Lehi’s Isle of the Sea

While we have written about this before, it still remains one of the single most obvious deterrents to the many theorist claims for the location of the Land of Promise—and the most ignored of any other variance. In fact, theorists are extremely adamant in denying the meaning of the word “isle” as meaning “island,” but claim its actual meaning is very different. It is also one of the reasons that scholars and members do not consider South America as the Land of Promise, not knowing or believing the Andean west coastal waters were once an island.
    Thus, a lot of erroneous information has been suggested and written about Lehi’s promised isle of the sea. Most theorists, whose models do not include an island, try to cloud the issue by changing the meaning of the scriptural reference stated by Jacob:
    “We have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea.” (2 Nephi 10:20)
    So what are the “isles” of the sea? Modern theorists trying to explain away the idea of isles meaning islands, claim the early writers of the Old and New Testaments were unfamiliar with far-off lands, and referred them simply as islands, meaning the land inland from the coastal seas, no matter the size of that land.
    Other Bible scholars claim that the word “isle” meant any land as opposed to water, or maritime district, whether belonging to a continent or to an island, and claim that the wordage of Jacob simply meant a far off land. However, scriptural references by Old Testament writers do not back up that theory.

Old Testament authors new and wrote more about distant lands than modern theorists believe

As an example, these writers referred to numerous far-off lands by name, some of which we don’t know their meaning without looking up their location in an historical Atlas dictionary. In fact, research into Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, Canaanite, Ugaritic histories have been retrieved, along with their writing systems, making ancient archives accessible once again, along with a better understanding of the past than at any earlier time. This research into the ancient Near East has uncovered much lost information about the history and annals and their vast treasuries of documents and texts cast a clear light on the lands of the Bible, where they were, what they were called, and how they were seen and understood.
    As an example, the early Israelites knew and understood the world around them. The Bible is full of writings about far off lands, and not mentioned as isles of the sea regarding coastal land of unknown areas, but as specific land-based places.

A few of these examples would be: Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Galatia, Bithynia and Optimatoi (Acts 2:9; 18:2; 1 Peter 11:1), the land of Mannae, Media (Amos 4:3), Eiujj or North Gomer, North Pontic (Herodotus 4:12); Caphtor (Jeremiah 47:4), Cush (Isaiah 20:6), Pathros and Shinar (Isaiah 11:1), to name a few.
    There are 6,000 islands in Greece scattered in the Aegean and Ionian Seas, an area well known to those of the ancient Middle East, including major islands such as Crete and Cypress, along with Rhodes, Saria, Tilos, Simos, Kasos, Kos, and Nikia islands, as well as numerous others on the way to Ephesus, Galatia, Corinth, Philippi and Thessaloniki.
    Further, Pontus (Pontos), mentioned several times in the Old Testament, was a far off important province in the northeastern part of Asia Minor, lying along the south shore of the Black Sea (modern day Turkey), it was first used to designate that part of Cappadocia which bordered on the "Pontus," as the Euxine was often termed. This was the area of Gamir, a region the early Cimmerians, otherwise known as "Gomer," appeared in. Pontus extended from the Halys River on the West to the borders of Colchis on the East, its interior boundaries meeting those of Galatia, Cappadocia and Armenia. All of this was known to the Old and New Testament writers. The Hebrew also knew of Pathros, which was far to the south beyond Egypt.

