Additional Clues to the Land of Promise Location-Part II Still Other Matches

Returning now to our original series on the Land of Promise location matching scriptural clues such as winds and currents moving Nephi’s ship that was “driven forth before the wind,” the temperature and climate needed to grow seeds from Jerusalem exceedingly and provide an abundant crops, locating ore deposits in abundance and which contain gold, silver and copper in a single unit, finding two unknown animals that were as “useful to man” as the elephant, two unknown grains on a par with corn, wheat and barley, and natural herbs to cure deadly fever, roads, buildings, resorts, area of many waters, volcanoes and earthquakes, fortified walls, slings used as weapons, coins, ziff, and tall mountains, there are other clues in the scriptural record that also need to be found in the Land of Promise.

Some of these clues are not directly mentioned in the scriptural record, but implied by the nature of the Jewish culture from which the Nephites sprang.

One example is that we know the Nephites practiced the Law of Moses (Alma 25:15), and we know that the Law of Moses required circumcision and was practiced by the Nephites for the first 600 years of their history before it was fulfilled in Christ (Moroni 8:8). Thus, we see that the Nephites, who lived the Law of Moses, practiced circumcision.

In fact, circumcision dates back to God’s covenant with Abraham. In the first biblical mention of circumcision, God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God said to Abram, "I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless." God then explained his part of the covenant — he would be the God of Abraham's descendants and give them the land of Canaan (Genesis 17:1-8); God then further explained Abraham's part of the covenant (Genesis 17:10-14). "This is...the covenant you are to keep." Every male was to be circumcised, and this physical rite was to be "the sign of the covenant" with God, and it was "an everlasting covenant." Every male in Abraham's household was to be circumcised immediately, and from then on every new baby boy was to be circumcised on the eighth day. Whether they were Hebrews or whether they were purchased as slaves, the men had to be circumcised. If they were not, they would be cut off; they had broken the covenant. Abraham did what God told him to do (Genesis 17:23-27; 21:4). The practice of circumcision became the defining characteristic of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob clan.

Thus we find that God’s people, which obviously would have included the Nephites, honored the covenant of circumcision. And the only area in the Western Hemisphere where there is an archaeological record with physical evidence that the ancients living there from B.C. times, practiced circumcision was in the Andean area of Peru.

Rafael Larco Hoyle, whose uncle Victor Larco Herrera was the founder of the first museum in Lima, Peru, and who himself is credited with nearly 100 verified discoveries of the early 20th century in the Andean area, and perhaps the most knowledgeable person of the ancient Peruvian people known today as the Mochica, discovered that these people anciently practiced circumcision, as did their predecessors, unnamed at this time, but referred to as the Mochica Complex or Initial Mochica. In addition to ceramic and textile art, which shows circumcision, numerous mummies discovered and preserved in the dry climate of western Peru have shown countless incidents of circumcision practiced anciently.

Again, the area of Andean Peru matches an area of the Book of Mormon, along with those listed in the previous 17 posts covering and matching 15 specific scriptural references—no other area in the Western World matches all these scriptural descriptions to be found in the Land of Promise other than this Peruvian area.