After Nephi left Jerusalem, he and his family and some friends wandered for many years in the desert southeast of Jerusalem. Even though they had a magical compass called the Liahona, they were basically lost and directionless. When they reached the coast of the Arabian Sea, probably somewhere around modern-day Oman, Nephi was commanded to build a ship.
I read about this boat as I sat at a gate in the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. I’d intentionally put off reading this chapter of the book until now, saving it for the moment when I was en route to the very place where Nephi’s boat made landfall, the new American promised land—or, as we call it, Guatemala.
Some readers are encouraged by evidence, though preliminary, that Mesoamerica is the one and only setting for the Book of Mormon saga. This is part of a long-standing, ongoing debate about where in the New World Nephi and his family landed and where their thousand-year American story took place. For a long time it was believed that the events described in the book happened over a vast territory spanning North and South America. Among Book of Mormon readers, this is called the Hemispheric Theory, or the Heartland or Great Lakes Theory. It has many variants. But all agree that the lands where the Nephites once roamed were vast, and that the Nephites’ story concluded in a giant bloody battle in what is today upstate New York. This theory holds that the hill down the road from the Smith farm, where Moroni buried the gold plates, was the same hill where the final battle took place, and where Mormon was killed. This is the view that Joseph Smith seemed to have held. Though it does have vocal adherents among today’s Book of Mormon readers, this theory is generally disavowed.
These days, the Limited Geography Theory (LGT) is the majority view. The geography of the Book of Mormon story, according to this view, does not—cannot possibly—include North America. Mormon never dipped his feet in Lake Superior. Young Moroni never made a snowman. The consensus today is that all of the Book of Mormon’s New World action took place in a relatively small region somewhere in Central or South America. Most believe it was Mesoamerica. The story’s principal characters, therefore, were Maya or Olmec people. Nephi and his descendants, the first Jewish Americans, were technically Israelite-Maya. Even the ever-cautious, ever-political Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which doesn’t take an official position on Book of Mormon geography, tacitly nods toward the LGT by consistently giving the story Mesoamerican settings in its official narratives. In its movies, in live productions such as the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and in church paintings and merchandising, the settings and costumes of the characters always have a strong Mesoamerican flavor.
But even within the official storytelling ranks the question remains open. Filmmaker Kieth Merrill, who went with an exclusively Mesoamerican setting for The Testaments, the biggest and most popular church-funded Book of Mormon film to date, has apparently backtracked on the LGT. He reportedly regrets his earlier decision and now believes the film should have had scenes set in the Great Lakes region. And so the debate goes on and the search continues.
Some of the Mesoamerica proponents consider the archaeological proofs compelling enough for a person, or, say, a busload of people, to make a rather picturesque vacation of the LGT. Even as academic scholars continue to excavate Maya and Olmec sites, groups of Book of Mormon readers are traveling down to Guatemala and Mexico to explore the extraordinary ruins and draw their own conclusions.
I’d signed up for one such tour, an intensive sixteen-day exploration run by a mom-and-pop company based in Utah. The trip would begin in Guatemala City/City of Nephi—the first major New World site mentioned in The Book of Mormon—then wend its way north, deep into the jungle of Petén, near the border of Belize; then south, down to Lake Atitlán/Waters of Mormon, where Alma was on the lam as a fugitive from King Noah; then northwest along the Pacific coastal plain and into the mountains of southern Mexico, where the notorious Gadianton robbers once dwelled. We would cross into the Chiapas Valley—The Book of Mormon’s glorious Land of Zarahemla—then into the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz, known in the story as the Land of Desolation. We’d stop just short of the Land of Moron, aka Oaxaca, Mexico.
Our destination was a mountain in Mexico that is believed to be The Book of Mormon’s true Hill Cumorah, the site where the Nephite people met their tragic end and near the spot where Mormon fashioned the gold plates before giving them to Moroni to carry many miles north, to the area now known as upstate New York. There, he was to deposit them in a hill (which in recent years, according to the LGT, mistakenly came to be called Hill Cumorah—more on that later).
Along the route between the City of Nephi and Cumorah, we would explore ancient Mesoamerican ruins—Maya and Olmec—with our Book of Mormon in hand. Over the course of two weeks, we would retrace the entirety of the New World saga of The Book of Mormon by examining the physical remains of the story, much like a biblical archaeology tour to Jerusalem and Jericho and the Sea of Galilee. And like America’s Holy Land pilgrims, we would stay in luxury hotels, with food and expenses included. We would travel by what our information packets gallantly called a “motor coach,” chartered, and would take two short private flights in-country. In all, we’d cover over 1,000 miles. It wasn’t a beach vacation, it was a mission—though a high-end one, to be sure.
