According to Peter Covino in his True Book of Mormon Geography website:
“When
the angel visited Joseph Smith, Joseph was told of a record that was buried
nearby. According to Joseph, the angel said it gave...an account of the former
inhabitants of this continent. (Joseph
Smith History v.34)”
One
of the problems people have in trying to understand things anciently, or even
just 150 years ago or so, is they think in terms of the present. By way of an
example, when I first got started in genealogy, not long after my marriage, we
started looking for the movement of my DowDell line as they left Anderson
County, South Carolina, around 1795 and ended up in northern Alabama. So,
naturally, we looked at a map and checked out the route hoping to find where
they had settled along the way—basically across Interstate Route 20 into
Atlanta and on to Alabama. We checked every town, village, and settlement along
that route to try and locate a DowDell name around the end of the 18th
century. After months of checking and double-checking, it finally dawned on us
that such a route in that era did not exist—no roads crossed the mountains in
those days. It was more than a year before we stumbled on the fact that people
went west from South Carolina, not
south, in order to reach Alabama, by sailing down the Tennessee River. Within
days, we found the names we were looking for, where the family stopped, and
other families along the way. In order to understand all this, we had to change our thinking from the present to the past--something that is not as easy as it sounds.
Today,
we use the word Continent to mean North America, or South America, or Europe,
or Asia, or Australia, etc. However, in the early 1800s, at the time Joseph
Smith was translating the Plates, the word “continent” did not mean what it
does today. Initially, continent meant the entire Western Hemisphere. The 1828
American Dictionary of the English Language, the language known in the New
England area where Noah Webster created the dictionary and where Joseph Smith
lived, relates continent to the Eastern and Western continent. At that time, the American Continent was the entire Western Hemisphere.
Originally,
as today, the word continent comes from the Latin, “terra continens,” meaning
“continuous land.” In the mid-19th century, Europe and Asia were
considered one continent. When Amerigo Vespucci ”discovered” the Americas, he
referred to it as the continent of the New World. Cartographers for years
referred to the Americas as a single continent. In Joseph Smith’s day, the word
“continent” referred to a single area—North and South America, or basically,
the Western Hemisphere.
According
to an 1898 book by Truman C.White, The Boston Historhy Company, when the first Europeans visited the Americas, they referred to is as the “Western
Continent,” and the term was still being used around the turn of that
century—sixty years after Joseph Smith’s time.
It
was Nephi that told us: “For my soul delighteth in plainness;
for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the
Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men
according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3). Thus, when the angel said:
“it gave...an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” he
was obviously referring to the entire Western Hemisphere, for that was the understanding of Joseph's language at that time.
In
addition, Covino also quotes: “On them is contained the fullness of the gospel
of Jesus Christ, as it was given to his people on this
land” (Joseph's account as reiterated by Oliver Cowdery to W.W.
Phelps in Messenger & Advocate, October 1835, 2:195-198).”
Since
Covino wants to refer to ”this land,” let us consider the meaning of such a
statement. There is an angel, a representative of God, talking to Joseph:
There are two things to consider here. 1) The angel is
referring to what is and has taken place in this Western Hemisphere, as opposed
to what had already taken place in the are of Israel/Jerusalem; and 2) the
angel is also referring to what is to take place among the people of this
Hemisphere as opposed to what is to take place among the “ten tribes of Israel
[that] will be revealed in the north country” as stated in this same
discussion. Thus, we can see, that the angel is grammatically correct in
referring to “this” land as opposed to “that” land, i.e., Jerusalem land the
north countries.
It is important for any reader of scripture or modern day
prophets to understand that the Lord sees this world as a whole, and divides it
into those areas where certain events are to, or did, take place. We have the
original area after the Flood of the Hebrew or Jewish "Land of Promise,” the
unknown lands of the Lost Ten Tribes; the “isles of the sea” Isaiah talks
about, the “Land of Promise” given to Lehi, of which the Jaredites also laid
claim, etc.
When the angel was talking to Joseph Smith, he was
referring to the latter area, the Land of Promise of the Western Hemsiphere, as
opposed to the other areas of which the Lord has special interest, or at least
as we know it from scripture. It is never wise to place a narrow restriction on
the Lord or his messengers as to the meaning of their words. When the angle spoke
to Joseph Smith of “the people on this land,” we know he was not referring to
those in Jerusalem, those in the north countries, or those on the South Sea
islands, etc. He was referring to the people of this continent, of this land,
of the Western Hemsiphere, of the land that remained unknown to other natons of
the world as the Lord promised Lehi.
It is the height of “racial superiority” to lay claim to
the belief that the Land of Promise is only the United States, as many North
American theorists claim. When all is said and done, we will find that the Land
of Promise spoken of and described in the Book of Mormon is the entire Western
Hemisphere which “after the waters had receded from
off the face of this land it became a choice land above all other lands, a
chosen land of the Lord; wherefore the Lord would have that all men should
serve him who dwell upon the face thereof” (Ether 13:2), and that in one
portion of this land would be, “the place of the New Jerusalem, which should
come down out of heaven, and the holy sanctuary of the Lord” (Ether 13:3), and where “New
Jerusalem should be built upon this land, unto the remnant of the seed of
Joseph” (Ether 123:6).
Liberal-minded
people might think that the American Indian in North America has been
mistreated since the coming of the Europeans; however, when Nephi saw in his
vision that “I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of promise;
and I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren; and
they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten” (1 Nephi 13:14); And
Lehi said, “Yea, he will bring other nations unto them, and he will give unto
them power, and he will take away from them the lands of their possessions, and
he will cause them to be scattered and smitten” (2 Nephi 1:11), one might want
to revisit the absolute horror and destruction that the Spanish conquistadores
brought upon the indigenous natives (Lamanites) of Mexico, Mesoamerica and the
Andean area of South America. The destruction of these races was total and
complete, the subjugation unbearable, the robbing of their lands and the
confiscation of their wealth is unparalleled. Even today, the Aztec, Maya and
Inca remain in total subjugation, with thousands upon thousands having been
killed in the initial wave of occupation.
Where in North
America the indigenous natives were moved onto reservations and today enjoy
complete autonomy with their own, separate nation within the United States, in
South America especially, no such provision were ever given—the natives were
and are subject to the most servile status, living in complete squalor in the
mountains and jungles, with few, if any, conveniences in life enjoyed by their
brethren in the United States.
(See the next post, “More Covino Comments Answered-Part II,
for more of Covino’s so-called “errors,” which, in fact, are errors he makes in
the defense of his model)
No comments:
Post a Comment