Potter and Wellington write that one of the criteria met by their proposed land of Bountiful is that it had “wild honey” (1 Nephi 17:5). The reference to “wild honey” might seem odd to those who are used to domestic bee keeping as a more efficient means of collecting honey. In Dhofar, however, honey was and is collected from wild bees. Bees are rare in Arabia and the Dhofar coast is one of the few places they are found in Arabia. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, pp. 189-190]
“We Called Bountiful Because of Its Much Fruit and Also Wild Honey”
Concerning the qualifications of Salalah, Oman as the land Bountiful, the Hiltons write that Nephi was not exaggerating when he called the land “Bountiful.” It is truly fruitful. It springs to life at the touch of water, and the local farmers informed us that they make ten cuttings of alfalfa a year. We saw many fruits and vegetables growing: citrons, limes, oranges, dates, bananas, grapes, apricots, coconuts, beans, pomegranates, eggplant, cabbage, spinach, onions, radish, cucumber, green peppers, tomatoes, carrots, squash, papaya, sugar cane, figs, and melons. They saw a profusion of wild flowers, white jasmine hung in garlands from the trees, and they smelled flower perfumes on the breeze. Thousands of cattle grazed on the mountains. In well-irrigated spots, the grass was above their heads--over six feet tall. Beside the stately sycamore trees which we had come to see, residents grow wild olive trees called naetan zatoon and another, the sograt tree, both used in building.
The southern slopes of the Qara Mountains (where the rain falls as the moist air rises) are covered with waist-high grass and clumps of great trees. During the monsoon season, the valleys are filled with mist and rain, and the vegetation becomes luxuriant and tropical. Wild flowers and wild honeybees abound in the hills. They saw honeycombs stacked almost carelessly in hollow tree trunks and thought again of Nephi’s description: “We called [it] Bountiful, because of its much fruit and also wild honey” (1 Nephi 17:5).
The Sultanate of Oman has memorialized honeybees and beehives by issuing a double-size commemorative postage stamp of 50 Baisa (15 U.S. cents) denomination in 1983. The art work depicts honeycombs in their wild state. Some combs are shown hanging in a shallow cave of a rock, one from a tree branch and several in hollow palm logs, bearing the caption “Honeybees in Oman,” reminiscent of Nephi’s “wild honey in abundance.” [Lynn M. and Hope A. Hilton, Discovering Lehi, pp. 154, 156]
“We Called Bountiful Because of Its Much Fruit and Also Wild Honey”
According to Potter and Wellington, the surrounding region of Dhofar in which Ain Humran was situated most closely fits Nephi’s textual requirements for Bountiful which are as follows:
(1) It was “nearly eastward” from Nahom. (1 Nephi 17:1)
(2) It had abundant and a wide variety of fruits. (17:5; 18:6)
(3) It had wild honey. (1 Nephi 17:5)
(4) It had an accessible seashore. (1 Nephi 17:6)
(5) It was adjacent to “many waters.” (1 Nephi 17:6)
(6) There was a mountain nearby. (1 Nephi 17:7)
(7) There was ore available. (1 Nephi 17:7)
(8) There stones available to make fire. (1 Nephi 17:11)
(9) There were beasts (“skins”) available for Nephi to make bellows. (1 Nephi 17:11)
(10) There was “meat from the wilderness” available. (1 Nephi 18:6)
(11) Such things as were required to build & sail Nephi’s ship. (1 Nephi 17:8)
(a) A harbor to build it and launch it from.
(b) A protected port to outfit the ship.
(c) Materials to construct the ship.
(d) Materials to outfit the ship.
(e) Expert shipwrights to help construct the ship.
(f) A trained crew to sail the ship.
(g) A qualified captain to command the ship.
