A Common Sense Approach to Alma 22 and the Mulekites – Part II

Continuing from the last post (if you haven’t read it, you might want to read it before this continuing part):

Now comes the part the Theorists have misinterpreted for decades and that has caused all the misunderstanding and controversy over the Mulekites and a connection with the Jaredites—the end of verse 30: “whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it being the place of their first landing” (Alma 22:30). The problem stems from the insertion of a parenthetical phrase. Note the commas used: “of whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it being the place of their first landing.” The parenthetical phrase is “which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla,” and is even more pronounced as a separate phrase from the following statement in the original Book of Mormon “as it came from the mouth of the prophet in its original, unchanged condition” the statements are separated by a semi-colon rather than a comma. A semicolon, of course, is used when two independent clauses are combined into a single sentence without a conjunction, and is stronger than a comma. The original read: “of whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; it being the place of their first landing.”

Read correctly, the statements in verse 30 should be understood as: “And it (Bountiful) bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it (Desolation) being so far northward that it (Desolation) came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken, which (bones) was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it (Desolation) being the place of their (the people who had been destroyed) first landing.” It could also be written as: “And it bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it being so far northward that it came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken (which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla), it being the place of their first landing.”

That is, Mormon is talking about the “land” and the “people” who occupied it. When it gets to the Land Northward (north of the Land of Desolation), he identifies that land as once have been occupied by the people whose bones were found, and that “that land” was the place of “the people whose bones were found” first landing. The idea of the People of Zarahemla is inserted only as an identifier of the bones since earlier in the record the bones were first discovered by Limhi’s 43-man expedition (whose parents/grandparents were originally from Zarahemla).

Again, this is not rocket science, merely an understanding of written English as known to Joseph Smith. So why the misunderstanding? Because the Mesoamerican Theorist have a problem with the Olmec (the first claimed major civilization in Mexico) and predated both the Mayan and the Aztec and were, according to these Mesoamericanists, the Jaredites. Once they determined the location of Mesoamerica for the Land of Promise, all things in the scriptural record had to fit that location, or adjusted to fit, as Hugh Nibley and John L. Sorenson so often did. Because of this, their model requires the insertion of the Mulekites into the Land Northward and their interaction and connection with the Jaredites.

To these theorists, the Mulekites landed in the Land Northward, with varying opinions of their interaction with the Jaredites, and then for some reason traveled south into the Land Southward, settled along the east coast and at some point and unknown reason traveled west and settled in the city of Zarahemla where Mosiah found them. With this, these Theorists build up relationships, wars, etc., between the Mulekites and the Jaredites of which there is no hint, indication, or suggestion at all in the scriptural record of any such contact. It could even be suggested that such loose scholarship has produced extensive other errors over the years regarding the Land of Promise claimed to be in Mesoamerica.

So why did Mormon insert this information at this point in Alma’s record? The answer seems obvious—once he wrote about the Lamanite king’s proclamation being sent to all his people throughout all his land, that Mormon thought it prudent to describe exactly where all that land was and what part of the Land of Promise the Lamanites occupied. Then once on that subject, he added more about the separation of the Lamanites and the Nephites to include all the Land of Promise, clear to the north and the old Jaredite lands and the land of many waters. Of course, when he is writing this (around 350-380 A.D.), he knows about all this land, and actually was probably located in the land of Cumorah (land of many waters) at the time he is writing, so he describes the entire breadth and width of the Land of Promise.

Continuing with Alma 22, Mormon goes on to insert: “And they came from there up into the south wilderness. Thus the land on the northward was called Desolation, and the land on the southward was called Bountiful, it being the wilderness which is filled with all manner of wild animals of every kind, a part of which had come from the land northward for food” (Alma 22:31).

So, the Jaredites landed in the Land Northward, traveled up into the south wilderness. That is, they landed a little to the north or west or east of the Land of Desolation and traveled up from the coast to higher ground where they “went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the earth” (Ether 6:13). This area was evidently called the Land of Moron (Ether 7:5), and there was another land nearby called Nehor (Ether 7:4). This land of Moron was near the land which is called Desolation by the Nephites (Ether 7:6), therefore, the Jaredites landed a little north of the narrow neck of land and traveled up from the coast into some higher land not far from or on the outskirts of the Land of Desolation.

At this point, Alma retraced his direction southward to the narrow neck of land, where he marked a line in his mind that separated Desolation from Bountiful and described the distance of this narrow neck or strip of land: “And now, it was only the distance of a day and a half's journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, from the east to the west sea” (Alma 22:32), giving us a way to relate to its width, that is, how long it would take a normal or average man (a Nephite) to walk across it. A day and a half would be about 18 hours of travel (in daylight, resting or sleeping during the night—for traveling at night would be both difficult and dangerous in the Nephite period).

An 18-hour journey would at most average about 2 miles an hour, or be 36 miles, certainly no more. However, an average man would have difficulty to maintain such a pace for 12 straight hours, then for a 12 hour rest, and 6 more straight hours. More likely, about 1.5 miles would be the best that could be maintained by an average man, especially across uneven ground, up and down hills, which would make the distance about 27 miles.

To verify this, go take a walk for three straight hours without stopping and see how far you managed to go (but be in good shape before you try it). According to statistics, a man can walk at a pace of 3.5 miles an hour for thirty minutes. Power walking can reach a pace of 4.5 to 5.5 miles an hour, but can be maintained for only about 100 yards; tests taken of 7100 pedestrians crossing a street showed a pace of 2.8 miles an hour; jogging on a treadmill is at 4 miles per hour. Other tests have shown that the average distance walked in a day at a steady pace was 21 kilometers, or just over 13 miles; making a distance of the Gulf of Tehuantepec in Mesoamerica of 120 miles (144 miles crossing) impossible for the average man.

(See the next post, “A Common Sense Approach to Alma 22 and the Mulekites – Part III,” to continue with this article)