How easy it would have been for Nephi to get angry at his brothers? Perhaps he did get angry, but we never hear about it. He wrote the book and therefore had control over his own portrayal, but I think Nephi probably kept his cool most if not all of the time. There would have been very little for him to have gained by getting mad. His brothers obviously were ridiculing and pushing him pretty hard, and they were older than he, yet Nephi’s longsuffering was incredible—his willingness to forgive his brothers and his willingness to say, in effect, "I don’t have a dog in this fight. We are going to pull together. If we are going to succeed, it is going to take all of us. The cause, the mission, the purpose is much bigger than any of our personal interests." There are valuable lessons in Nephi’s attitude for all of us—for leaders in the church, for wards, for families, and for individuals. It is so easy to get offended or to want to assert yourself, but that is not Nephi’s way.
Chapter 17 is a very rich and long doctrinal chapter. We usually focus on the stories, but what we have in this chapter is less about what they were doing than what they were arguing over. Something like 45 verses tell about the arguments that Nephi’s brothers raised against him, and then his rebuttal of those arguments. Verses 19 to 22 contain three arguments that Nephi’s brothers raised about why he should not build the ship.
1. The first argument begins in the middle of verse 19: "They rejoiced over me," saying, "We knew you could not do it. You do not have good judgment." Then in verse 20, "You are foolish." This normally is the first criticism of naysayers. "You do not have good judgment. You cannot do this. It is too hard. This is impossible." Imagine if somebody were to have said to Joseph Smith, "You think you can start a church? You think you can get this book published? Who’s going to want to buy the Book of Mormon? There are no printers around here. Foolish imaginations. You are just making all this stuff up." Imagine someone saying to Brigham Young, "You are going to send people where? To St. George? To Hole in the Rock? This is foolishness." Last Tuesday we went to the funeral of a friend of ours—quite an unusual, dynamic Canadian—and the thing that drove him more than anything else was that if somebody said it was impossible, he did it, and he lived an amazing life as a result of that. Nephi was like that. His brothers say this is impossible, and Nephi does not wither. He says, "I will do it just because it is impossible."
2. The second argument of naysayers is found in verse 20. "Well, we would be better off dead," or "We would be happier elsewhere. We ought to go back to Jerusalem. You know, we have had to suffer all these things, and it would have been better if we had died before we came out of Jerusalem." Well, this type of complaint is really not much of an argument. The grass always seems greener somewhere else! But that, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily make it so.
3. The third argument is in verse 22: "We know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, … wherefore, we know that they are a righteous people; and our father hath judged them." In other words, "You and Lehi are judgmental and, therefore, we are off the hook. We do not have to do anything," and so on, justifying themselves. This argument works, unless, of course, you stop to think about it. Laman and Lemuel are calling Lehi and Nephi judgmental. Of course, the very act of labeling someone as being judgmental is itself an act of passing judgment. And in this particular case, it was the pot calling the kettle black.
We have these three arguments. They are the sorts of raw objections that people often raise in desperate situations. Thinking about them can help us improve our own thinking. They say a lot about human nature, which the Book of Mormon carefully and helpfully exposes.
John W. Welch and J. Gregory Welch, "Murmurings of Laman and Lemuel" in Charting the Book of Mormon: Visual Aids for Personal Study and Teaching (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1999), chart 77.
Alan Goff, "Boats, Beginnings, and Repetitions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 1, no. 1 (1992): 67–84.