Another thing I'd like to talk about is Lehi's dream.
This is not a dream that summoned from upstate New York.
Can't concoct!
This is a dream which fits in the desert,
and it fits with different desert travel.
When it opens, Lehi finds himself in this dark, dreary waste,
and there's a man who approaches him, a guide,
who asks him to follow him, so if they go they go.
They go off into the darkness,
and after a while Lehi complains "this is a long trek, my gosh we've been walking for hours" and so on.
And then comes the dawn.
There has to be a dawn in the story because he sees himself in a field
and a field is different from the desert, the sand, the dunes and the rocks.
At the dawn he finds himself in a field, but a field presumes water.
In a desert water comes either by the seasonal rains or he had to figure out a way to hold on to it
He and his family, the traveling party, later on will run into people who know about the Mar'ib damn.
It's already under construction by the time they passed through there.
This is a dam which catches the rain, their seasonal rains and stores them.
And through sluices on either side of the dam,
the water is let out gradually and is carried by canals and channels up to 22 kilometers away,
creating basically a green verdant oasis right next to the sand dunes.
So this in a sense what he sees and experiences is something yet to be experienced.
So his dream in that sense is prophetic as to what he'll experience.
Well he finds himself, the dawn comes he sees the most prominent plant is this tree,
so he goes over, there's fruit, he takes a bite, it's spectacular stuff.
So he looks around, I think, expecting to see his wife.
"oh there she is over there, she's at the stream."
So he beckons to her, the two younger sons come over, they do, they come over they partake of the fruit.
Then he looks around, I think expecting to see the two older sons "Ah there they are, come over," they refuse.
What this dream consists of it is a family moving through the desert.
Even if the night is dark, there's no moon,
there's enough starlight out there and and the floor of the desert is bright enough
that Sariah following behind Lehi 25, 30, 50 yards behind
with the camels that are loaded and the two younger sons with her.
She and they can see him walking against the the glare of the stars off the desert
and the two older sons in the rearguard, that's how this goes.
One clear example of this is to look at the description of the movement of the Israelite tribes
through the desert as recounted in the Book of Numbers.
There's a very set order and the most precious things, the most important part of the cargo
was kept in the middle of this moving van of people.
That happened to be the tent, the sacred tent, and all of the sacred objects
that went with this movable temple.
And so it is with Lehi's family,
they're moving, Sariah and the younger boys have charge of the goods that they're carrying with them.
Tents, food, tools, so on.
And the two older boys are the rear cart.
They're traveling by night, this is not part of Joseph Smith's world.
There's nobody in Upstate New York who says "ok let's go over you know to the next County,
we'll leave at 8 o'clock tonight," that doesn't happen,
but in Lehi's world it does.
This little story will illustrate it.
Years ago I landed in Aswan, Egypt
and I was met and taken by a couple of young guys to my hotel.
On the way into town I discovered that one of these guys is Bedouin.
So I decided that he's going to give me some interesting answers to some questions.
So I asked him, "how far is it from Aswan to Abu Simbel?"
Abu Simbel is an archaeological site which was saved by the United Nations back in the 1960s.
And all kinds of people go out there, some drive,
it's a long way out there, it's probably 100 kilometers or more.
The best way to get there is to fly and then fly back to Aswan.
So i asked him "how far is it to Abu Simbel from here?."
He thought for a few seconds and he said "four nights."
Now that's a different answer from what Joseph Smith would think or anybody in his world.
But it's not a strange answer for somebody like Lehi,
whose dream takes place at night which is the natural time to travel.
You don't travel during the day when the heat is unbearable, you sleep during the day.
Besides that, in chapter 17 verse 13.
The Lord is quoted there as saying, "I will also be your light in the wilderness."
I suspect this is something that came off the Liahona, but the Lord made that promise.
You ask yourself, "Light? Why do I need light?"
I don't if I'm traveling during the day but if I'm going at night I need some help
So the Lord is going to be their guide and their light as they as they go into the desert.
This is a world that fits in the ancient Near East, the stream fits in ancient Near East.
One other little tiny piece along the way in his dream,
Lehi sees this great and spacious building and he says it's as though it's standing above the earth.
Farther south in Arabia, people built buildings to live in.
United Nations actually has identified some of these places that are hundreds of years old.
They've tried to maintain them as part of the cultural heritage of the earth.
But the idea is that the bottom level is for the animals,
the whole complex, there maybe two or three or four buildings that are part of a complex
is surrounded by a protective wall
and then families live in the upstairs
and these things go up to eight stories high,
so that approaching them at night,
say they're early evening or something like that
what you see are lights in the windows that are suspended in the air.
So the idea is that the architecture of what the eye will see, will match what he sees in his dream.
The way I read Lehi's dream, it's a prophetic anticipation
of what he will see and experience as his party moves south into the Arabian desert.
They will experience all of these things that he sees in this dream.
The river, as Nephi describes it in chapter 15 he says "my father didn't see that the river was filthy."
He says he's so much caught up in in the vision in the dream
that he didn't notice that, but it matches what we know about that part of the world.
Because the seasonal rains will hit the mountains someplace
and then depending on how the watershed is shaped,
the water runs off, it's like a hard pan
and it runs off down into these rivulets,
gathering more and more and it just comes rushing and gushing out of these wadis.
That's the description of what we see.
The water carries a lot of soil when it comes out of these places, making it muddy looking.
and that's what Nephi sees.
Joseph Smith doesn't live around rivers
that are what we'd call filthy or full of mud except maybe during spring runoff.
In some places most of them are the kind of river that would be fairly clear as a stream.