Welcome to Part 2 with Dr. John Hilton the 3rd on First Nephi 1 through 5.

Okay, Dr Hilton, what do we have next?

Let's just jump down to one of the shortest verses in the Book of Mormon first

nephy chapter 2 verse 15 and my father dwelt in a tent I'm sure that both of

you have had the experience when you're teaching seminary and a student gets to give

the devotion they go up and read this version.

It's like, oh, they go sit down. So funny. But this is actually a great verse.

Going back to what we talked about earlier with a serious study of the Book of Mormon,

one technique that I really like to do is to search for how often words or phrases are repeated.

If you do that with the word tent, we find out that over the course of his writings,

Nephi will refer to his father's tent more than 20 times.

This is actually an important detail. It seems like Lehi is pretty wealthy because he has so much treasure right that

Leibin is gonna lust after it and that's just the stuff that they left behind

Lei has got a lot and now he's gone from that to living in a tent.

I don't have the nicest house, but I would be really bitterly disappointed if I had to move out of my house into a tent.

That would be so hard.

And I think it's interesting that Nephi and Lehi are going to have incredible revelations while they're living in a tent.

This was a step down for them.

To me it's kind of this, and it came to to pass my father dwelt in a tent

symbolizes that even in the difficulties of our lives even when we're

metaphorically dwelling in a tent we can still have great revelations and great joy

like Lehi and his family did.

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