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Gospel Wiki Connections morm-geo-cumorah-many-waters

Mormon 6:4 · Mosiah 8:8

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Book of Mormon Mormon 6:4
"it was in a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains"
Book of Mormon Mosiah 8:8
"having traveled in a land among many waters, having discovered a land which was covered with bones of men"

Offered to weigh: Mormon sites the Nephites' last battlefield 'in a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains' (Mormon 6:4); generations earlier the Limhi expedition, lost in the wilderness, 'traveled in a land among many waters' and found 'a land which was covered with bones of men … and was also covered with ruins of buildings of every kind' (Mosiah 8:8) -- an earlier people's destruction-ground in a many-waters land. The reading: the record twice locates a nation's death-field by the same many-waters description. Cautions (why interpretive): (1) 'many waters' is common -- eleven verses in the record (1 Nephi 13:10, 13:12, 13:13, 13:29, 14:11, 14:12, 17:5 'Irreantum … many waters', Mosiah 8:8, Mormon 6:4, and Ether 2:6, 6:7), some twenty-six corpus-wide (the frozen scriptures add Psalms, Ezekiel, Revelation, and others) -- so the shared phrase alone proves nothing; (2) the record's own geography ties Mosiah 8:8's bones-land to the land DESOLATION, not to Cumorah by name -- 'the land which they called Desolation … which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken' (Alma 22:30, the textual identification registered at alma-mormon-ed-bone-land, Alma 22:30 <-> Mosiah 8:8); whether the land of Cumorah and that Desolation-adjacent bones-land are one region, the text never states. Both textual facts are reported; the convergence is the reader's to weigh. Whether any of this maps to real-world geography is out of scope.

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