Narrative: Nephi begins to give his prophecy of his people’s future. The question that should be asked of this prophecy is when he received it. While its presence at the end of Nephi’s writings might suggest that it was received close to the time it is being written, the content of the revelation suggests that Nephi is recasting the revelatory experience he received to explain his father’s dream. The content of the two revelations is very similar, with very little in this later revelation that is not explicitly noted in the former. I suggest that Nephi received only one vision of the future of the world and that it came when he wanted to know the meaning of the dream his father saw. When Nephi wrote that experience in 1 Nephi 11–14, he structured the discussion of those events around the symbols of his father’s dream because they were the proximate cause for the revelation. Now, however, he is over thirty years away from that experience. In this telling, he uses themes from Isaiah as the structure around which he recounts the same revelation he described earlier in a different context.
In this verse, Nephi discusses wars that precede the birth of the Savior. These are the wars discussed in 1 Nephi 12:2–3 and refer to the destruction of the Nephites prior to the birth of Christ. The fulfillment of this part of the prophecy is found throughout the end of Alma, culminating in the wars in Helaman.
Nephi then notes the Messiah’s birth. This comment reprises the earlier vision that gave more detail of the Messiah’s mortal life (1 Ne. 11:11–31).
Vocabulary: The title applied here is “Father of heaven and of earth.” This is a uniquely Book of Mormon title that is similar to the “Lord of heaven and of earth” that is seen in the New Testament. (See commentary accompanying Mosiah 3:8.)