Zion is used in two ways across the record: as a place name carried over from Isaiah, where it stands for Jerusalem, the city of God and site of the temple, and as a term for the Lord’s covenant people and the kingdom he establishes among them, especially in the last days. The Isaiah passages quoted by Nephi promise that the Lord will comfort Zion and all her waste places, making her wilderness like Eden (2 Nephi 8:3).
Those who seek to bring forth the Lord’s Zion are promised the gift and power of the Holy Ghost (1 Nephi 13:37). The laborer in Zion is to labor for Zion and not for money (2 Nephi 26:30-31), and the nations that fight against Zion are told they shall be as a dream of a night vision, their efforts coming to nothing (2 Nephi 27:3). Nephi’s prophecy also contains the record’s sharpest warning about Zion’s counterfeit: the devil pacifies people until they say “all is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth,” leading them carefully down to hell (2 Nephi 28:21), and pronounces woe upon “him that is at ease in Zion” (2 Nephi 28:24). The danger Nephi identifies is not an external enemy of Zion but a community that calls itself Zion yet has grown complacent and pride-saturated.
Christ, speaking to the Nephites, said he would gather Israel from their long dispersion and establish his Zion again among them (3 Nephi 21:1). He identified this people as those he would establish in the land to fulfill the covenant made with Jacob, and called the result a New Jerusalem, with the powers of heaven in their midst (3 Nephi 20:22).
The record also preserves an earlier instance of a leader establishing peace among a wicked people. Melchizedek, through mighty faith, preached repentance to a wicked people; they repented, and he “did establish peace in the land in his days,” being called “the prince of peace” as king of Salem (Alma 13:18). This shows that the unified, peaceable community the Nephites achieved after Christ’s visit was not the first such realization.
After Christ’s visit, the converted Nephites and Lamanites held all things in common, with no rich or poor among them (4 Nephi 1:3). The arrangement ended in the two hundred and first year, when some began to be lifted up in pride and to wear costly apparel, stopped holding their goods in common, divided into classes, and built up churches to get gain, denying the church of Christ (4 Nephi 1:24-26).
The book’s final prophetic appeal returns to Zion. Moroni closes the record by summoning: “awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion; and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders forever, that thou mayest no more be confounded” (Moroni 10:31). This closing summons frames the entire record as addressed to the latter-day house of Israel and ties the book’s Zion hope to its gathering audience.