Talk:Nephi, son of Lehi

Hebrew and Arabic forms

I've deleted the parenthetical Hebrew and Arabic forms of the name. See Talk:Linguistics and the Book of Mormon for my reasons. Pterodactyler 14:59, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Redundancy

I reverted the section in the introduction at the end of the paragraph and shown in bold below:

The name Nephi is used in the context of the Book of Mormon to refer to the following persons, places and books. There is no archeological evidence of the ancient usage of these names in the Americas or that any of the places, persons or events actually existed or happened.

Fred Bauder re-entered the text. I believe that this is redundant with the information already present in the sentence to which it was added. What do others think? Val42 15:44, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it's redundant. Val's version deals only with the name Nephi, so an uninformed reader might conclude that Nephi is a modern name for an established historical figure who did not himself use that name. Fred's version, on the other hand is too broad. Which "places, persons or events" is he referring to? (There are no events called Nephi.) I would propose something along these lines: "Outside of the Book of Mormon account, there is no evidence that any of these Nephis existed." (except the city of Nephi, Utah, of course; maybe we can move that one to a disambiguation page?) Pterodactyler 17:00, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

That would be acceptable to me, once you work out the exact wording to "except" the city. But to be truthful, we will have to apply the same (or similar) wording to most all of the persons in the Bible and Quoran. Since Fred Bauder made this wording change here and in the Book of Mormon article, perhaps he would volunteer to apply this same standard to these other books. Val42 17:29, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguation page

This is addressing the comment by Pterodactyler about possibly making a disambiguation page. The article page is sort of a disambiguation page but with a brief explaination of each usage of "Nephi". I think that the accounts of person's named Nephi are better dealt with in the articles about the books named after them. The city of Nephi should definitely be on its own page. I like the format of this page the way that it is. Val42 17:29, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

Speculation regarding a compass

I removed the section speculating on the existence of compass technology as it was unrelated to the subject of the article. I did, however, modify the "liahona" reference to remove the direct statement that the liahona was a compass. andersonpd 05:00, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

According to Alma 37:38, "our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass". It may or may not have had an actual compass, but it certainly did more. I think that they picked the word that most closely match the object that they had. I like the change that you made to the Nephi article though because it catches the sense of the use of the object rather than the sense of "compass", the word that they used for the object. Val42 16:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, that is the sense I was trying to convey. The deleted section seemed to me to equate "compass" with "magnetic compass" rather than the sense of any device that gives direction, which is what I think the scripture intends. Maybe today it would be "which is, being interpreted, a GPS receiver"!! andersonpd 21:00, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Words/Specualtion of words

Here's two thoughts

Sometimes in translation, there is no word for what the speaker is saying or writing. In which case either a close sounding replica is used, or a word that is closest to the meaning, is used. So, I don't think it is nescessarily important what the word "liahona" ment, only the point or message that is being conveyed.

In this case the point was that the liahona gave dirrection when all were following the laws of God, and stopped working when they went against the laws of God. There for the cloeset word availible to the english language at the time of translation would be "compass" or the closest sounding would be the anglosized "liahona".

Another examlpe not from the book of mormon would be the word Tsnami, in the english language we usually pronouce it "soo-nam-ee", where as when pronounced in the native language it may sound closer to "t'soo-nam-ee".

Tone of article

The article appears to be written as if Nephi is an actual historical figure. To be NPOV, the sections that say "Nephi was..." should be changed to "According to the Book of Mormon, Nephi was..." or something similar. Badagnani 03:15, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a great deal of content devoted to myhthical, scriptural or fictional characters, however I believe it is normally customary to state kind of person in the opening paragraph of the article. I'd add something like: "The historicity of Nephi story is not generally accepted by non-LDS historians or archaeologists."