The known world to the Hebrews during the Old Testament time

It should also be kept in mind that at the time of the Biblical writings, much of the world had not as yet been discovered, and those in the Mediterranean lands (Biblical lands) knew almost nothing of any lands or events outside the Mediterranean world—north to Trace and along the coast, east to Persian (Iran), South to Egypt and Cush (Ethiopia) and west to the Atlantic Ocean. By the time of the Roman Empire, that knowledge had extended to Gaul and Britain and Germania in the north, and the west to Morocco and Spain—the rest of the world was referred to as the four corners of the earth.
    The entire Western Hemisphere, of course, had not been discovered, nor had the thousands upon thousands islands of the South Pacific or even Indonesia. Just because some scholars today want to claim the historians of the Old Testament used the term “isles” claiming they referred to unknown lands, it is highly unlikely they knew far more about these so-called far off lands than modern theorists believe.
    The modern interpretation of the word “isle” is that it means “coast” or” coast-land” (America Standard Revised Version; however, Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, isle is defined as: “A tract of land surrounded by water, or a detached portion of land embosomed in the ocean,” and quotes “The isles shall wait for his law” Isaiah 42:4). Webster also defined “island” in 1828 as “A tract of land surrounded by water,” but adds: “This is an absurd compound of isle and land, that is, land-in-water land, or ieland-land. There is no such legitimate word in English.”
    Thus, when Joseph Smith translated the plates, he used the word “isle” in translating Nephi’s writing of Jacob’s wordage, since the word “island,” which we would use today, was not in use in America at Joseph’s time.
    It is also important to remember that the Prophets spoke in their language according to terms familiar to them. They spoke the truth. The names given by the Prophets to different places in connection with future events may be the same places that had those names at that time; or they may be different places to which descendants of the same people moved; or they may have had names that sounded similar to the names the Prophets employed—such as Hamath being an important city in northern Syria, but you also had Ecbatana (the capital of Media), known as Hamadan, and according to the commentary by modern Hebrew Bible Scholar Da’at Mikra that Hamath was the term for the Bible.
    Isaiah, one who discusses islands more than any other Old Testament writer, made it clear that there was a difference between the use of “isles” and those far-off lands which he simply stated as the “four corners of the earth” (Isaiah 11:1-2). And he knew what a coastland was. Which brings us to Lehi, who sailed to one of those islands in the midst of the sea to the land the Lord promised him.

The ancients knew what an island was, they knew of Cyprus and Crete and understood them as being islands, and also the nearby islands of Greece—to them far off lands were those out of their range of knowledge, and trusted in the Lord who said there were people in far off lands

Keeping in mind that an “isle” of the sea is an “island,” the Nephites had sailed across the ocean and landed upon an island in the midst of the sea, which Jacob well understood, having been on the ship that brought them to the Land of Promise and observing their approach to that land. Thus, when the Nephites began to fear their separation from Jerusalem and whether or not God knew where they were in their new home, Jacob told them: “And now, my beloved brethren, seeing that our merciful God has given us so great knowledge concerning these things, let us remember him, and lay aside our sins, and not hang down our heads, for we are not cast off; nevertheless, we have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea. But great are the promises of the Lord unto them who are upon the isles of the sea; wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren” (2 Nephi 10:20, emphasis added).
    There simply is no way that these two verses that “isles” can be interpreted as being communities locations on a landmass,” but as “separate lands as would be found on islands scattered in various areas around the Earth.
    In addition, Mormon tells us that Lehi landed along the West Sea toward the south along the seashore when he said, “on the west in the land of Nephi, in the place of their fathers' first inheritance, and thus bordering along by the seashore” (Alma 22:28). He also described the Land of Nephi that extended as he said from that West Sea clear to the East Sea, as did the Narrow Strip of Wilderness that separated that land from the Land of Zarahemla (Alma 22:27-28), and that the lands of Nephi and Zarahemla were surrounded by water except for a “small” neck of land (Alma 22:32), along with the comment  that the Nephites had spread “from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east” (Helaman 3:8)—all of which suggests quite clearly that the Nephites were on an island.
    There seems little doubt, based upon the numerous scriptural comments about “isles” of the sea that they “mean an island,” consequently, for any Land of Promise to receive serious consideration, it must be shown that at the time of Nephi, it was an island. No other area suggested for this Land of Promise is based on an area now, or in the ancient past, as being an island, except for that of Andean South Carolina, which we have written about many times in these articles.