The Children of Lehi: The Book of Mormon and the House of Joseph

A family that left Jerusalem on the eve of Babylon’s conquest and crossed an ocean to a new world; two brothers whose descendants built nations across a thousand years; a last prophet who buried his people’s record on gold plates and returned, centuries later, as an angel to an American farm boy who built a church on it. The Book of Mormon’s own story — and the nearly eighteen million who carry it today.

1. The house of Joseph

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has nearly 18 million members, a worldwide missionary force, and large financial reserves. Its members hold that they belong to the house of Israel, and to Joseph in particular. The claim is built into the church’s practice. Its central work is called the gathering of Israel. In the patriarchal blessing each member receives, which names the tribe they descend from, the usual answer is Ephraim, son of Joseph.

The claim comes from the Book of Mormon. The book presents itself as the record of a branch of Israel carried to the Americas. It begins around 600 BC with Lehi, reckoned a descendant of Joseph through Joseph’s son Manasseh; the second founding family, Ishmael’s, is assigned by tradition to Ephraim. Manasseh and Ephraim were the core of the northern kingdom of Israel — among the ten tribes Assyria deported in 722 BC, later called the lost tribes. The record was written on metal plates and abridged near the end by a man named Mormon.

2. The world at 600 BC

The book’s setting fits its time. It opens around 600 BC, the hinge of the ancient Near East: Assyria had fallen, Nineveh sacked in 612 BC; Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar held the region; and Jerusalem’s last years were closing, its elite deported in 597 BC and the city and Temple burned in 586 BC. A family leaving Jerusalem just then is leaving a real and documented moment — the same deportation that carried Mordecai’s people east into Persia, covered elsewhere on this site.

The Americas of that age were no wilderness. The Olmec, the mother culture of Mesoamerica, were giving way to the rising Maya, with their cities and writing; far to the north, mound-building peoples raised great earthworks along the river valleys. The continent the book describes was already home to accomplished civilisations.

Mainstream archaeology has not found direct evidence tying those civilisations to the Near East, and Latter-day Saints hold the account on faith. What is not in dispute is that the book reads the world of 600 BC accurately on the Old World side.

3. Two brothers, a thousand-year story

The book’s heart is two brothers. Nephi, the younger, is its prophet; Laman is the eldest. Nephi is sent back into Jerusalem to bring out the brass plates, the family’s scripture, and it is he who leads the family across the sea.

After Lehi dies, his descendants become two peoples: Nephi’s followers the Nephites, Laman’s the Lamanites. Across roughly a thousand years they build cities, keep records, and rise and fall, until the two lines meet for the last time around AD 385 at a hill the book calls Cumorah. By the book’s account, the Lamanites are among the ancestors of the American Indians.

The last of the Nephites is Moroni, son of the prophet-historian Mormon, who had abridged the record onto the plates. Moroni completes his father’s work, adds a book of his own, and buries the gold plates around AD 421.

His name ends on the syllable oni — Hebrew for vigour, or sorrow: the word in Ben-Oni, the name Rachel gave her last son, and in Jacob’s blessing of his firstborn Reuben, “the first of my strength.” Whether that is anything more than an echo, the reader can decide.

4. The marker that won’t settle

There is a genetic thread worth following. Among the Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes, the Western European male line R1b turns up at high frequency — near 80 per cent in some tested Ojibwe groups, second only to the native lineage Q. It is a striking result in the very part of the continent the Book of Mormon’s story would point to.

The author’s view is that R1b may be an Israelite line, and its presence here a trace of the migration the book describes. He is not alone: David Read’s Face of a Nephite (2020) and Rod Meldrum’s “Heartland” movement argue similar cases from the genetics and the archaeology of the North American interior.

Two further facts sit alongside it. The same Ojibwe kept the count of their generations on metal: in 1842 their chief Tagwagane showed the missionary Chrysostom Verwyst a copper plate notched once for each generation. And the old Israelite world wrote on metal too — the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, found near Jerusalem and dated to about 600 BC, carry the oldest known text of the Bible. A record kept on plates of metal is a thing a reader of the Book of Mormon has met before.

Mainstream geneticists read that R1b as later European ancestry rather than an ancient Near Eastern one, and trace the ancient Israelite line to a different haplogroup; on that reading the connection is unproven. But the frequency in some tribes sits higher than ordinary admixture would explain, and the question has not been closed.

