Nephi had several great moments in his life. This moment, in which he went up to his tower to mourn the evils of the people and call them to repentance, was certainly one of them. When he got home and saw how troubled everything was, he went up on his tower to pray and mourn. This was a very public expression of sorrow, much like they did when someone had died.
In a way, you might say that Nephi had strategically staged a fake funeral! Instead of walking around trying to call people to repentance one by one, he mourned and lamented loudly and in public. He was weeping, and “multitudes of people” gathered around his tower. They must have been asking each other such things as, “What is going on? Who has died?” It was a brilliant way to attract their attention, and Nephi began immediately to call them to repentance, explaining that he was mourning “because of the exceeding sorrow of my heart, which is because of your iniquities!”
Nephi didn’t have a modern Conference Center with a raised podium and a microphone. He didn’t have the internet, television, or radio to transmit his message to his people. Instead, he had a tower next to a highway leading to a market. And while Nephi’s message was initially intended for an ancient audience, there can be no doubt that his cry of warning was included for our day.
Book of Mormon Central, “Why Did Nephi Prophesy Near ‘the Highway Which Led to the Chief Market?’ (Helaman 7:10),” KnoWhy 178 (September 1, 2016).
John W. Welch, “Was Helaman 7–8 an Allegorical Funeral Sermon?” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992), 239–41. See especially Helaman 7:11, 15. In a typical funeral, family members would wail and cry, tear part of their clothing, veil their faces, cut their beards, put on sackcloth, and sit in ashes.
John W. Welch and Robert D. Hunt, “Culturegram: Jerusalem 600 B.C.,” in Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem, ed. John W. Welch, David Rolph Seely, and Jo Ann H. Seely (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004), especially in this case see pp. 36–37 and sources cited in note 41.