Zeniff is allowed to come before the king of the City of Nephi. Unlike the later occasion when Ammon is imprisoned when he approached a king, here Zeniff is allowed to approach. This suggests not only that the king was secure, which should be obvious since he was within his power structure and there were only five men who were before him. Nevertheless, it is not a question of threat, but animosity. Were Zeniff and his people considered mortal enemies they might have been treated differently. What they were, were separated kinsmen. They spoke the same language, and had the same heritage (though clearly a difference in religion at this point).
The king of the City of Nephi grants Zeniff his desire for land, again confirming that the king saw no threat from Zeniff or his people. The conferral of land is apparently volunteered by the king. Zeniff and his people may have the “land of Lehi-Nephi, and the land of Shilom.” We see in the next verse that there is also a city of Lehi-Nephi and a city of Shilom, following the tradition of having a central location for which the surrounding land is known.
Geography: What might we presume of the land of Lehi-Nephi and Shilom? Sorenson suggests:
“In the Valley of Guatemala distances and topography fit markedly with the geographical statements in the Book of Mormon. The land of Nephi in the narrow sense of the term would have consisted of the upper floor of the valley occupied today by Guatemala City and its suburbs (see map 8). It centered upon the sprawling ancient city that archaeologists have labeled Kaminaljuyu (”hills of the dead“). The upper valley’s six square miles lie at an elevation between 4,800 and 5,500 feet. The land of Shilom, the lower level of the valley, would have lain between the curving Rio Villalobos and the north side of Lake Amatitlan. San Antonio Frutal, second largest site in the Valley, sits in this flattish zone, near 4,300 feet elevation. ”Enormous mounds“ found there date in part from B.C. times, although its most important remains are of Early Classic date, near the end of Book of Mormon times. It occupies a position in relation to the city of Nephi, about seven or eight miles away, which neatly fits the Book of Mormon statements involving the two. This Shilom area is about half as extensive as the Nephi portion of the valley. The hill spoken of earlier lies about northwest (by our directions today) from San Antonio Frutal; the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 7:16) calls the direction ”north." (Sorenson, John L. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. FARMS 1985, p. 168).
Zeniff is allowed to take over a physical location that consists of two population centers and their surrounding agricultural lands. That two lands are given to him suggests that they are fairly close together. What might we presume about the size of those lands? First, we should understand that the Zeniffites cannot be an extremely large population. They were certainly large enough to populate two lands, but how many might that be? Zeniff’s people would have consisted of some Nephites, and some Zarahemlaites, and possibly a larger number of Zarahemlaites who might be looking for a new start. Traditionally, those whose inherited lands have become too small (through division among the family) would be those who were interested in new locations and therefore new land.
Let’s give Zeniff a fairly large body – say 1,000 people. That number might be able to leave Zarahemla without crippling it (remembering that Zarahemla had already lost people in its own civil strife). When Zeniff splits that number into two locations, he has 500 in each town. That is a small population. It fits well with town sizes as we have seen, but it hardly fills a city of the magnitude of the City of Nephi. With only a thousand people spread over two lands, Zeniff is hardly in a position to be a wealth provider to the king of Nephi, and therefore it is very unlikely that the king would withdraw himself and all of his people from his own large city to give it up to some lost relatives.
Further indication that Lehi-Nephi and Shilom were not already powerful locations comes in the next verse, were the first tasks were to build and repair. It would appear that the Zeniffites were given smaller lands, and the residents of the city of Nephi would have stayed right where they were, keeping eye (and thumb?) on the Zeniffites. This would appear to contradict the plausible importance of the site of Kaminaljuyu. However, it may be that it was in a period of decline, and the Zeniffite presence built it up again.