New World, Nephi’s group will separate themselves from the families of Laman and Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael. Nephi will record:
Wherefore, it came to pass that I, Nephi did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, mine elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me … (2 Nephi 5:6; emphasis added)
One might ask, Who are Nephi’s “people”? and Who is referred to by the phrase “all those who would go with me”? It would have been the norm for a wealthy man of Lehi’s position to have had household servants and slaves. It is hard to imagine Lehi fleeing into the wilderness with only his immediate family members and, in essence, cruelly deserting his faithful servants in a city that was about to be destroyed. The real likelihood that Lehi took with him a large party provides a plausible explanation as to how the Lamanite and Nephi nations would become a large multitude so rapidly in the New World. The presence of servants would have meant that there would not be the need for first cousins to marry as the Hiltons proposed, although this is not an uncommon practice in the Middle east to this day.
Up to the last two centuries the names of women, children and servants were very seldom mentioned in literature. A review of the ancient scriptures reveals only a handful of names of women or servants. Nephi was a prophet, but he was also a product of his time. It would have never crossed his mind to have mentioned the names of his sisters (1 Nephi 5:6), the daughters of Ishmael (including the name of his own wife--1 Nephi 7:6, 16:7), let alone any servants and slaves. Another intriguing Near Eastern cultural example of this practice of literary exclusion is found in the writings of Michael Crichton. He placed in a novel format the manuscripts of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan’s report to the Caliph of Baghdad in A.D. 922. Crichton writes:
Throughout the manuscript, Ibn Fadlan is inexact about the size and composition of his party. Whether this apparent carelessness reflects his assumption that the reader knows the composition of the caravan, or whether it is consequence of lost passages of the text, one cannot be sure. Social conventions may also be a factor, for Ibn Fadlan never states that his party is greater than a few individuals, when in fact it probably numbered a hundred people or more, and twice as many horses and camels. But Ibn Fadlan does not count-literally-slaves, servants, and lesser members of the caravan.
Additionally, one cannot rule out the possibility that some of the local people from the Frankincense trail had joined the family. The Hiltons first put forward the argument that Arabs were part of the group, albeit as polygamous wives to Laman and Lemuel in order to explain the skin of blackness" or darker skins of the Lamanites referred to initially in 2 Nephi 5:21. It is possible that some of the darker skinned ’Adites in Dhofar accompanied the expedition and later aligned themselves with the Lamanites leading to their relatively darker skins. [George Potter & Richard Wellington, Discovering The Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript (July 2000), pp. 227-233] [See the commentary on 2 Nephi 5:6; 5:21; Jacob 2:27]