The Mesoamerican theory of The Book of Mormon does not come cheap. But there was no disputing the tour company’s claim that this was to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the lands where the story really took place, to walk in the footsteps of real Book of Mormon characters, to behold the true Hill Cumorah.
As I waited for my flight to board, I struck up a conversation with a fellow member of my tribe, a young Israeli who seemed not the least bit surprised to be chatting in Hebrew with a stranger on a flight from Dallas to Guatemala City. He was fresh out of the army, covered in beads, and preparing to trek across Central and South America with his pals, smoke the local stuff, grow out his hair, and, he believed, with all the certainty of delusion, put his army traumas out of mind.
The young guy nodded toward a third member of our tribe, a Hasidic man who was balancing two massive hatboxes. “That son of a whore has been following me since Tel Aviv,” said my friend. “I think he’s trailing me.” I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, and surmised that he’d gotten a jump start on the smoking-grass segment of his journey. He asked me what I was after in Guatemala. I told him about The Book of Mormon, how the events of the story may have taken place in Mesoamerica. I gave him the basic rundown.
“Whoa, no way,” he said. “That’s amazing. There were Jews from Jerusalem who went there on a boat and became Mayan guys, with feather headdresses and stuff? That’s some trippy shit.”
I felt gratified to imagine this kid in a few weeks’ time, wearing nothing but a loincloth and leather headband, covered in even more beads, lying half-conscious on a hammock somewhere in the jungle, taking huge bong hits and blowing his pals’ minds with tales about how a group of stoner Israelites took a ship to Central America in ancient times, hung out a lot, and wrote a totally stoned-out bible.
Our conversation was interrupted by an announcement. “Now boarding: all members of the One Pass Program, Star Travellers, Visa Explorers, executive members and associates, Platinum and Premier Platinum, Star Alliance One and Premier Star Alliance, Gold Star Members, Global Service 1K, and first class.”
Not a single person stepped forward. The flight attendant continued: “Now seating all Silver Star members.”
This time one guy, out of hundreds waiting around, stepped forward: the Hasid.
I could hear my young Israeli friend mutter, “Sonuva whore.”
Our flight was bursting with Judeo-Christian fervor. As I made my way down the aisle, I passed by the Judeo part; the Hasid, a few rows up from me, was rocking lightly in his seat, mumbling psalms from a Hebrew Bible, his long beard curled up on his chest like a napping kitten. The remainder of the plane was packed with non-Mormon Christian missionaries—not the group I’d be traveling with in Guatemala—sporting identical blue backpacks and matching ill-fitting caps. Some of the missionaries seemed like missionaries; others struck me as not particularly godly. All of them were fussy and friendly and loud.
I’d been with this group for hours now, having met them way back on the security line, where the mobs of tired men, women, and children wearing pajamas conjured a scene of villagers taken prisoner in an early-morning raid. The missionaries and I had become friends of sorts. I’d agreed to watch their bags; they’d given me crackers. We had a good thing going. I’d overheard and very nearly joined an argument between high schoolers speculating about whether Guatemala would have a Denny’s, or at least a Waffle House, and the related question: will this theoretical Guatemalan Denny’s/Waffle House be as good as their home Denny’s/Waffle House?
At some point during the controversy, as it became personal and involved the tweeting of unflattering instagrams and increasingly sarcastic hashtags, a church elder walked over, overheard what was being discussed, and with a tart Georgia lilt said, “Oh, hush.” To my astonishment, the kids became instantly silent.
Among those who hadn’t been talking of Denny’s, it had become a game to listen to the airport PA announcer struggle to pronounce names that really did seem to be getting progressively more complicated, and cheer her on as though she were an underdog contestant plowing through rounds of a quiz show. Among some boys there was a grotesque preboarding gorging on Chicken McNuggets.
Seated next to me on the plane was a sixteen-year-old girl from Tennessee who had the words Golden Gal emblazoned in large sequined letters on the ass of her jeggings. Golden Gal brandished a three-and-a-half-foot-long plastic wand filled with M&Ms, which jabbed my neck each time she uncorked it and tipped it back into her mouth—which was often. (To be fair, she did kindly offer me some.) GG chatted frequently with an endless shouting chorus of female family members.
I wasted no time in putting on my headphones, and began to doze off to the sound of an actor’s ludicrously deep voice reading from The Book of Mormon. As I fell into a dehydrated airplane stupor, a kind of torturous trance, the actor’s voice became the distant sound of a voice, and my thoughts morphed into an anxiety carousel of word noise.
