Knowing that his descendants would be destroyed must have been very painful for Lehi. Fervently, he pleaded with them to forestall it by repentance. The contention and rebellion that had occurred within his own family during the previous decade is a microcosm of the larger destruction. He sees their ultimate fate clearly, but they do not see it at all. His metaphor of eyes closed in sleep aptly captures this obliviousness.
Translation: His reference to “chains” could mean the metal links that come to the mind of a modern reader. However, throughout the Book of Mormon prisoners are bound with ropes, not chains. Here, the metaphor is clearly attached to binding prisoners who are then “carried away captive.” There is no evidence that Mesoamerican technology could forge metal links into a chain, even though they may have been familiar to Nephi in the Middle East. “Chains of hell” appears in Alma 5:10; 12:11; 13:30; 26:14, with “chains of death” in Alma 36:18. By Alma’s time, “chains” would be meaningless as a mechanism of binding, suggesting that “chains of hell” is Joseph Smith’s contribution from his own vocabulary of religious terms.