While the death of Laban is well-known as the outcome at the end of 1 Nephi 4, many important factors in Nephi’s account lead up to that unfortunate but required outcome. However told or explained, any killing is awful. Even packaged in beautifully crafted literature, any killing is disruptive to the fabric of human life. It instills anxieties, horror, and chaos. It throws the normal boundaries of human powers into turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and cosmic imbalance. Nephi realizes this. He does not tell his story of the slaying of Laban triumphantly, but as an account of tremendous restraint, repeated warnings, divine interventions, miraculous deliverances, and unimagined developments. The heart of this story is told in 1 Nephi 3–4, but it actually begins in the opening chapters of 1 Nephi, just as its lessons will continue to reverberate throughout Nephite history thereafter.
For example, Nephi was highly favored of the Lord. As Nephi begins his account, he casts his character in a positive light. He was "highly favored of the Lord in all my days," and was given "a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God" (1 Nephi 1:1). One of those mysteries was that God would destroy the wicked leaders in Jerusalem, one way or another, which may presage the slaying of Laban among many others. Nephi was the son of the prophet, Lehi, who was "filled with the Spirit of the Lord" (1:12). That was the same Spirit that spoke on important occasions to Nephi (2:19; 4:11).
As the fourth son in this family, Nephi can also be identified with biblical characters such as David, a beloved younger son of Jesse, whom Samuel called "a man after [the Lord’s] own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14). And just as David beheaded Goliath with his own sword and rose to powerful positions ahead of his elder brothers, Nephi would do likewise. Lehi prophesied that many inhabitants of Jerusalem "should perish by the sword" (1:13). His mention of the generic use of the sword as the principal mode of execution for apostate cities in biblical law (Deut. 13:15) sets the stage for the slaying of Laban to be carried out by the sword, and indeed, by Laban’s own sword (1 Nephi 4:18).
Nephi’s account had quickly turned its attention to Lehi’s domestic situation. When Laman and Lemuel rejected the idea that the great city of Jerusalem could be destroyed, Lehi spoke to them with power, shaking them to the core, and silencing them (2:13–14). Their rejection of Lehi’s patriarchal authority stands in stark contrast to Nephi’s believing "all the words" of Lehi. Nephi’s goodness is then rewarded, and he was promised that if he will keep God’s commandments he will prosper and be led to a land of promise (1 Nephi 2:20). The crucial need to keep God’s commandments will surface again in one of Nephi’s culminating ruminations before slaying Laban, when he remembers that his people "could not keep the commandments" unless they have the plates on which the law was written (4:15–16).