Mosiah 21:26-27

Brant Gardner

The small party of men attempted to find Zarahemla, but failed. What they did find was a land of a destroyed people. They brought back souvenirs from that destroyed land. The most of important of which was a record. That record we learn later was a record of Ether, last of the Jaredites.

The story of the men getting lost is an interesting geographical conundrum. The land of Nephi is at a higher elevation that Zarahemla, and Zarahemla was built near the river Sidon. The clues in the text suggest that the river may have had its headwaters in between the lands of Nephi and Zarahemla. The people of Limhi are only a generation separated from the people of Zarahemla, and it is possible that there were some alive who had made the journey. The instructions from those elderly might have been something like “go up to the mountains, and find the river, follow the river to Zarahemla, you can’t miss it.” They missed it.

Scholarly consensus has the land of Nephi in highland Guatemala. There is a mountain range that they might go to that just so happens to contain the headwaters of two major rivers that are about thirty kilometers apart. The best explanation for how this party could possibly get lost suggests that they simply followed the wrong river. No matter which of the two they would have followed, they would end up in a territory that had belonged to an older civilization that had been destroyed by Limhi’s time.

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