In his article on the Hill Cumorah, Andrew Hedges challenges two long-held assumptions of advocates of a limited Mesoamerican geography.[1] First, “that the geographical descriptions provided in the text itself require that the final battles of the Jaredites and Nephites took place relatively close to both peoples’ centers of civilization near the narrow neck of land,” and second, “that the hill where Joseph Smith found the gold plates does not match the Book of Mormon’s descriptions of the hill where the final battles took place.” While granting that recent alternative models which limit Book of Mormon events to the Great Lakes or Susquehanna River regions “have been convincingly discounted,” the author suggests that the limited Mesoamerican view is also problematic and that the above two tenets rest “more on assumptions about the text than a close reading of it and that the text does not require either.”[2] Hedges’s admonition that we pay close attention to the text and that we more carefully distinguish between our own deductions and inferences and what the text actually says is a welcome one. While I disagree with much of what the author says in his paper, I am grateful for the opportunity to reexamine the Book of Mormon text and some of my own long-held ideas. It is my hope that the readers of the Religious Educator will likewise benefit from the exchange.

Of course, knowing what the Book of Mormon says or doesn’t say is only the first step. As with most texts, there are parts of the record that are more ambiguous than others, and these may lend themselves to different possible interpretations, particularly on questions relating to the reconstruction of Book of Mormon geography. In such cases, it is not enough to suggest different possibilities. We want to determine which possibility or which interpretation is more plausible or probable. That means we have to prudently weigh various options in order to judge which possible interpretation is the most likely. In some cases, other readings are possible, and the text may not strictly require a limited Mesoamerican view. The more important question is whether these other possibilities are more likely than those which favor a limited Mesoamerican model.[3] While the Book of Mormon text may not require a particular reading, we may rightly judge one possibility to be more plausible, more compelling, and more probable than another. In what follows I will explain why the final battles of the Jaredites and the Nephites, including those at Cumorah, best make sense as having taken place near a narrow neck of land, believed by most contemporary researchers on the Book of Mormon to be in southern Mexico, and why the alternative of a far distant location of a hill in New York does not make sense. I will then address the question of the hill’s description as given in the text. I leave the reader to decide whether the weight of the more probable interpretation requires us to read the text in a certain way.

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In addition to the fact that the hill would need to be of such a kind as to provide a place where the many Nephite records could be hidden (see Mormon 6:6), Mormon would have needed to keep the hiding place and its location a secret from most, if not all, of the Nephites, with the exception of his son and possibly another faithful companion or two. With nearly a quarter of a million Nephites, most of them grossly wicked, camped around the hill (see Mormon 6:4, 11–15), how would Mormon keep his endeavor a secret? The hill needed to be large enough that Mormon could accomplish this task in relative secrecy, something that would be especially difficult to do if Mormon’s hill was the one in Palmyra. While such considerations do not prove the Mesoamerican candidate, Cerro Vigia, to be the hill in question, they do suggest that it is a more plausible candidate than the hill in Palmyra.

Basic and central to the contemporary Mesoamerican view of Book of Mormon geography is the idea that the lands and peoples described in the Book of Mormon “were limited in extent” and that in reading the narrative we should “think in terms of hundreds of miles instead of thousands, and of millions of people instead of hundreds of millions.”[37] The proximity of the Jaredite Hill Ramah, later known to the Nephites as the Hill Cumorah, is an intrinsic part of that view. Any thesis that puts the hill thousands of miles away from the narrow neck of land does not do justice to the Book of Mormon text or to reasonable inferences that may be drawn from it. The problems of distances and logistics that would have been involved in such a hypothetical scenario are deeply problematic, if not insuperable. These are difficulties, however, that arise from our own assumptions, rather than from the Book of Mormon itself. On the other hand, a model with Mormon’s Cumorah in Mesoamerica, though not without its own set of questions and challenges, is far more consistent and believable.