Book of Mormon Geography
The claim:
"This is one of the reasons why unofficial apologists have developed the Limited Geography Model (it happened in Central or South America) and claim that the Hill Cumorah mentioned as the final battle of the Nephites is not in Palmyra, New York but is elsewhere. This is in direct contradiction to what Joseph Smith and other prophets have taught."[1]
"Many Book of Mormon names and places are strikingly similar to many local names and places of the region where Joseph Smith lived."[2]
The geography complaint comes in two parts:
- Faithful scholars invented a smaller, Central American setting for the Book of Mormon to dodge the fact that nobody can find its cities, and that smaller setting flatly contradicts what Joseph Smith and other prophets taught about the New York hill where the gold plates were buried.
- The book's place names were lifted from towns near Joseph's home in upstate New York, so he must have made them up.
Together they make the geography look like a story in retreat: the setting moved when the evidence failed, and the names were never ancient in the first place.
The two arguments the CES Letter actually makes here both fall apart on the documents. In 1841, Joseph Smith himself read a book about spectacular Central American ruins and wrote that it supported the Book of Mormon. Many of the towns the names were supposedly lifted from did not even have those names until decades after 1830. The underlying gap is real, though: after two centuries of believing scholars searching hard, no one has tied a single Book of Mormon city to a confirmed dig site. (The broader archaeology question lives in the archaeology article.) And the most remarkable thing about the book's geography is the map inside the text itself.
The Church never claimed to know
The first argument assumes the Church once taught a settled, official geography and that scholars have been quietly retreating from it ever since. That is not what happened.
The Church has held a position of official neutrality on Book of Mormon geography for over a century. The current Gospel Topics essay says it plainly: "The Church does not take a position on the specific geographic locations of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas."[3] And this is not a modern dodge. Back in the 1920s, a committee of apostles sat down with several scholars to be briefed on where the Book of Mormon happened, and the apostle James E. Talmage, reporting on the meeting in February 1923, recorded that the scholars' views "differed as widely as the continent." The apostles decided that "until we have clearer knowledge in the matter," the Church would not endorse any map or text claiming to fix Book of Mormon lands.[4] In 1929, Anthony W. Ivins made the same point from the pulpit: he had talked with at least half a dozen men who had each "found the very place where the City of Zarahemla stood," and yet they "vary a thousand miles apart in the places they have located."[4:1]
So the neutrality is a century old, and it can be read two ways. By never staking its credibility on a particular map, the Church has never set itself up to be disproven by the next dig; the apostles chose a candid "we don't know" over a tidy answer. But that same neutrality means the geography cannot be confirmed either, and a critic can fairly call that an open question rather than a strength. Both are true. What is not true is the picture of a Church that once knew and then backpedaled.
Joseph never contradicted the limited model
The heaviest word in the first argument is "contradiction": the claim that placing the events in Central America directly contradicts Joseph Smith. The primary sources tell almost the opposite story.
Matthew Roper combed through every documented statement Joseph Smith ever made on geography. Two things stand out. Joseph never claimed revelation for any geographic identification, and his views actually shifted toward Central America over time.[5] The turning point was 1841, when a friend gave him a popular new book by John Lloyd Stephens describing spectacular ruins in Central America. Joseph wrote back that of all the histories ever written about this country's antiquities, "it is the most correct luminous & comprihensive," and that it "corresponds with & supports the testimony of the Book of Mormon."[6] A year later, the Church newspaper Joseph edited ran an editorial saying it was "a good thing for the excellency and veracity, of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon, that the ruins of Zarahemla have been found" in those same Central American ruins.[7]
The prophet the CES Letter says the limited model contradicts is the same prophet who, once he saw evidence of a Central American civilization, got excited and tied it to the Book of Mormon himself. There is one more wrinkle: Joseph's own writings do not clearly call the New York hill "Cumorah" until 1842, twelve years after the book came out, and the name appears to have entered common use through other early members first.[8] Joseph followed the community's habit of naming the hill; he did not hand it down as revelation.
The whole "contradiction" framing rests on treating a prophet's personal opinions about geography as binding doctrine. They never were. And the rule applies to everyone: to Joseph Smith's own leaning toward Central America exactly as much as to a later apostle's leaning toward the New York hill. On geography, the Church has said for a hundred years that no one's opinion is the official answer.
The map inside the book
The strongest geography evidence the book has is the part the CES Letter steers around.
