In Exodus 23:31, the Eastern
Mediterranean is literally "Sea Philistines" and the Red Sea is
literally "Sea Re(e)d", see Numbers 14:25, thus the awkward wording
in the Book of Mormon, relative to it's four seas might be read as something of
a hebraism. With an additional “Land of Bountiful”(Alma 50:11; 52:9) above the
Nephite core, what we have is an area, north to south, roughly 300 miles in
length, which is in turn enclosed by another area, which is itself enclosed by
four seas. So, what about the river Sidon?
The Book of Mormon is clear, the
Sidon river has a west bank and an east bank (Alma 2:34, 35). If the Sidon has
an east bank and a west bank then it runs north to south or south to north.
Since Nephi is in the highlands and Zarahemla is in the lowlands, it's always
"up" to Nephi and "down" to Zarahemla, the river Sidon must
run south to north. By the way, this means that the Mississippi River is not a
match, in case you were wondering. Manti is at the southern headwaters of the
river Sidon, east of the river Sidon, with borders running "east to
west". Zarahemla is north of Manti, west of the river Sidon and east of
Melek, which Melek is south of Ammonihah. Now, Manti is about 88 miles from
Helam which was about 132 miles from Nephi thus Nephi is about 220 miles south
of Manti.
Now, the Nephites do have some
cities by “the West Sea, south”; but their greatest strategic concern is over
cities by the East Sea and by the River Sidon. We know this because it's what
they use almost all of their military resources to protect, the cities along
the river Sidon and the cities by the East Sea. The relatively scant cities
near the West Sea are attacked by the Lamanites then defended by the Nephites,
almost as an after thought by both(Alma 53:8-22). As to why the Nephites and
Lamanites focused their attention on the cities along the river Sidon and the
Sea East, while leaving the West in relative neglect, is something we’ll tackle
in “Trade and War: The Usumacinta as Sidon.”
. . .
Taking the Usumacinta as the
Sidon River, with the reference to four cardinal seas as being four actual seas
(Helaman 3:8) has several advantages. The first limited geography model for The
Book of Mormon which set the Nephite history entirely in Mesoamerica was that
of Edward Lawrence Hill, a member of the RLDS in 1917. Though many of the
specifics in his model are certainly wrong, Hill identified the Rio Pasión
tributary of the Usumacinta River as the River Sidon and the Gulf of Honduras
as the Sea East; it was also the first model to identify “the narrow neck of
land” with the Strait of Tehuantepec. This is significant because these
identifications were made decades before radiocarbon dating was invented in the
1940’s.
Using the above three
identifications as pegs for an external model for Book of Mormon geography
protects us from the risk of subconsciously shoehorning The Book of Mormon into
a specific region, based on our current knowledge of
Mesoamerican archeology, such that we radically refine the four cardinal points
in a part of the world where the East and West were universally identified with
the rising and setting sun. Hill's model is essentially a prediction (1917),
based on another prediction (1830), made without knowledge of Olmec or Mayan
archeological chronologies; they hadn’t been discovered yet. In this paper we
can see that two of the three main predictions (Usumacinta = Sidon; Gulf of
Honduras = Sea East) converge with modern archeology and have explanatory power
in ways which have gone unnoticed by Book of Mormon scholars for too long.
Starting at about 100 BC, in both the north-western sites of the Central
Depression of Chiapas and in the Maya Lowlands, ceremonial space was becoming
less public, with access becoming more and more restricted to elites, in
increasingly stratified societies. (Pedro Antonio Olavarria Perez, The
Palmyra Codex: The Book of Mormon As History, pp. 4, 34-35, of PDF in my possession)
