Lehites Sailed East

Noe Correa, a brilliant Scripture Central colleague, shared this insightful exegesis with me today. I thought about it for several hours, and am convinced Noe's conclusion is correct. When the Lehites left their Bountiful harbor in modern-day Oman, they sailed east toward India, Indonesia, and the Philippines before crossing the Pacific and landing on the west coast of Mexico or Guatemala.

Likely Route of Lehite Voyage 

Up to this point, our single clue in the text of the Book of Mormon that pointed to a Lehite landfall on the Pacific coast of the Americas was Alma 22:28 that says the place of the Lamanites' fathers' first inheritance (aka land of their first inheritance Mosiah 10:13) was bordering the seashore on the west in the land of Nephi. Almost all Mesoamerican geographers locate the land of Nephi in highland Guatemala, so west by the seashore would be in the general vicinity of Izapa near the mouth of the Suchiate River which is the boundary between modern Mexico and Guatemala.

Noe now adds a second confirming data point. His logic is:

1. Nephi quoting Zenos says the Lord in the last days will remember and gather Israel from the isles of the sea and the four quarters of the earth. 1 Nephi 19:16. Jacob explicitly says the Nephites were upon an isle of the sea. 2 Nephi 10:20-21. The Lord also refers to the posterity of Lehi on an island 2 Nephi 29:11 in one of the quarters of the earth. 
2. Nephi reiterates the prophecy that the children of Israel will be gathered from the four quarters of the earth. 1 Nephi 22:25.

3. In 1 Nephi 21:8 Nephi quotes Isaiah 49:8, but as part of his "likening" Isaiah to his people (see 1 Nephi 19:23), Nephi adds the phrase "O isles of the sea" which explicitly makes the Lord's words in the Isaiah passage refer to the Nephites.

4. Nephi, still quoting Isaiah, says the house of Israel will be gathered from the north, the west, and the land of Sinim. 1 Nephi 21:12. The earliest text we have of Isaiah is the great Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rather than "Sinim" it says "Syene" which is Aswan in southern Egypt. Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) in his 1650 book Hope of Israel critically cites Aben Ezra (p. 40 in the 1651 English edition) as supporting an Egyptian location for Sinim. So, Isaiah is referring to the house of Israel gathering from the north, west, and south. But north, west, and south are not good enough for Nephi because it leaves his people out of the picture.

5. So in 1 Nephi 21:13 Nephi inserts the phrase "for the feet of those who are in the east shall be established" to complete the quadripartite partition of the earth into four quarters. Nephi is saying that his people, the Nephites and Lamanites, are in the east relative to Isaiah's Jerusalem. This means that the Lehite voyage sailed east from the Arabian Peninsula Bountiful. Nephi literally puts words into Isaiah's mouth to reflect the location of Lehi's posterity in the prophetic geography.

My tireless colleague, Alan Miner, has a third line of reasoning that shows Lehi travelled east from Oman. 1 Nephi 17:1 says the Lehites, after leaving Nahom, travelled "nearly eastward from that time forth."  Generally eastward from Oman (17 degrees north latitude) lands you in Mexico.

Was it possible to sail west from Oman anciently? Yes. Philip Beale in his replica ship Phoenicia demonstrated that single masted square riggers ca. 600 BC could have circumnavigated Africa just as Herodotus said the Phoenicians did. On the south coast of Oman, prevailing winds are seasonal. Westerlies predominate part of the year, then easterlies the other part. See the blog articles "Where did the Mulekites land?" and "Pacific Winds and Currents."