Set aside where the events happened in the real world for a moment, and just look at the geography inside the text: which city is north of which, which river runs which way, how long it takes to travel from one land to another. The Book of Mormon is packed with this kind of detail. One scholar, John Sorenson, counted over 550 geographically significant passages.[9] Another, Randall Spackman, went back through Sorenson's index and found 637 verses carrying geographic information.[10] A BYU professor named Tyler Griffin catalogued 500 to 550 specific references and could find only two places in the whole book where the geography seems off. Two apparent slips in roughly 550 references put the consistency rate near 99.6 percent across the 531 pages of the current edition.[11]
And it is not just that the place names stay in order. The same quiet patterns hold across hundreds of pages, dictated by different characters at different points in the story:
- Every major migration in the book moves north. That is an odd instinct for a young man in western New York in 1829, who would have known westward frontier expansion far better.[11:1]
- The land of Nephi is always "up" and Zarahemla always "down," tracking elevation rather than the compass, a subtle logic kept across the whole text.[11:2]
- The cities along the east seashore appear in the same geographic order every time they come up, even in separate chapters describing different wars years apart.[11:3]
Two different scholars, John Clark and John Sorenson, working separately and years apart, each tried to reconstruct the book's internal map purely from the text, and they arrived at substantially the same configuration.[12][9:1] Clark even drew up a ten-point checklist of features any real-world setting would have to match: a narrow neck of land between a land northward and a land southward, a river flowing north through Zarahemla, a city of Nephi up in the highlands, and so on. Hundreds of little geographic facts in the book all have to fit together at once. A made-up geography can be padded with details; a system that closes on itself, where every piece constrains every other piece, is a different kind of thing. The text describes a real landscape, even before anyone asks where on earth it sits.
Now put that next to how the book was made. Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon, roughly 270,000 words, in about 60 working days in 1829.[13] Emma Smith, his wife and one of his scribes, gave her final interview in 1879, the year she died, and said that "he had neither manuscript nor book to read from."[14] The other scribes said the same: no notes, no maps, no source text in front of him, and he resumed after breaks without reviewing what he had already dictated.[15] The historian Grant Hardy, who publishes with Oxford University Press, put it this way: the book is "remarkably consistent" on its geography, so much so that "one would assume the author worked from charts and maps."[16] Then where was the map?
Be careful with what that proves. Internal consistency by itself does not prove the events really happened. A skilled novelist can build a consistent fictional world; Tolkien did. The fair claim is narrower and still powerful: an intricate, interlocking geography, more careful than many novelists manage with years of revision, was dictated aloud in two months with no notes, and the manuscript behind it was never substantively reworked.[17] That makes a "Joseph just made it up as he went" explanation a great deal harder to credit than the CES Letter lets on.
The name parallels prove too much
The CES Letter's second argument is the list of Book of Mormon names that sound like places near Joseph Smith's home. It reproduces maps from a 1983 pamphlet by Vernal Holley pairing about 20 Book of Mormon names with Great Lakes locations. Side by side, it looks striking. It does not survive a closer look, for reasons that stack up fast. (The site's introduction already walks through Holley's maps as a worked example, so here is the short version.)
Start with the dates, because they are decisive. A large share of Holley's "source" towns did not exist under those names when the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Angola, New York got its name around 1854, Minoa, New York in 1895, and Mantua, Ohio was not even incorporated as a village until 1898.[18] You cannot borrow a name from a town that will not bear it for another twenty to seventy years. As FAIR puts it, "We cannot legitimately use the location of American cities to create a Book of Mormon map that we then use as evidence that the Book of Mormon used the location of American cities to construct its map."[18:1]
Next, strip out the names that are simply biblical. A chunk of the "parallels" are names like Jerusalem, Jordan, Boaz, Shiloh, and Ramah (which appears some three dozen times in the Old Testament).[19][18:2] Finding biblical names both on the American map, where settlers loved biblical names, and in a book that claims to come from Israelites, is exactly what you would expect. It needs no local source beyond the Bible.
Take the pairing the CES Letter gives the most space, Teancum and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. The names sound alike, and the chief's name was on the map before 1830: Tecumseh, Michigan was established in 1824, so Joseph could have heard it. But the stories share nothing. The Book of Mormon's Teancum is a Nephite soldier who sneaks into an enemy camp at night to kill a king and later dies trying it again; Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who fell in open battle against American forces in the War of 1812.[18:3][20] Two names that happen to sound alike, with no story in common, is what a coincidence looks like.
The deepest problem is that the method works anywhere. The Latter-day Saint scholar Michael Ash showed you can play the same game with place names around Virginia, or Hawaii, or anywhere else with a big enough list of towns, and "find" just as many parallels.[21] When a method produces hits no matter where you point it, all it is really measuring is how easy it is to match two long lists after the fact. And Holley's map fails on its own terms anyway: it puts cities the Book of Mormon calls "far in the land northward" down in the south, and splits a hill the book says is a single place into two locations 280 miles apart.[19:1][20:1][21:1] When a map has to contradict the very text it claims to explain, it was forced into shape.