We find very similar text on the page about Nephites, the group of people that this Nephi allegedly founded, however nowhere on the nephi article do we mention that he is almost certainly a fictional or mythical character. --Salimfadhley (talk) 16:56, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

The tone of the article is a NPOV violation. It's fine to contain all the info that a Mormon believer would find informative, and it should certainly be respectful of the Mormon faith, but it has to be clear that the page is describing Mormon beliefs, not objective facts.PhysPhD (talk) 04:24, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I removed the neutrality tag since changes have been made to address the issue. The lead explains that the article proceeds under assumptions outlined in the BofM, and whether or not the BofM is a true history is tangential to this article. —Eustress ^talk 22:53, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I still do not think we have satisified NPOV. The first paragraph gives the impression that Nephi is a historical character, however the mainstream opinion is that Nephi is a character who exists only in Mormon scripture. Furthermore, the existance of the Nepthites cotnradicts the known history of native American peoples. Claims made about Nephi and his people have not been confirmed by any non-mormon historian. --Salimfadhley (talk) 13:55, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I completely agree. It's important to stick with the facts. Wishful thinking is not good enough for Wikipedia. See section on Historicity below. Peteruetz (talk) 01:34, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

This issue is still present throughout the page, with all of the information presented as factual. Rounkah (talk) 01:49, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

My edits

I made quite a few edits, and would appreciate someone looking over them. I think in general, this article needs some serious work, before I started editing, it was a general narrative that was out of order, and referred only to the narrative of the Book of Mormon itself. --Descartes1979 (talk) 23:04, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Rename

Shouldn't this article be renamed to Nephi, son of Lehi instead of Nephi, Son of Lehi, given that the word "son" should not be capitalized in sentence case? -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 15:48, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Historicity of Nephi etc

Following up on the "Tone of article" section above: does anybody have any information about the historicity of Nephi or the whole clan? An explicit section on this problem would be an important component of this page (or any other related page on those BofM characters). Without historical evidence these books in the BofM remain fairy tales of unclear significance. Thanks! Peteruetz (talk) 00:28, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

You could cite https://bookofmormonevidence.org/. It might stir up some members of my faith a bit, but the link is to a reliable resource that has a man who has done his research on The book of Mormon and it's Geography. 38.43.22.44 (talk) 05:53, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)

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Citations and Missing Events

So far my work on this page has been and will continue to be adding citations other than Book of Mormon verses. There were a few other sources on the page when I started, which I am grateful for. However, I'm going to plump out the other citations; this may entail simply adding another citation with the verse or complete removal of the verse citation, depending on the information in need of reference.

I'm also noticing that various events in Nephi's life are missing, such as the retrieval of the daughters of Ishmael and the different times Laman and Lemuel tried killing Nephi. I have added some information on these and plan on expanding them. On another note, I will add a little bit of background on the destruction of Jerusalem, but make it so as to not overwhelm the purpose of the article (summarizing Nephi's life). The background will constitute a couple sentences at most--just enough to give our readers some context on what's going on. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 23:04, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

On the infobox

User AFeatherlessBipehead added birth and death dates to the religious biography infobox. I have removed those dates. AFeatherlessBipehead did not provide citations to any reliable sources for the claim. Additionally, while the Nephi arc of the Book of Mormon is certainly set around approximately the dates given, to say in an infobox that Nephi was born and died—that's not necessarily implying anything, but it could be taken that way. The page for Esther, a biblical figure of disputed historicity, does not attempt to lay out birth or death dates.

Additionally, Grant Hardy in his introduction to The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. xxii) notes that the Book of Mormon's own accounting of years doesn't entirely fit that of IRL calendars, further complicating the use of specific dates in IRL dating systems.

For these reasons, I removed the birth and death dates from the infobox. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 20:18, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Picture

This image could benefit from improvement. In comparison to portrayals of other significant religious figures, the current depiction falls short. With a brief search, I easily discovered an alternative image that surpasses the quality, exceeding what one might find in a comic book. LuxembourgLover (talk) 01:18, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

What is the image? What are the usage rights of the image? Wikipedia heavily prefers and prioritizes images that can be uploaded to WikimediaCommons—images under certain CreativeCommons licenses or that are in the public domain. Many of the better-known or more visually interesting artistic depictions of Nephi were produced in ways such that they remain under copyright. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 01:24, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

yeah, I'd love to know more! I've been able to find some public domain images that depict Nephi with his family, but it is difficult to find a close-up. I'm open to discussing whether or not an infobox image is appropriate. Other religious figures, like Moses, have artistic depictions in their infoboxes, but there is more public domain art to choose from for Biblical figures. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 18:18, 8 February 2024 (UTC)