The Book of Mormon

Week 26: Mormon₂ led his people; the end of Nephite civilization

4 Nephi, Mormon 1–7

2 May 2024

Notes and slides will be posted after the class has been held. 

• The archaeological record of western New York is persuasive evidence that Book of Mormon peoples did not live in that region. The Cumorah of the Nephites (Mormon₂’s hill) and the Cumorah where Joseph Smith unearthed the gold plates (Moroni₂’s hill) are not the same hill. Dr. John E. Clark, professor of anthropology at BYU, explores this in his article “Archaeology and Cumorah Questions,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no. 1–2 (2004): 144–51, 174.

• In the second half of the nineteenth century, a legend about a cave in New York’s hill Cumorah began to appear in the writings and sermons of several Church leaders. This legend claimed that the hill contains a cave in which there were hundreds of different records written on plates; however, all of the accounts of this story are late and secondhand. See Cameron J. Packer’s article, “Cumorah’s Cave," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no. 1–2 (2004): 50–57, 170–71.

• The numbers of war dead described in the Book of Mormon are massive—so large, in fact, that it’s quite likely that Mormon₂ and Moroni₂ were purposely exaggerating. See Stephen Smoot, “Why the Book of Mormon’s Battle Numbers Don’t Add Up (And Why That’s Evidence for Its Authenticity),” Ploni Almoni (blog), 9 May 2016.