I was in the lobby of the Grand Tikal Futura Hotel in Guatemala City visiting with Rolando Amado on Dec. 26, 2015. He is a native Guatemalan who knows the country well. As an agronomist and lay anthropologist, he has traveled extensively throughout the region. He is an avid student of the Book of Mormon who has spent years documenting astronomical alignments at important sites like Tikal. He is a brother to Carlos Amado, an emeritus member of the Seventy. Rolando told me about a powerful experience he had with the text. He thought one of the anchor points he should be able to locate on the modern map is the place where the sea divides the land referenced in
Ether 10:20. After years investigating coastal features, he looked at the inlet to Mar Muerto on the coast of Chiapas, Mexico and decided that had to be the place. It was the only feature he had found along the entire coast of southern Mexico or Central America that to his mind precisely fit the text.
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| Rolando Amado/'s Proposed Place where the Sea Divides the Land |
A person traveling northward along this coast would have to detour 203 kilometers around Mar Muerto, then Laguna Inferior, then Laguna Superior to stay on solid ground and get back to an uninterrupted coastline.
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| 203 Kilometer Detour around Mar Muerto |
Bro. Amado felt confident this was the place Moroni was describing in Ether chapter 10.
The
Book of Mormon Lands Map January 2016 agrees precisely with Rolando Amado. It correlates the place where the sea divides the land with the Mar Muerto Inlet that is the coastal border between the Mexican states of Chiapas on the southward and Oaxaca on the northward. See the article "
The Narrow (Small) Neck of Land" point #13 for more discussion on this point. The article "
Some Questions and a Rule" sheds additional light on this place where the sea does indeed divide the land.
If a proposed Book of Mormon geographic correlation is accurate, multiple people following different lines of inquiry will come to the same conclusion.
