Culture Shock ~ Zarahemla!

Shortly after Ammaron's disclosure of the hiding place of the Nephite records, Mormon's father took him to Zarahemla.  What a culture shock this must have been for eleven-year-old Mormon!  He later wrote:  The whole face of the land had become covered with buildings, and the people were as numerous almost, as it were the sand of the sea. (Mormon 1: 7)

The shock of the spiritual state of affairs in Zarahemla must have been equally disturbing to the young boy.

A probable candidate for the City of Zarahemla were the ruins of Santa Rosa in Chiapas, MX.  You may recall that Santa Rosa was buried under the waters of the lake created by the Angostura Dam in the 1970s. But we must also remember that the greater Land of Zarahemla covered many miles along the Sidon/Grijalva River or most of the Valley of central Chiapas State. (See July 16, 2013 post for more on Zarahemla.)

In that same year, war broke out along the borders of the Land of Zarahemla and the Lamanite-possessed Land of Nephi.  I know nothing about tracing a people via their language, so I will quote from John Sorenson's book An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon:*

Southeast Chiapas formed a boundary between speakers of the Maya languages and other groups . . . Our glimpses of ethnic history before . . . Columbus indicate that the Maya speakers occupied nearly all the lands we have identified as included in the greater land of Nephi . . . [Lamanites] probably spoke one or another Mayan tongue.  The tendency of the speakers of those languages, as shown by linguistic reconstruction, has been to expand in a northern and western direction into Chiapas.

This is exactly what happened between 350 and 400 A.D.  The Mayan-speaking Lamanites moved northward to crowd the Nephites in Zarahemla/Chiapas.  The Nephites, who by now had lost the protection of God, were forced northward in retreat after retreat.

* Sorenson has written a new book that was just released last October.  It is titled Mormon's Codex: An Ancient America Book and appears to cover much of this same material in a more reader-friendly format.

Text copyright January 2014, Gebara Education

 

Pictures:

Zarahemla from www.bigboardgames.com

Angostura Lake from www.flickr.com

Map from www.bookofmormonresources.blogspot.com