Like anyone with a soul, I hate air travel. At the airport, you arrive barefoot and accused, ceding all agency to the control of a remote, faceless tower, like Kafka’s unreachable Castle or the indifferent God of the Old Testament. The airplane itself, tightly packed with strangers in various states of unconsciousness, is essentially a mass grave. When you arrive at your destination, you are a ghost of yourself.
A swift, hollow blow rammed my forehead, shaking me out of sleep. I saw Golden Gal reach into the overhead compartment, her candy wand swinging recklessly. But it was just as well. We had arrived in Guatemala City, the ancient City of Nephi.
Nephi and his clan made landfall in America somewhere around 591 BCE, a few years before the Babylonians would lay waste to their hometown and mine, Jerusalem. Nephi’s father had foreseen the sack of Jerusalem, the cataclysm that sent the Israelites, Nephi’s former neighbors in Jerusalem, into exile and left them heartbroken “by the rivers of Babylon,” as the biblical poet famously described them, remembering Zion and weeping and refusing to sing their beautiful hymns. While all that was happening, Nephi and his family were making a fresh start across the globe, in America. In their own way, Nephi and company, like the prophet Jeremiah of the Hebrew Bible, were among the generation of Jerusalem’s dispossessed.
Though there is much dispute over when the Hebrew Bible was edited and compiled—whether before, during, or after the Babylonian exile—much of the story was clearly written to convey a sense of doom. It makes sense that people unsure of their future, who fear imminent extinction, might want to preserve their story, or even reimagine it completely. That was certainly Nephi’s experience: on his way out of Jerusalem he’d grabbed the brass plates from Laban, and then, sitting by the rivers of his own Babylon, in the New World, he began writing the next chapters.
He also founded the first Israelite settlement in Guatemala. This city would remain under the sovereignty of the Nephites for roughly the next 450 years, that is, until about 120 years before Jesus. That first New World settlement is known in the story as the City of Nephi; in the Maya archaeological record it is known as Kaminaljuyú; we know it today as Guatemala City.
The opening sections of The Book of Mormon are basically the Hebrew Bible told backward. The story of how Nephi’s family got to America is a subtle respooling of the biblical yarn: instead of a story about a lifesaving boat (Noah’s) followed by wandering in the desert (the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt) followed by an arrival in the Promised Land, this story starts in said Promised Land, moves into the desert wilderness, and then circles back to a boat. It’s almost as if we’re watching the story rewind back to that original ship and launch forward again, this time in a new and completely different direction. The ship is the vehicle that transports the story from the old biblical saga into a parallel narrative, the American sequel.
As Nephi builds his ship, his brothers Laman and Lemuel, as usual, mock him mercilessly. The number of times Nephi has the crap beat out of him by his brothers in this story makes you want to give the guy a hug and tell him that everything will be all right. I must admit, however, that in this case they were right to laugh. The theme of prophets in boats is a running joke in the Bible.
Unlike classical Greek heroes, the Israelites were not big fans of bodies of water, much less seafaring. The authors of the Hebrew Bible claimed competence neither as sailors nor even as well-behaved passengers. The two major maritime stories in the Hebrew Bible both contain elements of farce. The first involves Noah, whose ship has no navigation, which turns out not to be a problem as it also has no destination. It simply goes up with the flood tide and drifts around aimlessly until it washes up, comically, on top of a mountain. Noah, however, seems heroic compared to the Bible’s second major seafarer, Jonah, who insists that the crew of a sinking ship save themselves by tossing him overboard, which they do.
Acorollary to these antisailing stories is the famous tale of the parting of the Red Sea, the fantasy of crossing a giant body of water as though it were a stroll in the park. It’s as if the Hebrew Bible were warning us: jump overboard or pray for a miraculous reprieve—just do whatever you can to avoid sea voyages.
That’s why the idea of Nephi, from landlocked Jerusalem, building a ship for a transoceanic journey—in what would be by far the longest sea voyage in history—gave both Nephi’s brothers and me, when I read it, a good laugh. But The Book of Mormon’s seafaring plot, whether a joke or not, is certainly a signal that this story, like all good sequels, offers some new twists, some surprises.
According to my trip itinerary, the tour guide was supposed to meet me at the airport. Waiting for my luggage, I fumbled through a carry-on bag for my brand-new BOOK OF MORMON LAND TOURS nametag. For months before the trip I’d received many wonderful mailings, which appeared with magical frequency in whimsically shaped boxes: lots of informational packets, a poster-sized map of Nephite/Maya civilization, and a giant, scrupulously detailed textbook with maps and diagrams that illustrated parallels between the Book of Mormon saga and Mesoamerican history, literature, culture, language, anthropology, and especially geography. My tour guide was the book’s coauthor, Lee Thomas.
