And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth 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)
Some have tried to argue that this verse contradicts the various Mesoamerican models for Book of Mormon geography. LDS scholar Brant Gardner, offered the following commentary on this verse:
Geography: I argue that we should not read as geographic references to Mormon’s description “from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east.” These four seas, each in at a cardinal point, cannot be literal references except for an island. Thus, rather than reading this passage geographically, we should see it as a literary image expanding the idea of the “whole face of the earth.” Mesoamerican peoples symbolically centered themselves in a universe that existed inside the four directions (David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, 126-27). The later Aztecs conceived of their world as completely surrounded by water. Their name for the earth was Anahuac or land ringed by water: “Completing their division in the horizontal plane, toward the four corners of the world, they conceived of this great disk of the world as surrounded by water” (Miguel León-Portilla, La Filosofia Nahuatl: Estudida in sus Fuentes, 113). Thus Mormon is repeating, with a literary flourish, the “whole world” concept. (Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon [6 vols; Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007], 5:65)
