Wanderers in a Strange Land...

This morning in my scripture study I was in Alma 13 and I was reading verse 23 when I got to the part where they were talking about, “our being wanderers in a strange land…”  A quick reference to the bottom told me that this would have been about 82 B.C. – I thought it was interesting that 518 years after the fact they still thought of themselves as “wanderers in a strange land.”  That reminded me of the first time that phrase was mentioned in The Book of Mormon, it was in Jacob 7:26, “and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren…” it led me to wonder if that phrase was ever mentioned again, so I looked it up, and it is once more in Alma 26:36, “Yea, blessed is the name of my God, who has been mindful of this people, who are a branch of the tree of Israel, and has been lost from its body in a strange land; yea, I say, blessed by the name of my God, who has been mindful of us, wanderers in a strange land.”  I found it interesting that they kept referring to themselves as wanderers in a strange land, especially when you look at the context in which each of these comments were made; Jacob said it first somewhere between 544 and 421 B.C. during his farewell address to his people, Alma the Younger said it in 81 B.C. while he was preaching repentance to the people in Ammonihah with Amulek and Ammon said it somewhere between 90 and 77 B.C. while he was talking to his brethren at the conclusion of their mission to the Lamanites.  At first I thought that Jacob had said it because they had just left Jerusalem roughly 180 years before and maybe he was homesick and they weren’t that established in the land, but then I moved on to Alma and I thought that it was in reference to their missionary work taking them away from their friends, family and homes but then I got to Ammon and it all just clicked together – they meant that they had moved away from the land promised to their fathers through Abraham, Issac and Jacob.