Outside the terminal, I immediately identified Lee as the large man standing among a crowd of Guatemalans who was most likely to have descended from the earliest Mormon settlers of Utah. (“Pioneers on both sides,” he would later tell me, referring to his own and his wife’s families.) The placard in his hand, presumably with my name on it, was drooped over and thus unreadable. This was because Lee was doubled over in laughter, goofing off with two cabbies.
I walked up and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey!” he said, and deployed a big swooping handshake that was more ranch wrangler than doorbell missionary. “You must be Avi.” He pronounced my name with uncommon precision, which came as a relief from an anxiety I hadn’t quite realized I’d been feeling.
As the hotel shuttle zigzagged through the streets of Guatemala City, Lee asked, “So, are you a longtime member of the church?” I conceded that I was not and that I was in fact a longtime Jew. Lee seemed to take the news in stride. As it turned out, he had a confession of his own: he had just seen a Hasidic man emerge from the airport terminal and wondered if perhaps this man with the big beard and black hat was the mysterious Steinberg from the East Coast who’d signed up for his tour.
“When I saw that fella,” Lee said, “I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is gonna be real neat.’ ”
“I hope you’re not disappointed.”
“Oh no!” he said. “Not at all.”
Mormons make regular visits to their local temples to baptize, by proxy, dead people—especially Anne Frank—who didn’t have the opportunity to do it for themselves during their living years. This tends to bother Jews—especially Elie Wiesel—though I personally don’t mind and actually rather appreciate that someone wants to give my soul a dip. It certainly could use one.
Something about the long lull in my first conversation with Lee gave me the sneaking sense that we were headed toward the big talk, in which Mormons unnecessarily apologize for the misunderstanding regarding Anne Frank.
But that would come later. Instead we got polygamy out of the way. “I know about Jewish people mostly from TV and Fiddler on the Roof,” Lee was saying as we waited at a red light. “And I’ll bet you probably know about us from TV too. You’re probably thinking, ‘So how many wives does he have?’ ”
“Yeah—how many do you have?”
“Ha, right. Well, I know you’re kidding. But as you probably know, that practice was discontinued over a hundred years ago, and it was only instituted for a very brief period, during a time of peril.”
I always feel for Mormons when they get defensive about “plural marriage.” Isn’t every religion entitled to a few youthful indiscretions? God knows Jews were polygamous (God knows because he encouraged it). For another block or two, Lee and I traded a few more jokes and then, thankfully, the van arrived at the hotel.
From the balcony of my sixth-floor hotel room I had a magnificent view of the Land of Nephi. It was exactly as I’d imagined it, exactly as I’d been given to imagine it by The Book of Mormon’s descriptions. It was a green land of minerals and wood, of lush growth and overgrowth. It was a city that rested luxuriously upon a tropical plateau and received refreshing showers with regularity—it was quite unlike Jerusalem, a desert fortress town that crouched jealously over a tiny creek. Still, through the large and woolly tropical trees I could see small hints of contemporary life in Guatemala’s capital that reminded me of the Jerusalem I knew: unsmiling men with rifles standing guard in front of family restaurants.
I watched a spectacular storm drifting toward Guatemala City and the surrounding Land of Nephi. A front of dark gray clouds rolled by overhead and met the surrounding mountains, enclosing the city as if it were a giant terrarium. This was a welcome distraction from the situation in my closet, where I’d discovered a mysterious pair of pants.
It’s hard to describe how large these pants were without reference to the number of people who might fit into them at one time. The trousers, I estimated, would comfortably host me and the members of my immediate family, with enough room to allow us to play gin rummy at my Aunt Miriam’s fold-up card table. These pants were not just wide but tall, on the order of a giant flag, the kind that inspires people to write national anthems and brings tears to the eyes of grown men. A garment such as this deserves ample space, a stadium, a battlefield. It doesn’t belong hanging awkwardly in a hotel room closet—especially not my hotel room closet. I found its sudden presence in my living space, its proximity, a distraction and possibly an alarming clue in some mystery I wanted no part of.
Tomorrow I would meet the rest of the tour group. Tonight, though, I was stranded in my room by the rain, left to contemplate either these mysterious, epic trousers or the mysterious, epic map I’d received in the mail along with Lee’s tome. The full-color “Proposed Map” of Book of Mormon lands had itself been too large—and too much of an objet d’art—to lug around with me in my tour baggage. I’d photocopied a smaller version of the map, which I now unfurled and pinned to my bed with pillows.
