The second video in this series explains why the text itself is the most important of 6 major tools that will allow us to accurately locate Book of Mormon geography in the real world. See the blog article "Book of Mormon Geography #02 500 Clues."
The third video in this series was published on September 24, 2026.
It walks through assumptions about the text and establishes guidelines that will help us more accurately interpret what the Nephite authors intended us to understand. This is an executive summary of the points Brad Omer and I make in the video.
The text is foundational - the ultimate source of truth for any serious Book of Mormon geography effort. This ensures compliance with the Church directive to not imply any prophetic or Church support for proposed theories.
Multiple people can and do read the same textual passages quite differently. Hence, the need for guidelines aka assumptions aka an interpretive apparatus.
The Book of Mormon is a real record of real people who lived in the real world, so a physical map is possible. The Church has told us the book is set in the Americas, so we have a general starting point. The Old World setting of the Book of Mormon is well-established. In the Old World, we had a reliable specific starting point - Jerusalem. Once we establish a viable specific starting point in the New World, progress solving the Book of Mormon geography puzzle will be rapid.
Cardinal directions from the Old World carried through to the New World. Ditto ups and downs in a spatial context referring to elevation.
There are no silver bullets, no easy button, no single criterion solutions. Seeds brought from the Old World flourishing in the New World are one example of a complex topic that can easily get oversimplified. We must account for hundreds of data points. This is not an algebraic equation where a + b = c. It is more like a 3 dimensional scatter plot where best fit analysis typically uses calculus.
We must account for all references to a word or phrase. Cherry picking, even from the text of the Book of Mormon, is a logical fallacy.
As a true eye-witness account, the Book of Mormon is rational and consistent.
Geonymns are physical, not selectively metaphorical. John Sorenson is a counter example. Named geonyms are singularities. A double definition is a logical flaw. The city of Aaron entry in the 1981 and 2013 indices is a counter example. Ditto the city of Nephihah.
Hyperbolic phrases such as the "face of the whole land" (Mormon 1:13) can be interpreted via hyper-literal, common sensical, or metaphorical lenses. Hyperbolic phrases are generally figures of speech that should be interpreted with common sense. The interpretive solution derives from the text's extreme consistency. It is so consistent Royal Skousen coined the term "systematic phraseology." So, we analyze every instance of a word or phrase and deduce patterns that explain the semantic range of meaning of Nephite idioms.
The Nephite author's point of view was boots on the ground. The correlation of the Gulf of Mexico/America with the place where the sea divides the land (Ether 10:20) is one counter example.
Multiple attestations of a location in the text facilitate triangulation and contextualization, but single instances of a place name should still be included in any map.
The text explicitly gives multiple meanings to a few major place names such as Nephi and Zarahemla.
Joseph Smith's translation was under divine tight control as per 2 Nephi 29:2-3.
The Yale 2009 edition is our preferred text. This means Amalekites should be Amlicites (Alma 21:2). Midian should be Middoni (Alma 24:5). Nephihah should be Moroni (Alma 51:26).
The language of the text as it fell from the lips of the prophet Joseph was Early Modern English (EModE) which places the linguistic setting in the 1500's and 1600's. This means the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is our relevant lexical resource. Places where EModE makes a difference in Book of Mormon geography:
- A "neck of land" is NOT an isthmus. It is generally a peninsula, a cape, a head, a sandbar, or some other coastal feature.
- The "head" of a river is generally the confluence of 2 tributaries that come together to form a stream large enough to be called a "river."
- "Between" means somethng of a different nature by two twins as in a hall between two rooms. Since the narrow neck was between the lands northward and southward, we should be looking for a landform strikingly different from either of the two twins, the land northward or the land southward.
- "A Nephite" is an ordinary citizen or soldier.
- A "day's journey" is a standard unit of measure.
- "Many waters" is a salt water ocean. That means Hill Cumorah is seaside.
- East or west of Sidon is riverside. If the land of Melek is riverside, and the Sidon is flowing northwesterly at that point, then 3 day's journey north of Melek will be east of Sidon.
The Book of Mormon took place in the Holocene Epoch. The geological layout of the Americas has been relatively stable throughout the Holocene. Coastlines did not change much during the destruction described in 3 Nephi 8.
We should take advantage of the best modern tools such as the Yale 2009 text, searchable electronic databases, Geographic Information Systems (we use Google Earth), and LIDAR.
Our best efforts notwithstanding to interpret the text using these assumptions, guidelines, and apparatus, there will still be some ambiguity. It is simply the nature of the beast.
