Continuing with the previous
post regarding Sorenson’s claim that the Nephite elite recorders of the
scriptural record ignored other people and concentrated solely upon the wealthy
and successful Nephites and ignored other groups and people in and on the Land
of Promise.
Starting with the Jaredites as
the first group to be introduced (see last post), we then move to:
2. The Mulekites (People of
Zarahemla) – which are first mentioned in Omni when Mosiah I was commanded to
flee the city of Nephi and traveled northward to discover Zarahemla. There is
not a lot mentioned about the people of Zarahemla since when discovered they
were illiterate, had no records of their history, brought no records with them
from Jerusalem, denied the being of their Creator, and could not even be
understood by the Nephites (Omni 1:17).
There is no mystery to any of
this being brief. Without records, Zarahemla, the leader (or king) of the
Mulekites only had a memory handed down over generations of the previous 400 years of Mulekite history (Omni
1:18), which he told Mosiah and which Amaleki, the prophet, briefly wrote down
(Omni 1:14-22). Now it is likely Amaleki could have written more on these Small
Plates of Nephi, but the space was limited and his comments were brief.
After all, his entire record is
only nineteen (19) verses of which 10 verses (54%) he devoted to this one event.
When recognizing two other events of extreme importance, i.e., Mosiah being led
by the power of the Lord’s arm out of the city of Nephi and through the
wilderness by many preachings and prophesyings (Omni 1:13), and a serious war
fought between the Nephites and Lamanites and King Benjamin drove the Nephites
out of the land of Zarahemla (Omni 1:24), 54% about the Mulekites and Coriantumr might be considered a lot.
On the other hand, Amaleki tells
us that Zarahemla gave a genealogy of his fathers, according to his memory, and
they are written, but not in these plates” (Omni 1:18). This can only mean:
1) A much more complete record
of the Mulekites is given in the Nephite record;
2) That Nephite record was on
the Large Plates of Nephi, which were kept by the kings, which Mormon had
already abridged by the time he encountered these Small Plates (Words of Mormon
1:4);
3) Amaleki had no reason to go
into greater detail about this encounter;
4) There is no suggestion in any
of this that the Nephite elite wrote only about themselves.
For that record we need to turn
to Mosiah and also to Alma to find—of which both records are quite extensive,
involving the entire story of Alma the Elder, king Benjamin, Mosiah I, Ammon,
Zeniff, king Noah, and Limhi, and the rescue of the Nephites who went back to
reclaim the Land of the First Inheritance—the City and portions of the Land of
Nephi. And as far as this story is concerned, we can learn of its placement
within the Israelite kings by reading the accounts of king Zedekiah, the fall
of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., and the fate of Zedekiah’s family—which, when read
all together, gives us the complete picture of the son Mulek and his history.
We can even go into secular history and read about the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzer, Zedekiah and the end of Zedekiah’s Royal Line in Israel.
The Lord knowing all this, and
being involved in the writing of the ancient prophets and Mormon’s abridgement,
of which Mormon said:
“And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus it whispereth me,
according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I
do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come;
wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will”
(Words of Mormon 1:7), so that without much overlap, the Lord brought about the
entire record of Zedekiah, Mulek, and the involvement of the Mulekites into the
Nephite people in the Land of Promise.
It is a shame that
theorists like Sorenson lose sight of the workings of the Lord within the
scriptural record, but the facts are there and need not be belittled by him or
other theorists who want to show that other people were in and on the Land of
Promise who were not, of course, there at all.
Thus, when Sorenson
writes (p55): “All this boils down to the
fact that the Book of Mormon is a partial record of events, emphasizing what
happened to one group of people, put in their own ethnocentric terms, in the
midst of other peoples each with its own version of events,” is not at all
accurate. However, despite Sorenson's negative take on the scriptural record, the Book of Mormon is what it purports to be, “Another Witness of
Jesus Christ,” or another witness of the scriptural record of the dealings with
God and man, or another witness of God’s involvement with the House of
Israel—all we need to do is put the two together, i.e., the Bible and the Book
of Mormon and see how they so easily and perfectly fit.
One can only wonder
how great will be the day when we have a third witness, the record of the Ten
Tribes, and even more than that, all the witnesses of God’s dealings with man
and the House of Israel as we will someday see as more and more peoples come
together in the future to bring God’s word out of the dust of the ages and into
the hands of modern man.
We saw how that
happened in the time of Alma, when the record of Alma, the record of Zeniff,
and the record of Limhi, all came together in a spiritual feast of the early
Church as the Mulekites and Nephites joined together to be one people. The fact
that there will be other days like that one is obvious—and no doubt there will
be those who fight and complain about it, but overall, the work of the Lord
will go forth in these writings, showing his power and accomplishments through
man as his works are unveiled and revealed for the first time in new lands
among other peoples from the House of Israel and the Gentiles as well.
The problem lies in the changing
of meaning of the written words of Mormon and the beliefs of Sorenson, the
other Mesoamericanists. And since the latter feels he is absolutely correct, he feels
completely free to change the meaning of the scriptural record in light of his
understanding of the Mesoamerican scene. As an example, Sorenson writes (p117):
“The Jaredites were essentially confined to the land northward until the time
of King Lib (Ether 10:21), about 1500 B.C. The Book of Mormon reports that at
that time Lib built a great city at then narrow neck of land, suggesting
increased penetration into the land southward.”
Of course we know from the
scriptural record that Lib did “that which was good in the sight of the
Lord. And in the days of Lib the poisonous serpents were destroyed. Wherefore
they did go into the land southward, to hunt food for the people of the land,
for the land was covered with animals of the forest. And Lib also himself
became a great hunter” (Ether 10:19). However, despite Mormon writing to the
contrary “And they did preserve the land southward for a wilderness, to get
game. And the whole face of the land northward was covered with inhabitants”
(Ether 10:21), Sorenson ignores that knowledge and makes up his own mind that
the Jaredites moved into the Land Southward contrary to what the scriptural record
says. He adds (p117): “The archaeological record tells us that earlier
First Tradition settlements had been concentrated north of the isthmus (his
narrow neck of land), but that after 1500 B.C. significant though still
secondary Olmec activity was manifested south of the neck.”
In insisting that the Olmec were the Jaredites, the theorist is left
having to defend why the Jaredites went into and settled the Land Southward
when the scriptural record says the opposite
Again, the problem lies with
Sorenson, the avowed Mesoamericanist, who thinks he knows more than Mormon,
because in his Mesoamerican model, the Olmec people, who he claims were the
Jaredites, moved south of his narrow neck of land—therefore, in Sorenson's world, the Jaredites
would have to do that even though Mormon tells us they did not.
It is this type of thinking that
causes so much trouble in the discussion of Land of Promise location. To the
Mesoamericanist, it doesn’t matter what the scriptural record says—the only
thing that matters is the location of Mesoamerica and anything that disagrees
with that has to be wrong or change, even if it is in the scriptural record, and is so stated in the writings of Mesoamericanists!
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