It’s rare in our day to think about, much less to use, an experimental map. Our maps are packed coast-to-coast with the same predictable, mostly reliable information. But this is a fairly recent development. Only a few hundred years ago, Earth’s maps were full of speculation and mystery, outright rumors and bold mythologizing. Maps were used partly for navigation and partly to locate the precise boundaries of experience, the line that marked the exact end of what was known and the beginning of the great Somewhere Else. Outer regions were embellished with little doodles of fantastic creatures, scaly monsters, and Amazon women. Here Be Dragons, they’d sometimes write, like a dark analog to our more optimistic You Are Here. Modern maps give us the impression we have all things figured out. But the map spread out over my hotel bed did not give this impression at all.
Although the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—the dainty wrist that links the south of Mexico to Central America—is a silhouette of land familiar to me, the place-names that dotted it on this map were not. Or rather, they were familiar from a completely different context: from my reading of The Book of Mormon. Here were the Land of Many Waters, the adjoining Lands of Bountiful and Desolation, Zarahemla. The isthmus was identified as The Book of Mormon’s “narrow neck of land,” one of the story’s major geographic markers. It was jarring to see these labels grafted onto a recognizable, real-world landmass, like waking up one day and discovering that all your friends now go by names from Anna Karenina. Even more odd and discomfiting were the place-names punctuated with question marks. That isn’t a symbol you want to see on a map.
In addition to the question marks, there were trail lines that went in circles with no apparent destination; known cities were omitted. It was almost as if this map’s purpose weren’t to guide but to visually represent a feeling of disorientation.
The earliest editions of The Book of Mormon—those that Joseph himself edited—had no maps or geographical cross-references. They also lacked verse markers, being laid out instead in continuous, unnumbered sentences and paragraphs. The first edition to break up the text into verses, in the 1850s—after Joseph was gone—was also the first to include detailed notes on geography. Maybe the impulse to order a text into neatly measured verses corresponds with the impulse to chart a story numerically on a real map. Both are motivated by a desire to move a story from novelistic fiction into epic history, from the subjectivity of a story to the objectivity of measured quantities. But putting that map to actual use, navigating a real terrain with it, that was bolder still—and possibly a bit daft.
I was well aware that all of this sounded completely nuts. At times it gave me serious pause. I vacillated between thinking it was the good kind of nuts and the bad kind. In darker moments—and my first night in Guatemala City was one—I feared, genuinely feared, that my hasty enrollment on this tour, and this quest in general, were not the actions of a happy, grounded person.
What was this really about? Was I really here to find something, or was I actually avoiding something? Was my quest really just a fancy way of running away from problems on the home front? I’d recently entered into a marriage that was doomed and, worse, doomed largely by my own amorphous sense that it was doomed. My personal hope, or so I’d told myself, was that I might find something genuinely uplifting in witnessing, participating in, a scripture in progress, in seeing how a big story was created from the ground up. It would be like watching the formation of a literary sun: wouldn’t that be moving?
So on the one hand, I hoped there might be something inspiring in this journey to Guatemala in search of Zarahemla. On the other hand, I was in Guatemala in search of Zarahemla. That just sounded nuts. Maybe it was all just a cover. Maybe my quest for Nephite lands was just a means of disappearing into a lala fantasyland, a way to escape the complications of real life. Maybe that’s the reason anyone searches for Zarahemla. Maybe that’s why Joseph Smith, newly married and facing a tumultuous road ahead, had become enamored with Zarahemla, the idea of Zarahemla, to begin with.
What if I was like that Dutch guy, Jan Dibbets, who once picked at random the coordinates of four spots in Holland and then made an epic search to find them? He claimed that by the time he finally did locate them, the four random spots didn’t seem random. The whole thing felt incredibly meaningful, he said. But to me, in my hotel room that night, his project sounded terribly sad. It seemed like a nihilistic satire of life. When Jan Dibbets arrived at one of his meaningless coordinates, he reported seeing “two trees, one with a dog pissing on it.” How he hadn’t hanged himself from one of those trees seemed remarkable to me.
There were surely many causes of my gloom, all the usual reasons—my failures in life and love—but there was no question that what triggered it was showing up for this tour, sitting in this random hotel room in Guatemala City, a strange, probably hostile man’s giant pants lurking in my closet, not totally understanding why I would want to go to a distant country in search of a nonexistent country and with only a half-berserk map covered in question marks as my guide.
As a wild jungle storm lashed the plate-glass windows of my room, I could empathize with those travelers who ended up wrapping themselves in hotel bedsheets and, as the Jerusalem syndrome researchers reported, running into the street and loudly making an “unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.” That’s what it feels like to be lost.