There is a flip side you will not find in the CES Letter. Some Book of Mormon names carry genuine ancient Near Eastern fingerprints that random borrowing from English towns could not produce. The clearest case is "Alma." Critics long mocked it as a girl's Latin name. Then a 1960–1961 expedition in the Judean desert dug up an 1,800-year-old document naming a man "Alma son of Yehudah," confirming it as a real ancient Hebrew man's name. The document had sat buried in a cave, unknown until well over a century after the Book of Mormon was printed.[22] That is the opposite of a name borrowed from the neighborhood.
The CES Letter has a related argument, that "Cumorah" and "Moroni" were lifted from the Comoros Islands off Africa (whose capital is named Moroni) by way of pirate stories about Captain Kidd. It sounds clever, but it leans on a fact that did not exist yet: Moroni did not become the capital of anything until 1958, more than a century after Joseph Smith died.[23]
The spelling is the theory's best card, and it is true: the first edition of 1830 spells the name "Camorah" every time it appears.[24] The handwritten printer's manuscript behind that edition, the copy the typesetter worked from, is another matter. There the copyist, misreading an unfamiliar name in the dictation manuscript's handwriting, wrote Cumorah six times, Camorah once, and Comorah twice, and it was the typesetter in E. B. Grandin's shop who standardized the spelling as "Camorah" for the printed book.[17:1][21:2] Joseph Smith later directed the change to the familiar "Cumorah," and Oliver Cowdery called the old spelling a mistake.[21:3] A copied name comes with its spelling attached; this one plainly did not. The full unwinding of the chain is in the in-depth version.
The Hill Cumorah problem
Two objections are harder than anything in the name lists.
The first is the Hill Cumorah. The Book of Mormon describes a final battle there so large that at least 230,000 Nephites died (Mormon 6). The New York hill where Joseph found the plates was long assumed to be that same battlefield. But there is no archaeological trace of any battle at the New York hill: no bones, no weapons, no fortifications. John Clark, a believing Latter-day Saint who is also a trained Mesoamerican archaeologist, examined it and concluded, "Archaeologically speaking, it is a clean hill... This is not the place of Mormon's last stand. We must look elsewhere for that hill."[25] The faithful answer is that the book itself leaves room for two hills: Mormon hid the main record "in the hill Cumorah" but gave "these few plates" to his son Moroni, who then wandered for decades before burying his small set, possibly thousands of miles away, in New York.[25:1] That reading is reasonable, and a BYU scholar named Sidney Sperry argued for it back in the 1990s on textual grounds, long before DNA or modern critics were in the picture.[26]
But the two-hills reading sits uneasily beside the fact that some Church leaders, including the apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, taught firmly that the New York hill was the battlefield. The tension is genuine. What resolves it is the same point as before: prophetic authority covers doctrine and ordinances, not archaeology, and the Church has never made the New York Cumorah binding doctrine.
The second hard problem is directions, and it is the most technical objection to a Central American setting. The book's lands sit "northward" and "southward" of a narrow neck, with seas "east" and "west." But the best-known Central American candidate, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, runs more east-to-west than north-to-south, so making the book fit seems to require rotating the whole compass. The critic Earl Wunderli sharpened the problem into its hardest form. The same translation renders Old World directions accurately by the compass: Lehi travels "nearly a south-southeast direction" through Arabia, and that matches the real map. Yet it renders New World directions in a way that has to be twisted to fit.[27] The scholar Brant Gardner has a serious answer, that ancient peoples often built their directions around the sun's path rather than a compass, and that Joseph translated those concepts into plain English words.[28] That is historically well grounded. What it only partly explains is Wunderli's asymmetry, why the same translator would handle the Old World by the compass and the New World by a different system. This one is not fully solved. The fuller back-and-forth is in the in-depth version.
And the deepest critical worry, beneath all of it, is that the sheer number of competing geographies, Central American, Heartland, South American, and more, looks like a theory that can never be pinned down: when the evidence pushes on one location, proponents just move to the next. That concern is legitimate. The reply is limited but real: the worry applies to fixing the book on a real-world map, not to the book's internal geography, which can be tested for consistency and has passed, or to the Old World leg of the trip, where the place names actually have been confirmed.
The map isn't the real question
The disagreement here is not really a fight over the facts. Critic and believer are often looking at the very same things: a Church that has declined to fix a geography for a hundred years, a field full of competing models, a city no one has dug up. The critic reads that as a slow confession. The believer reads it as a text whose internal map is near-perfectly consistent, whose Old World trail has produced real confirmations, and whose New World setting stays unproven but not improbable. The scholars whose views "differed as widely as the continent" were not reading different books. They were reading the same one and disagreeing about where it pointed.
