Kings or queens are nothing without an identifiable group of people who are willing to follow them. Maintaining a sense of belonging, social cohesion, loyalty, and membership is essential in forming any kind of organization, whether it be public or private, national or familial, social or religious. As their leader, Nephi did all that was within his power to help his people, and he needed to deter members of his small and fragile group from defecting back to their cousins. Especially because those family members who would not obey Nephi’s words were "cut off from the presence of the Lord" (5:20)—which would have meant that they should neither enter the temple of Nephi nor intermarry with the people of Nephi (compare Exodus 34:16; Deuteronomy 7:1)—it was important to the survival of that fragile society that those dissenters should "not be enticing" unto the people of Nephi (5:21). Their hearts were hard as flint; their hands were impure; but these social problems were not indelible. They were not innate. These defects could be overcome simply if those dissenters would "repent of their iniquities" (5:22). This concern, especially in antiquity, was not about any modern construct of the idea of race, but was rather about ensuring generational obedience to the first commandment to have no other god before the Lord (Exodus 34:14–16).