(12) Cliffs directly above deep water. (1 Nephi 17:48)
[George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 185, 209-223]
1 Nephi 17:5 And we did come to the land which we did call Bountiful ([Illustration] -- Potter Theory): Map Showing the Trail Taken by the Family through Arabia. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 260]
1 Nephi 17:5 And we did come to the land which we did call Bountiful ([Illustration] -- Potter Theory): Land Bountiful. A satellite photo of Dhofar showing the trail leading to the frankincense port of Moscha at Khor Rori and the city of Merbat at Taqah. The extensive fruit plantations at Salalah and Taqah are clearly visible. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 194]
1 Nephi 17:5 And we did come to the land which we did call Bountiful ([Illustration] -- Potter Theory): Land Bountiful. Once the family neared the summit of the Qara mountains the contrast with the stark inland side of the mountains must have been amazing. They would have encountered the incredible lushness as the hillsides burst into bloom during the monsoons. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 194]
“We Called Bountifu Because of Its Much Fruit and Also Wild Honey”
Warren and Michaela Aston write:
By describing in such precise detail a fertile Arabian coastal location [for Bountiful], as well as the route to get there from Jerusalem (complete with directions and even a place-name en route), Joseph Smith put his prophetic credibility very much on the line. Could this young, untraveled farmer in rural New York somehow have known about a fertile site on the coast of Arabia? Could a map or some writing other than the Nephite record have been a source for him? The answer is a clear no. Long after the 1830 publication of the Book of Mormon, maps of Arabia continued to show the eastern coastline and interior as unknown, unexplored territory. In fact, until the advent of satellite mapping in recent decades, even quite modern maps have misplaced toponyms and ignored or distorted major features of the terrain.
The classical writings, assuming they had been available to Joseph Smith, are equally unhelpful. Since the fourth century B.C., less than a dozen writers and geographers have left us accounts of what they understood of the incense trade and the actual source of the precious commodity… . Even the few eyewitness accounts from travelers to the area fail to mention the existence of lush vegetation, rivers, fruit, and large trees. The first-century author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea described the incense land only as a “mountainous country wrapped in thick clouds and fog,” and later writers such as Marco Polo and the traveler Ibn Battuta in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries described aspects of the incense trade but never the fertile vistas that Joseph Smith ascribed to Nephi. As late as 1833, Andrew Crichton wrote, “The whole southern coast is a wall of naked rocks as dismal and barren as can well be conceived” after sailing the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula.
The first report of a fertile location in Arabia did not come until 1846, sixteen years after publication of the Book of Mormon, following the visit of Dr. H. J. Carter to Salalah in the Dhofar province of Oman. What could be called the first scientific research in southern Oman did not take place until the 1952 expedition led by Dr. Wendell Phillips. [Warren and Michaela Aston, In the Footsteps of Lehi, pp. 29-30]
1 Nephi 17:5 We called [it] Bountiful because of its much fruit and also wild honey ([Illustration] Date palms produce the probable “fruit” that Nephi wrote of, giving rise to the name Bountiful. [Warren and Michaela Aston, In the Footsteps of Lehi, pp. 66-67]
1 Nephi 17:5 We called [it] Bountiful because of its much fruit and also wild honey ([Illustration] Delicate flowers shoot forth in their beauty at Wadi Sayq. (p. 53) Looking west across one of the freshwater sources and up Wadi Sayq in Oman toward the beautiful lush mountainsides… Agricultural areas were discovered on the west side of the wadi area. (p. 57) Verdant wadi flora about a quarter of a mile from the seashore. [Scot and Maurine Proctor, Light from the Dust, pp. 47-57]
“We Called Bountiful Because of Its Much Fruit”
Potter and Wellington write that one of the criteria met by their proposed land of Bountiful is that it had “much fruit” (1 Nephi 17:5) They also note that as Lehi’s family were preparing to depart to the promised land from Bountiful, Nephi tells us that they “prepared … much fruits” (1 Nephi 18:6). The most likely explanation for the plural “much fruits” is that there was not only a lot of fruit but also a number of different kinds. Sir Donald Hawley writes:
Near Salalah itself - a garden city surrounded not only by groves of coconuts but also fields of lucerne and vegetables with clusters of paw-paw and other fruit trees - stands the ruined town of Balid, covering an extensive area. This medieval town was occupied until the sixteenth century and was visited by Ibn Batuta and earlier by Marco Polo, who described it as a “beautiful, large and noble city.” Ibn Batuta remarks that “The City of Dhofar (al-Bilad) is a garden valley in an isolated desert region.”
If Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta found a “beautiful and noble city” and a “garden valley” what must Lehi have witnessed? After all, Marco Polo was visiting the valley long after the collapse of the frankincense trade. In comparison, when Lehi entered the land, the valley probably attracted hundreds of travelers at any one time: traders, transporters and middlemen associated with the incense trade. The ’Adites who populated Dhofar were highly adept at cultivation. Hamblin writes: “According to the Islamic Hud traditions, one of the chief sins of the tribe of ’Ad was pride symbolized by … an attempt to create an earthly replica of paradise.” Hamblin sites Yaqut, that this mention of a “paradise” was a direct reference to the Qur’an (2:25) wherein is noted that in paradise one eats fruit at every meal. Numerous springs, fed by the summer monsoon, irrigate the plain and the area is said to be capable of producing three crops in a year. (see illustrations) The four khors near the ruins of Ain Humran are all fresh water and so irrigation from the streams that feed them would have allowed the inhabitants to grow fruits there then, as now.
Besides the domestically harvested fruit on the Salalah coastal plain, it is probable that Nephi also encountered many imported fruits. Omani sailors had traded with India at least as far back as 1000 B.C. and probably before that. Paleobotanist L. Constantini has isolated sorghum (sorghum bicolor), originating in the Ethiopia/Sudan region, in unbaked clay bricks in the Oman Peninsula datable to around 3,000 B.C. Perhaps in Lehi’s time the Dhofar coast was as it is now: groves of coconut palms bend down over the sand of the beach, banana plantations abound, their leaves a rich deep green, mangos and fields of sugar cane line the edges of the fields.
Despite the farmed and cultivated fruits at Dhofar in modern times, there are on record 18 species of naturally occurring fruits together with seven sweet fruits that were used historically as sweeteners. Some have suggested that this wild fruit that grows in the hills of the Dhofar region was Nephi’s “much fruit.” Potter and Wellington question this reasoning. They note that these naturally occurring fruits are found mainly in the hills around Salalah and Taqah and do not occur on the coastline. As they traveled through Arabia, Nephi must have observed tens of thousands of well-groomed date palms in Ula, Madina and Najran, growing the best dates in the world. So why would the family have been excited about scattered wild trees with fruits that can hardly compare with cultivated fruits for taste or fecundity? A cursory knowledge of husbandry tells us that wild fruit trees do not produce “much fruit.” The various parable of the pruning and grafting of fruit trees to prevent them from going wild are cases in point. It has also been suggested that wild date palms growing in small clusters along the Dhofar shoreline west of the Salalah plain might have been inspiration for the words, “much fruit.” However, the coastal date palms are not self-propagating and have only recently been planted. The dates on the Dhofar coast are drenched by the monsoon rains and rot on the trees before they are ready to eat. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, pp. 179, 186-189]
1 Nephi 17:5 A land which we called Bountiful because of its much fruit ([Illustration]--Potter Theory): Miles of fruit plantations abound from Salalah east to Taqah. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 194]
1 Nephi 17:5 A land which we called Bountiful because of its much fruit ([Illustration]--Potter Theory): The monsoon rains seep into the sandstone of the mountains giving rise to numerous springs that flow year round, like this one near Taqah. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 194]
1 Nephi 17:5 A land which we called Bountiful because of its much fruit ([Illustration]--Potter Theory): Wadi Dharbat contains numerous lakes which remain full throughout the year. This photo was taken 5 months after the end of the monsoon. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 194]