1 And it came to pass that we did again take our journey in the wilderness; and we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth. And we did travel and wade through much affliction in the wilderness; and our women did bear children in the wilderness.
Nephi has two running threads of narration: one that
describes the chronology of the trip, and one that describes the conditions of
the trip. At least that’s how I see this verse. The first sentence tells what
they did after they left Nahom. The second sentence describes the circumstances
of the journey, which could apply to the whole journey, not just the next
segment. The hardships the company waded through obviously had more to do with
weather and terrain than with the rigorous speed of travel. If the pace they
kept were very fast, it would not have taken them eight years to go from
Jerusalem to Bountiful. The fact that their women bore children during the trip
says that they stopped occasionally at least. Maybe they stopped in one place
long enough to plant and harvest crops. Of course there is no written
indication of this, but when they left the Valley of Lemuel they took “seed of
every kind that [they] might carry into the wilderness” (1 NE 16:11). Was that
only for the Promised Land, or did they plant some of those seeds along the way
to supplement their diet of meat? On the other hand, the next verse makes it
sound as if they only ate meat, raw meat at that, so the seeds could have been
strictly for the Promised Land.
