Continuing
with John W. Welch’s comments in Reexploring
the Book of Mormon, in which he discusses Nephite placement of cities, the directions
in the Land of Promise, and the distance across the narrow neck of land; and continuing
from the last post with Chapter 52: “Directions in Hebrew, Egyptian, and Nephite Language,” with
“Alma 22:27 on the east and on the west” as a sub-heading, he states:
2. “How would the Nephites, using the "learning of the Jews and the
language of the Egyptians" (1 Nephi 1:2), have written north, south, east, and west? The Hebrews, like most Semitic
peoples, oriented themselves by facing east, toward the rising sun. Thus east in Hebrew was simply front (qedem), with south
as right (yamîn), north as left (śemôl),
and west as rear (achôr) or "sea" (yam).”
Response: First of all, I grew
up learning directions from facing north, thus the west was on my left, the
east on my right, and south was behind me. I suspect all children learn their
cardinal directions from some similar concept. That the Jews learned theirs
from facing east, or the Chinese from facing south, matters little, since once
we all learned the directions, we never again had to face in a certain
direction to know which way the four cardinal points were from one another. Secondly,
in the Middle East, the direction of east was the main direction, and their
maps were oriented with east on the
top; in China, with south as their main orientation, their maps had south on the top, in Europe and the
Western Hemisphere, north was the direction of orientation, and all maps have north at the top. I am not personally
aware of any culture that had west as their main orientation and maps with west
at the top, but there might be one somewhere.
Top LtoR: Old Ship compass; Chinese compass; Russian compass; Bottom
LtoR: Mayan compass; Aristotle’s wind rose; Standard rose compass
Third, the point is, no matter
what is the main emphasis of a culture, every culture and people know there are
cardinal directions other than the main area of their orientation. However,
there are areas in the world that are limited to one north or south direction,
and that is either at the North or South Pole. And the closer you find people
to those poles, like Iceland, northern Greenland, northern Canada, northern
Finland, Sweden, Norway, or northern Russia, you have people who are going to
be out of the main directional path of four basic cardinal directions. The same
may be said for those in Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Melbourne, Australia,
Queenstown, New Zealand, etc.
Fourth, in addition, the Tropic
of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south mark the limits
of the suns movement north and south in its risings and settings. And any
ancient culture knew this from looking at their early crude observatory and astronomical
formations or structures. Since Jerusalem and Mesoamerica in the north, and
Andean Peru and La Serena in the south, and all other claimed Land of
Promise models, encompass all of the areas in between these points, the rising,
movement and setting of the Sun would have little bearing on the Nephites
knowing their orientation from the Sun.
Fifth,
after all, in antiquity, survival meant knowing that the Sun changed its rising
and setting positions during the course of a year, and that its noon height in
relation to the horizon varies with the seasons. In winter, the Sun rises in
the southeast and sets in the southwest, while in summer it rises in the
northeast and sets in the northwest, spending much longer in the sky than
during winter (when it is summer in the northern hemisphere, it is winter in the southern hemisphere). At the equinoxes, the sun rises at due east and sets and due
west and the length of day and night are the same. Any agricultural people,
such as the Nephites, and Lehi, Nephi and Sam in Jerusalem, would have known
this. Every culture knew when to plant and when to harvest, and knew this from
the course of the Sun.
In
addition, the Nephites were a lunar society, that is they measured by the Moon
(Omni 1:21), which basically follows the Sun across the sky. As an example,
when there is a New Moon, the moon is in the exact same position in the sky as
the Sun, a week later the moon is in its First Quarter (half moon), telling the
observer that in three months time, the Sun will occupy that exact position. In
fact the moon is always located 180º
from the sun on an east-west plane, so if the Full Moon is rising, the Sun is
setting. When the ancients saw a Full Moon rising around the time of Winter
Solstice, they marked its spot since that would roughly be where the Sun would
rise in six months time, at the Summer Solstice. And lastly, there's the last
quarter (or last half!) which marks out the position the Sun will be in nine
months' time.
Not to belabor
the point, but the Moon and Sun move in relation to one another, something any
ancient culture would know, just as ancient mariners knew when the tide would
rise and fall, or when we know today the exact time of sunrise and sunset.
Thus,
living anywhere along the two tropics or in between (as all Land of Promise
models are located) would not cause them to misunderstand their directions,
since they would understand the general location of the Sun and Moon during the
course of the year just as we understand that in the summer we use air
conditioning and in the winter we use forced air heating. We know this for our
comfort, they knew the Sun and Moon for their preservation—planting and
harvesting was both their livelihood and their sustenance, without that
knowledge, the ancients would have starved. It is one of the reasons ancient
observatories are found all over the world, such as Newgrange (Ireland),
Stonehenge (England), Jantar Mantar (India), El Kernak (Egypt), Nabta Playa
(Africa), Gaocheng (China), Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Gotland Grooves (Sweden),
Medicine Wheel (Wyoming), Machu Picchu (Peru), Chichen Itza (Mexico), etc.
Chankillo, Peru—the 13 regularly-spaced
towers of the astronomical observatory built in the 4th century B.C.
The site covers 1.5 square miles, with the towers aligned with the rising and
setting of the sun
As
for what they knew of the cardinal directions, it has been stated in this blog
many times, that Lehi led his party along the Red Sea after their stopover
along the borders of the Red Sea after traveling for three days in the
wilderness after leaving Jerusalem (1 Nephi 2:4). There he pitched his tent in
a valley by the side of a river of water (1 Nephi 2:6), which he called Laman
and it emptied into the Red Sea, near its mouth (1 Nephi 2:8).
Map of Lynn and Hope Hilton (Sept
1976 Ensign) shows where Lehi would have camped around the mouth of the Gulf of
Aqaba as it opens off the Red Sea, an area today near Al Beda
In
the morning of the day they were to commence their journey once again (after
receiving the brass plates, getting Ishmael’s family to join them, and the five
marriages), Lehi found the Liahona (1 Nephi 16:10). At that point, Nephi tells
us they “traveled for the space of four days, nearly a south-southeast
direction, and we did pitch our tents again; and we did call the name of the
place Shazer.“ (1 Nephi 16:13). It is the first
direction that Nephi writes on the plates, and is absolutely correct with the compass direction
along the coastal area of the Red Sea where they traveled. Then, after reaching
an area they called Nahom (after Ishmael dies), they turned into the sand
desert and “traveled nearly eastward from that time forth” (1 Nephi 17:1). This
again, is the correct compass heading. Thus we see that Nephi knew and understood the
cardinal and ordinal directions of the compass, which he stated, without being in Jerusalem and having to face east with the sea to his back, etc.
Consequently,
Sorenson’s comment: “The Hebrews,
like most Semitic peoples, oriented themselves by facing east, toward the
rising sun. Thus east in Hebrew
was simply front (qedem), with south as right (yamîn), north as left (śemôl),
and west as rear (achôr) or "sea" (yam),” is simply not applicable
here, since Nephi, with his back to the sea, would have been facing northeast,
thus his south-southeastern direction would have been 45º off from traveling
along the Red Sea—or, stated differently, he would have been traveling inland
into the Arabian Peninsula along that course, not along the Red Sea.
(See the next post, “A Look at Welch’s Approach to City Placement, Direction & Distance
– Part III,” for more of this type of problem facing Mesoamericanists and how
it is ignored in order to sustain and support their Mesoaemrican model)
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