During his trial before King Noah and his priests, Abinadi offered the following prophecy:
And it shall come to pass that I will
send forth hail among them, and it shall smite them; and they shall also be
smitten with the east wind; and insects shall pester their land also, and
devour their grain. And they shall be smitten with a great pestilence—and all
this will I do because of their iniquities and abominations. (Mosiah 12:6-7)
As
John Sorenson noted:
No scriptural record tells of the
fulfillment of this prophecy, but the threat turns out to be a valid one on the
Guatemalan scene where it seems to have been uttered. The conditions foretold
are phrased in such a way as to indicate they were within the realm of nature's
recognized potential, yet they were so rare that the listeners normally did not
contemplate such a combination of calamities as a serious possibility. Highland
Guatemala does occasionally suffer just those prophesied conditions under unusual
circumstances. Abinadi's point was that God would cause these rare phenomena to
come about jointly as unusual punishment for the Zeniffites' gross wickedness.
Geographer F. W. McBryde explains that
certain meteorological situations produce an extremely drying north or
northeast wind. (Recall that the "east" among pre-Columbian peoples
in highland Guatemala coincided with what on our present maps is north or
northeast.) These freak "norte" winds hold back the moist air from
the Pacific side that normally flows into the highland valleys daily. As a
result, the normal pattern of life-giving showers is upset. Fire danger
heightens under these unusual conditions, with drying gusts reaching as high as
35 miles an hour. Great hailstorms occasionally (March through May) accompany
these winds, as the strong surge of dry air converges along the coast with
moist Pacific air, forming huge hail-generating thunderheads that drift inland
above the north ("east") wind. [57] Thus, a period of "east
wind" could cause disastrous weather problems in Guatemala/Nephi, in just
the terms the prophet said.
He also warned that insects would come
to attack the crops. Migratory locusts periodically caused great destruction to
corn fields in the Yucatan Peninsula and highland Guatemala. [58] The dry
interior Motagua River valley, only 15 miles "east" from our Nephi,
had a climate that particularly favored the pests. The dry "norte"
winds could drive the swarms those few miles onto the Zeniffites' fields. The
Annals of the Cakchiquels, one of the traditional histories from the highlands,
mentions two locust infestations shortly before the Spanish conquest, and there
must have been many more. [59] Food shortages that result from destructive
weather and locust infestations are known historically to have brought
malnutrition and pestilence in their wake. [60] As Abinadi foretold, the
pattern of wind, hail, insects, and famine, which on the surface seems rather
arbitrary, turns out to be logically, integrally linked when we have our
geography correct. They could happen, and would be devastating, if the Lord
chose to trigger them. (John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for
the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, Utah: Foundation
for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1985], 183)
Notes
for the Above:
[57] Ledyard Smith, Archaeological
Reconnaissance in Central Guatemala, CIWP 608 (1955), p. 11.
[58] Felix W. McBryde, "Studies
in Guatemalan Meteorology (I): The Climates of Southwest Guatemala,"
American Meteorological Society Bulletin 23 (1942), pp. 259-60; idem,
"Studies in Guatemalan Meteorology (II): Weather Types in Southwest Guatemala,"
American Meteorological Society Bulletin 23 (1942), pp. 400, 402.
[59] George C. Shattuck, The Peninsula
of Yucatan: Medical, Biological, Meteorological and Sociological Studies, CIWP
432 (1933), p. 22.
[60] Daniel G. Brinton, The Annals of
the Cakchiquels (Philadelphia, 1885), pp. 167, 192.
Further Reading: