Jonathan Neville, author of the acclaimed historical book, The Lost City of Zarahemla, which finally unlocked the mystery of how Book of Mormon geography was shifted from Joseph Smith’s North American setting to Mesoamerica, has also written one of the most informative books ever shedding a flood of light and evidence onto the subject of Book of Mormon history called, “Moroni’s America”. If you haven’t read his book lately, you will realize how exciting it is to know the possible locations of the geography of the Book of Mormon. Share this article with your friends who wonder where the two theories came from.
Moroni’s America Chapter 2 by Jonathan Neville
The Book of Mormon presents a unique challenge when it comes to geography. The text contains many named locations, but the names are ancient. There is nothing comparable to Jerusalem, for example. We know where Jerusalem is because it never moved and it has been continuously inhabited. By contrast, there are no named sites in the Book of Mormon that have maintained their location and name through the present.
The text describes a comprehensive, consistent geography, but it is quite flexible. Locations and directions are given in vague terms. Distances are measured by travel time, not by miles or kilometers. There are lands northward and southward, relative terms whose meaning depends on the frame of reference. There is a narrow neck, a small neck, a narrow pass, and a narrow passage. There are seas and rivers and mountains and hills, some named but most not.
With such ambiguity, no two people can independently develop an identical map merely from reading the text. Matching such maps to real-world locations is just as problematic.
What we need is a solid starting point—a reliable pin in the map.
That’s why we need modern revelation.
Because the Book of Mormon does not refer to places we recognize, we look to modern revelation, where there are scriptural references to two Book of Mormon sites: Cumorah and Zarahemla.
Regarding Cumorah, D&C 128:20 says, in part:
And again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets—the book to be revealed. A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book!
Oliver Cowdery explicitly and unequivocally located the hill Cumorah is in New York, outside of Palmyra. Joseph Smith repeatedly endorsed Oliver’s statements about Cumorah.[i] Every one of Joseph’s contemporaries accepted the New York setting.
I stick a Cumorah pin in the map in western New York.
Regarding Zarahemla, D&C 125:3 says, in part, “Let them build up a city unto my name upon the land opposite the city of Nauvoo, and let the name of Zarahemla be named upon it.”[ii]
This verse is not conclusive about geography, but it doesn’t need to be. The Lord named the site Zarahemla. I want to see if it fits, so I stick a pin in eastern Iowa, along the Mississippi River across from Nauvoo.
Here is how the two pins fit on a map.[iii]
There it is. Book of Mormon geography in a nutshell.
I expect you have some questions. Most people ask, what about the narrow neck of land? What about the sea west? What about…
I’ll get to all those questions, but for now I want to focus on this question: If figuring out Book of Mormon geography based on modern revelation is so easy, why has it been so complicated and confusing?
A detailed answer would take an entire book to answer,[iv] so I’ll summarize some of the factors.
Fundamentally, we have more resources than people had in the past. Some of these factors may fit within Article of Faith 9: “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”
1. The Book of Mormon was translated into English from an ancient text that contained unusual terminology that has been difficult to understand. It contains ancient literary structures (such as chiasmus, discussed in Chapter 27) that were unknown to Joseph Smith and his contemporaries. I think Joseph knew where the Book of Mormon took place but couldn’t figure out how the text described the geography. That’s why he identified Book of Mormon places and people but didn’t link them to the text.
With modern understanding of these ancient literary structures and terminology, we can see how the text describes a comprehensive, consistent geography in a way previous generations could not.
2. Ancient languages lacked punctuation. Joseph Smith dictated the text without punctuation (another evidence of its antiquity, by the way). The original printer and subsequent editors have used punctuation to make sense of the text, but in doing so have unintentionally obscured some of the meaning. The text has also been divided into chapters and verses that also affect the meaning.
Thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers project and the work of Dr. Royal Skousen, we have access to portions of the original manuscript dictated by Joseph and the entire printer’s manuscript (the copy Oliver Cowdery made for the printer).[v] We can see where changes have been made in the text, whether by innocent mistake or in an effort to clarify the meaning. The closer we get to the original, the better—even on the geography issues.
3. In the 1830s and 1840s, overzealous missionaries sought to prove the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon by citing impressive ruins in Central America. The public was fascinated by the accounts of explorers in that area and some Mormons thought linking the Book of Mormon to these exotic locales would motivate more people to read the book. Some of these ideas were published in the Church newspaper, the Times and Seasons, in 1842. Different ideas about Book of Mormon settings in Central and South America were published in footnotes to the official text starting in 1879. The footnotes were deleted in 1920, but artwork by Arnold Friberg depicting Central America was included in official editions of the Book of Mormon and reinforced the Mesoamerican theory. Over the years, Mormon scholars persisted in seeking links between the Mayans and the Book of Mormon, and these ideas have remained dominant in Church culture, despite the official position of neutrality.
Thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers and other electronic resources, we now know much more about Church history and can see that the early links to Mesoamerica and South America originated not with Joseph Smith but with others. It is also becoming more apparent that the purported cultural links between Mayans and Book of Mormon peoples are illusory.
4. Everyone reads the Book of Mormon in the light of their own culture and knowledge. In the 19th century, people knew relatively little about archaeology, geology, geography, anthropology, etc.[vi] This led to misunderstandings about what the text actually said, leading to unwarranted assumptions about geography and Nephite culture that have persisted.
With far greater knowledge and understanding of the scientific context of ancient America—North, Central, and South—we can re-evaluate previous beliefs and match the text to what we discover.
We simply know more now than those who preceded us. And the more we learn, the more we realize Joseph Smith was right all along.
An open-minded evaluation of the text is essential for anyone approaching this topic in the pursuit of truth. As Brother John L. Sorenson points out, “If we are to progress in this task, we must chop away and burn the conceptual underbrush that has afflicted the effort in the past.”[vii]
Ironically, some of that conceptual underbrush has been the basis for the Mesoamerican theory itself. Brother Sorenson declined to even consider North America:
The prospect that any other part of America than Mesoamerica was the scene of Book of Mormon events is so slight that only this obvious candidate area will be considered here.[viii]
Answering the question before examining the evidence leads to confirmation bias, a common error that superficially resembles testing a hypothesis. I am sensitive to the risk of confirmation bias. When I started this process, I was fully prepared to take the pins out of the map if they didn’t fit. Unlike Brother Sorenson, I didn’t view any setting as unworthy of consideration. But after considering the Mesoamerican geography for decades, I realized it just didn’t work. So I came up with a different hypothesis.
The search for Book of Mormon geography is akin to application of the scientific method. I asked a question (where did the Book of Mormon take place?), did background research (reading, talking, traveling), constructed a hypothesis (put two pins in the map), tested the hypothesis (read the text carefully), analyzed my data, and drew a conclusion. The final step, communicating my results, consists of this book.
The rest of Section 1 of this book discusses how the text describes Moroni’s America and what Joseph Smith and others said about it. Section 2 goes through the text, verse by verse, to put the geographical references in context. Section 3 discusses frequently asked questions about geography issues and examines how the chiastic structure of Alma 22 describes North America.
[i] I recognize that some scholars dispute the validity of Oliver’s account. They even claim Joseph merely adopted a “tradition” about the New York Cumorah that was started by unknown Church members at an unknown time. I address this in my short book, Letter VII, Oliver Cowdery’s Message to the World about the Hill Cumorah, so I don’t address it in detail in this book.
[iii] I used Google Earth in this book because it is easily accessible to anyone who has access to the Internet. Those interested can experiment with the text on their own, using my maps as a start. I haven’t put my maps on the Internet because I’m constantly adjusting them, but if you’d like my .kml file for your personal use, just email me at the address listed on the copyright page.
[iv] The complications arose from what people read into the text. For example, where Joseph and Oliver stated clearly and simply that the Hill Cumorah was in New York, some scholars in the 20th century claimed that was wrong; they think Cumorah has to be in southern Mexico. They reached this conclusion by 1) establishing their own criteria for the scene of the last battles of the Jaredites and the Nephites and 2) deciding New York didn’t meet their criteria. For example, see David A. Palmer, In Search of Cumorah, Horizon Publishers, 1982, also cited in Sorenson, Mormon’s Codex, p. 142. Brother Sorenson discusses Cumorah in more detail on pages 688-695, where he ridicules those who believe the final battles took place in New York. See also Brant A. Gardner, Traditions of the Fathers, pp. 375-379, in which Brother Gardner refers to the “sacralization of the New York hill.”
[v] In this book, I reference the printed books (Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Volume 3) as well as Brother Skousen’s work available online. Information about the books is available here: http://bit.ly/Moroni7.
[vi] People were aware that many ancient sites were being destroyed, so they made efforts to document what they found. Squier and Davis conducted an extensive survey and published it in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, which I reference later in this book.
[vii] Sorenson, Geography, p. 210.
[viii] Ibid, p. 407.