The author sets it down for what it is: a lead, and a possibility, offered to the reader to follow.

5. Joseph Smith and the church he built

Fourteen centuries later, by Joseph Smith’s account, Moroni returned as an angel. In 1823 he led Smith — a young farmer near Palmyra, in the western New York of the religious revivals — to those same plates, buried in a nearby hill. Smith translated them and published the result in 1830 as the Book of Mormon, then returned the plates to the angel. The gold figure atop Latter-day Saint temples, trumpet raised, is Moroni.

Smith was not the only one to see the plates. Eleven men signed statements, printed in the front of the book, that they had seen them — three shown them by an angel, eight shown them by Smith and allowed to handle the leaves and study the engravings. Several of the eleven later left the church, yet none is known ever to have taken back his testimony.

On 6 April 1830, in Fayette, New York, Smith organized a church with a handful of members. It claimed to be not a new faith but the original one restored — the church of the apostles, lost in an age of corruption and given back through a living prophet.

The young church grew fast and kept moving — to Ohio, to Missouri, and to Nauvoo, Illinois, which the Saints built within a few years into one of the largest cities in the state. After their founder was killed by a mob in 1844, most of them followed Brigham Young, a hard and capable organiser, on the long road west. In 1847 they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake — a desert nobody else wanted — dammed the creeks, irrigated the valley floor, and laid out Salt Lake City on a grid. Utah Territory followed in 1850, with Young as its first governor.

The church practised plural marriage openly from 1852; its president Wilford Woodruff ended new plural marriages in 1890, and Utah was admitted as a state in 1896. From a frontier refuge in the mountains, the church began its long growth into a worldwide faith.

6. What they believe, and “more good”

Mormon belief is restorationist: it holds that the church Christ founded fell away and was restored whole through Joseph Smith. It treats Father, Son and Holy Ghost as three distinct beings, and alongside the Bible keeps three more books of scripture — the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. The church president is sustained as a living prophet who can receive continuing revelation, and the work is carried not by paid clergy but by ordinary members called to serve.

At the centre is the eternal family. Marriages and families “sealed” in a temple are believed to continue past death, and the living are baptised by proxy for their ancestors — which is why the church built the largest genealogical archive on earth, FamilySearch, to find those ancestors’ names. Members give a tithe of a tenth and keep the Word of Wisdom, abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea.

The name “Mormon” comes from the prophet in the book, and Joseph Smith gave it his own meaning. In an 1843 letter to the church paper, the Times and Seasons, he read it through the English “more” joined to “mon,” which he took for an old word for “good” — so that Mormon meant, he wrote, literally “more good.” It is a folk etymology, and the church has since asked the world to use its full name; but “more good” has stuck as a fond motto, and the world still mostly says Mormon.

7. The church today

The church the Book of Mormon founded is now a global institution. At the end of 2025 it reported about 17.9 million members, most of them outside the United States, with the fastest growth in Latin America, Africa and the Philippines; convert baptisms rose almost a quarter in 2025, its strongest year yet. It operates more than two hundred temples, with about two hundred more announced or under construction, and holds an investment reserve estimated above 100 billion dollars, giving on the order of a billion a year to humanitarian work.

Much of that growth runs on the church’s young people. More than 84,000 missionaries serve worldwide, most aged 18 to 25 — young men for two years, young women for eighteen months, in same-sex pairs and at their own expense. They do not choose where they go: headquarters assigns each one, often to another country and often in a language they learn at a training centre first. For most it is their first long stretch away from home, and many return fluent in a second language and used to disciplined work in an unfamiliar place.

The church is led by a president its members regard as a prophet. Russell M. Nelson died on 27 September 2025 at 101, the oldest president the church had had. Dallin H. Oaks, the senior apostle and a former Utah Supreme Court justice, was set apart as the 18th president and sustained by a solemn assembly of the membership on 4 April 2026, with Henry B. Eyring and D. Todd Christofferson as his counsellors.

The descent claim that opens this memo is not a relic. It is the church’s stated purpose — the gathering of Israel — and its living practice: members are still assigned a tribe, most often Ephraim, in the blessing each receives. Nearly two centuries after Joseph Smith knelt in a New York grove, the belief that these people belong to the house of Joseph is held by a large, prosperous, and growing church.