Lehi's House at Jerusalem and the Land of His Inheritance

Where did Lehi and his family live before their departure into the wilderness? Nephi reported that Lehi had "dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days" (1 Nephi 1:4) and that he had "his own house at Jerusalem" (1 Nephi 1:7). We also read of a "land of his inheritance" (1 Nephi 2:4), which, along with his house and his riches, Lehi left behind when he took his family into the wilderness. But what was the connection between the two: Jerusalem and Lehi's land of inheritance? Indeed, was there any connection at all? I will examine evidence in 1 Nephi concerning these questions and will supplement those passages with a significant amount of background information from the Old Testament, ancient Near Eastern historical records, and the findings of modern Israeli archaeology.

 After assessing all the data, I will suggest that Lehi's house was located in the city quarter of ancient Jerusalem called the Mishneh (the same location today is part of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City). I will further suggest that Lehi's land of inheritance was a piece of real estate about fifty kilometers (thirty miles) north of Jerusalem, in the former tribal area of Manasseh, which Lehi owned by virtue of having inherited a deed to the property and which he probably visited on occasion in order to manage the affairs of the land. However, I will suggest that he maintained no residence at the land of inheritance. Reading through the evidence from which my data is culled may seem, for some readers, somewhat long and circuitous. Those readers may trust, however, that by the end of this study they will be much more informed about the world of Lehi preceding 1 Nephi and that the above conclusions will be logically supported and understandable.

Before examining the evidence, it will be necessary to dismiss a misconception that has been in circulation among Latter-day Saint students for many years. In his 1952 book Lehi in the Desert, Hugh Nibley suggested the following about the residence of Lehi: "Though he 'dwelt at Jerusalem,' Lehi did not live in the city, for it was after they had failed to get the plates in Jerusalem that his sons decided to 'go down to the land of our father's inheritance' (1 Nephi 3:16), and there gather enough wealth to buy the plates from Laban."¹

The oft-repeated notion that Lehi's house was not inside the city of Jerusalem but somewhere well outside the city on his land of inheritance is simply incorrect. Also incorrect is the idea that Lehi's land of inheritance was a plot of real estate close enough to the city of Jerusalem to be within the boundaries of the greater land of Jerusalem. Lehi's house is sometimes said to have been "at Jerusalem" but not in the city Jerusalem, but this whole notion is not tenable since it does not correspond to the information in the Book of Mormon text. To his credit, Nibley himself later realized this error and offered a correction in his 1958 work, An Approach to the Book of Mormon:

He [Lehi] had "his own house at Jerusalem" (1 Nephi 1:7); yet he was accustomed to "go forth" from the city from time to time (1 Nephi 1:5–7), and his paternal estate, the land of his inheritance, where the bulk of his fortune reposed, was some distance from the town (1 Nephi 3:16, 22; 2:4).²

Here, Nibley correctly alluded to the fact that Lehi's house at Jerusalem was inside the city itself and that his land of inheritance was a distinctly different location from both his house and Jerusalem. In this conclusion Nibley was certainly correct, although he offered no specifics concerning the questions of the location of the land of inheritance or its direction from Jerusalem, nor did he attempt to locate Lehi's house in any specific location within Jerusalem's walls. We may now address both of those issues by turning to the text of 1 Nephi itself.



The Land of Jerusalem versus the Land of Inheritance
It seems clear that Nephi meant for readers of his record to understand that his father Lehi lived in the city of Jerusalem itself, not somewhere outside the city walls. In the same verse in which he reported that his father had "dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days," Nephi called Jerusalem "the great city" (1 Nephi 1:4)—in other words, by saying "Jerusalem" Nephi was making reference to the city itself, not merely the land of Jerusalem region in which the city was located. When Lehi "went forth" to pray (1 Nephi 1:5), he was probably exiting the city walls, just as Nephi himself did later when he said, "I went forth unto my brethren, who were without the walls" (1 Nephi 4:27). It is entirely possible that Lehi went eastward from the walls of Jerusalem. Immediately east of Jerusalem is the Mount of Olives, a perfect place for Lehi's private prayer—he would even have been able to gaze over the Temple Mount and Solomon's temple from that location. Perhaps the Mount of Olives was where Nephi and his brothers went to "hide themselves without the walls" (1 Nephi 4:5), although that would more likely have taken place directly adjacent to the city wall. In any event, Lehi's house clearly seems to have been located within the walls of Jerusalem.