And the Book of Mormon itself is the debate's most stubborn fact. However the map dispute ends, the book still carries an internal geography of more than 500 references, and it came through roughly 60 working days of dictation coherent from end to end, with no sign of substantive revision. Where Zarahemla sits on a modern map is still an open question. How a 23-year-old farmer dictated a book with that map inside it is the better one, and the CES Letter trades it for borrowed town names and pirate stories.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 6, p. 11. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 7, pp. 13-14. ↩︎
"Book of Mormon Geography," Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/book-of-mormon-geography?lang=eng ↩︎
"'Until We Have Clearer Knowledge': On Book of Mormon Geography in Church History," Maxwell Institute. https://mi.byu.edu/bom-geography-essay/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Joseph Smith, Revelation, and Book of Mormon Geography," FARMS Review 22, no. 2 (2010): 15-85. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol22/iss2/4/ ↩︎
Joseph Smith, Letter to John M. Bernhisel, 16 November 1841, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-johnm-bernhisel-16november-1841/1 ↩︎
Times and Seasons ("Zarahemla" editorial), 1 October 1842, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/times-and-seasons-1-october-1842/1 ↩︎
"Joseph Smith Geography Statements," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Book_of_Mormon/Geography/Statements/Nineteenth_century/Joseph_Smith's_lifetime_1829-1840/Joseph_Smith ↩︎
John L. Sorenson, Mormon's Map (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000). https://scripturecentral.org/archive/books/book/mormons-map-0 ↩︎ ↩︎
Randall P. Spackman, "Interpreting Book of Mormon Geography," Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 15, no. 1 (2003): 19-46. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol15/iss1/6/ ↩︎
Tyler Griffin, "Book of Mormon Geographical References: Internal Consistency Taken to a New Level," FAIR Conference, August 2017. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2017/internal-consistency-taken-to-a-new-level ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
John E. Clark, "A Key for Evaluating Nephite Geographies," FARMS Review 1, no. 1 (1989): 20-70. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol1/iss1/7/ ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 10-50. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/ ↩︎
Emma Smith Bidamon, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879, in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289-290. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "The Miraculous Timing of the Translation of the Book of Mormon," in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2005), 77-210. ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6-7. ↩︎
Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part Six: 3 Nephi 19 – Moroni 10 (Provo, UT: FARMS / BYU Studies; online edition, Interpreter Foundation), 3636–38. The name Cumorah occurs nine times in the text, all in Mormon, and the original manuscript is not extant for these passages. In the printer's manuscript the copyist (scribe 2) wrote Cumorah six times, Comorah twice, and Camorah once (the first instance of the name, which Oliver Cowdery corrected to Cumorah when he proofed the copy). The 1830 compositor set Camorah throughout; the 1837 edition restored Cumorah. Separately (pp. 3874–75), Skousen notes that the printer's manuscript "clearly reads Comron both times in Ether 14:28" for the different hill printed as Comnor. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Theory of Book of Mormon Place Names from Area around Joseph Smith's Home," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Theory_of_Book_of_Mormon_place_names_from_area_around_Joseph_Smith's_home ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
L. Ara Norwood, review of Book of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look by Vernal Holley, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1, no. 1 (1989): 80-88. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol1/iss1/10/ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Geography," Debunking the CES Letter. https://debunking-cesletter.com/geography/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal Part 6," FAIR Blog (September 2021). https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2021/09/08/the-ces-letter-rebuttal-part-6 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Yigael Yadin, "Expedition D — The Cave of the Letters," Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962): 227-257; documenting the 1960–1961 Cave of Letters expedition that recovered Bar Kokhba-era documents including references to "Alma son of Yehudah." See also Yadin, Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome (New York: Random House, 1971). ↩︎
"Moroni," Encyclopaedia Britannica. Dzaoudzi, on Mayotte, was the original administrative capital of the Comoros; Moroni succeeded it in 1958. https://www.britannica.com/place/Moroni-Comoros ↩︎
"The Book of Mormon and Captain Kidd," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Book_of_Mormon/Plagiarism_accusations/Comoros_Islands_and_Moroni/Captain_Kidd ↩︎
John E. Clark, "Archaeology and Cumorah Questions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no. 1 (2004): 144-151. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol13/iss1/15/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sidney B. Sperry, "Were There Two Cumorahs?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4, no. 1 (1995): 260-268. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol4/iss1/30/ ↩︎
Earl M. Wunderli, "Critique of a Limited Geography for Book of Mormon Events," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 161-197. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/critique-of-a-limited-geography-for-book-of-mormon-events/ ↩︎
Brant A. Gardner, "From the East to the West: The Problem of Directions in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 3 (2013): 119-153. https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/from-the-east-to-the-west-the-problem-of-directions-in-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