Jacob’s Book

Jacob 1

My brother Nephi gave these plates to me fifty-five years after the exodus from Jerusalem—a start date which, as you’ve deduced has become the standard for us. Nephi told me to do what he’d done: write spiritual stuff and leave mundane history to someone else, though I’m not sure who. These are plates to pass down to our children. The others not so much. These will have preaching, miracles, general edification. Because we’re worried about the future. We can see where all this is going.

We want to promote the sunshine, not the doom and gloom. So we spend a lot of time teaching about the Anointed One, trying to get people to trust that he’ll come

and bend the future back in our direction. We don’t want to be like Moses’ people, most of whom never got out of the wilds. So we tell our people not to rebel against God because that makes him mad. If they believe in the Anointed One and how he will suffer mockery and murder, that will soothe God into some serious mercy, which we’ll need. I know the demographics. We need any help we can get.

My older brother, of course, had done his part. But when he was getting too old to function, he poured oil on a man to make him king. That’s the way Israelites had done it for centuries. We were one big tribe by now and everyone loved Nephi, the way you love the granddad at the reunion. He was our mini-patriarch, not quite Abraham stature but getting there. People defended him, looked after him, celebrated his birthday, brought him presents out of the blue. All the usual bling that goes with age and respect.

To honor the man, we decided that any king would be coronated as “Nephi”—the second, the third, etc. It didn’t matter their given name. If you were going to be king, your name got changed to Nephi.

By the time Nephi (the real one) died, the family started to act like little nations, of which there were two self-evident alliances: Nephites and Lamanites. Their subsets were named after their respective immigrant ancestors: Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites. For my purposes, I’ll just refer to the big groups, adding my obvious bias into the mix: the good guys are Nephites and anyone who likes them and helps them are also Nephites. The bad guys are Lamanites, whose main trait is that they want to wipe Nephites from the earth. I hope that’s clear.

The reign of Nephi the Second: the Nephites started to turn into David-and-Solomonites, one might say. I talking mostly about the male Nephites. They read in the brass plates about the hundreds of women apiece David and Solomon got to marry and they thought, “That’s for me!” They also liked the descriptions of ultra-fanciness, especially the precious metals, which, to be honest, we’d gotten a little carried away with when we first arrived here.

So I felt it my duty to preach a big sermon at the little temple we’d built. I can’t remember if Nephi mentioned that he’d ordained some of us to be priests of the temple and, some of us, as teachers. We got pretty good at these tasks. We had a lot of practice. It was night and day, preach, teach, preach, make sacrifices for people’s sins, then teach, preach, teach. It wasn’t an actual job, no money in it. But it was around the clock, it seemed. Though we had our own problems, we didn’t want to get saddled with others’ problems for failing to do what we could to save people. Hence the zeal and overbooking.