Lehi's land of inheritance is first alluded to in 1 Nephi 2:4. Later, speaking to his brothers, Nephi called it "the land of our father's inheritance" (1 Nephi 3:16). But the real estate seems to have been destined to be passed on to Lehi's sons, for Nephi also called it "the land of our inheritance" (1 Nephi 3:22). The land of inheritance is not to be confused with the land of Jerusalem first mentioned in 1 Nephi 3:9. From the text of 1 Nephi as a whole, two things are obvious about the land of Jerusalem region: (1) The city of Jerusalem is obviously within the boundaries of the land of Jerusalem, and (2) the land of Jerusalem is a totally different region from Lehi's land of inheritance.
These observations are demonstrated by a three-step examin
ation of Nephi's text:

1. Nephi and his brothers returned from the valley of Lemuel up to the land of Jerusalem (1 Nephi 3:9).
2. They then went down to the land of inheritance to collect Lehi's gold and silver (1 Nephi 3:16, 22).
3. Finally, Nephi and his brothers returned back up again to Jerusalem (1 Nephi 3:23).

It is important to remember that in the idiom of Nephi one always went up to come to the Jerusalem region, and one always went down when exiting the Jerusalem region. This is also the Hebrew idiom employed in the Bible, where persons in both the Old and New Testaments typically are said to go down to leave Jerusalem (see, for example, 2 Samuel 5:17; Luke 10:30; and Acts 8:15) and go up to come to Jerusalem (see, for example, 2 Chronicles 2:16 and Matthew 20:18). Nephi adhered to this Hebrew idiom throughout his account—whenever his party is reported to have gone to Jerusalem, they went up (see 1 Nephi 3:9; 4:4; 5:6; 7:3–4), and whenever the reference is to leaving the Jerusalem region, they went down (see 1 Nephi 2:5; 3:4, 16, 22; 4:35; 5:1; 7:2, 5). It should be clear, then, that when Nephi and his brothers go down to the land of inheritance, they are in fact leaving the region of Jerusalem. The land of Jerusalem is clearly not the same as the land of inheritance. Since the location of Jerusalem has not changed, the question now becomes: Where was the land of inheritance?

For reasons that will become obvious in this discussion, Lehi's land of inheritance was most likely not located within the borders of the southern kingdom of Judah. The most likely location for Lehi's ancestral real estate in the ancient land of Israel was the region of Manasseh. Lehi is reported to have been a descendant of Manasseh, the son of Joseph who was sold into Egypt (see 1 Nephi 5:14 and Alma 10:3). The ancient tribe of Manasseh possessed large tracts of land on both sides of the Jordan River (see photo essay, p. 74). As described in the Bible (Joshua 13:29–31 and 17:7–10), the territory of Manasseh east of the Jordan was equivalent to the area of Bashan (the modern Golan) and the northern part of Gilead (north of modern Amman). West of the Jordan, Manasseh held territory in what came to be known as the Samaria region, from the Jezreel Valley on the north to Tappuah on the south—Tappuah being about thirty-five kilometers (twenty-one miles) north of Jerusalem (see fig. 1). Historical considerations suggest that the area west of Jordan and north of Tappuah—specifically between ancient Tirzah on the east and modern Jenin on the west—was more likely than any other segment of Manasseh to have been the location of Lehi's ancestral land tract. We will now explore those considerations and how it was that people of Manasseh came to live in Jerusalem, making it possible for Lehi to have been born there and to have dwelled there all his days until the time of his exodus in 1 Nephi 2.


Lehi's Ancestors—From Manasseh to Jerusalem
At least two significant migrations of Israelites from the Manasseh tribal areas to Jerusalem are now known. The first is reported in the Bible, and the second (for our investigation the more significant) has been discerned through the efforts of Israeli archaeologists working in Jerusalem. The first account, found in 2 Chronicles, reports that a number of Israelites from northern tribes left the northern kingdom of Israel and defected to the southern kingdom of Judah during the fifteenth year of Asa, king of Judah (about 900 BC). In speaking of Asa, the record reports that "he gathered all Judah and Benjamin, and the strangers with them out of Ephraim and Manasseh, and out of Simeon: for they fell to him out of Israel in abundance" (2 Chronicles 15:9).

By Jeffrey R. Chadwick - Professor of Ancient Scripture
at  BYU
Read the rest of this wonderful article at: http://www.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu