“My sisters”

The two (or more) daughters of Lehi and Sariah I presume, on the basis of Erastus Snow’s statement, to have become wives of Ishmael’s sons. They were minors at the beginning of the account, otherwise there would be no way to place them in Sariah’s birth history. I suppose that one was around twelve and the other around nine. When they arrived in Bountiful they would have been twenty and seventeen.

It is logical that in the intimate circumstances of the camp, youths approaching sexual maturity would be in a socially awkward position. Likely, the adult role of wife would be arranged for the two daughters as soon as feasible, say around age sixteen for each in turn, but whom would they marry? The sons of Ishmael alone seem of an age to be possible husbands. Lehi’s first daughter may then have become the second wife of Ishmael’s first son at about the time they were in Nahom. The second daughter could have become the second wife to Ishmael’s second son no later than the time the party reached Bountiful.

This scenario takes the Erastus Snow statement at face value. I realize that to suppose that the daughters became second wives appears to contradict Jacob 2:34 and 3:5, where it is said that Lehi was commanded that there should be no plural wives. But perhaps Lehi received that commandment only in the promised land after, and partially because of, bitter experience with the second wifehood of his two daughters, which had led to their separation from Ishmael’s sons. Or, these cases may have been covered under the “escape clause” of Jacob 2:30 (“For if I will...raise up seed unto me, I will command my people” to make polygamous unions), the daughters having no other prospect of marriage within their party.

Still another possibility is that the arduous wilderness experience had caused the (unmentioned) death of the original wives of the sons of Ishmael, whereupon Lehi’s daughters were taken as replacement spouses. A final possibility is that the Snow statement was in error in the recollection of the detail about the daughters and that they never married at all due to lack of partners of a suitable age. Obviously, we cannot settle these details on the basis of so few bits of information given us by Nephi in his record. We may wonder about such matters but must restrict our guesses to fit what hints the text gives us.