The Interpreter is sticking with Tapirs. Chariots aren't chariots and more.

[Shulem]

So, when it says "...make ready his horses and his chariots...", we should interpret this as, what exactly? The equivalent of "make ready his unrelated domesticated food source, and his mode of transportation that will be pulled by something else"?

It's exactly what Joseph Smith visualized and imagined while he was telling the story to his scribe who wrote exactly as they too could imagine were "horses" and "chariots" as understand in the mind of any 19th century American who talks about horses. A horse is a horse, of course! Right?

Joseph's mama later told how her young boy used to go on and on about how ancient Indians got along on the American continent which includes New York which I might add is north of the land of Nephi down past the narrow strip of wilderness which leads to the southernmost tip of Delmarva -- where Lehi landed and found horses (1 Nephi 18:25). And, to make matters clear, young Joseph was very familiar with horses and chariots as mentioned multiple times in the Bible in which he was so apt to plagiarize from.

• Ancient inhabitants
• This continent of America
• Dress standards
• Mode of travel
• Animals used for transport
• Cities
• Buildings and structures of various material
• Mode of warfare (tactical & strategic)
• Religious worship

[Doctor Scratch]

Hi,

I'm new to this chat board. I have to say that accuracy doesn't seem to be prized here. I'm the author of the INTERPRETER article. I don't say that Book of Mormon horses were tapirs. I have included the discussion for completeness. I doubt that was the animal. Horses in the Book of Mormon are rarely mentioned. Tapirs are more plentiful in the area today, although who knows what it might have looked like in 589 BCE.

The point of the article is that if horses (Equus caballus) existed among the Book of Mormon peoples, they did not use them as virtually all other developing civilizations used them. They didn't help in war or with transportation or in other ways.

This is important for determining the size of the Book of Mormon "Promised Land."

More importantly, it shows that critics have overstated their case when they say or imply that DNA evidence proves the Book of Mormon is not historical.

Thanks,

Brian Hales

Welcome, Brother Hales! I'm very glad to see you posting--I think you'll find that the critics here will give you a robust analysis of your claims. I also admire your courage: I think that Dr. Peterson has scared a lot of apologists away from this message board. In any event, I hope you enjoy your time here!

[drumdude]

More importantly, it shows that critics have overstated their case when they say or imply that DNA evidence proves the Book of Mormon is not historical.

Brian,

It would seem accuracy is not your priority either. I'd like you to find where a critic makes the claim that DNA evidence proves the Book of Mormon is not historical. I'm sure you're well aware of the CES letter, which explicitly states:

Admittedly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but where are the Nephite or Lamanite buildings, roads, armors, swords, pottery, art, etc.? How can these great civilizations just vanish without a trace?

Critics say that the lack of DNA evidence is consistent with a world in which the Book of Mormon events didn't happen.

The U.S. Civil War, one of the bloodiest episodes in human history, killed 600,000 men over 4 years. The Book of Mormon asserts triple that number in very short order; even 2,000,000 dead (Ether 15) and later hundreds of thousands using steel weapons and armor (Mormon 6). If true, this would be the largest battle in human history.

Your very limited geography hypothesis has to contend with the plain words of the Book of Mormon. A horse can't mean a horse, and two million can't mean two million. The null hypothesis is that these events didn't happen, and to overcome the null hypothesis evidence is required. Or in your case, you must reinterpret the text to a ridiculous degree until you get to your goal which is a Book of Mormon area so tiny that evidence would no longer be expected.

[Physics Guy]

How does the Bible compare to the Book of Mormon, in its references to horses? I could certainly be wrong, but my immediate feeling from memory is that the Bible doesn't talk much more about horses than the Book of Mormon does.

Certainly horses were used in Biblical cultures, for transportation and war, though not for food by the Israelites, because the horse's single-toe hoof is against Leviticus 11:3, and not nearly as much for work as they were used in medieval times, because the horse collar was a later invention. With the same kind of yokes that work well on oxen, horses don't pull well.

At least in my memory, though, the Bible doesn't talk all that much about horses. I'm not sure, for instance, that the Bible is anywhere very explicit about whether any chariots were drawn by horses, though I think it's pretty clear that horse-drawn chariots were an important technology in Biblical times.

Any society may be distinctly shaped by the technologies or domesticated animals that it has. The society's own literature may well fail to go out of its way to talk a lot about this social infrastructure—precisely because of how profoundly it shaped the culture. Everybody at the time knew it and took it for granted, so there was no need to talk about it.

Even quite detailed histories of the World Wars, for example, will often fail to mention that the soldiers on both sides were mostly armed with breech-loading rifles. A dedicated revisionist who wanted to insist that the Battle of the Somme was fought with longbows and catapults might well be able to cite several thick volumes that never explicitly mentioned gunpowder and only really spoke vaguely of "shooting" or "artillery", which as everyone knows were terms used with medieval weapons long before firearms.

If we had archaeological evidence about Nephite society, we could compare it to what we know from archaeology about other societies with and without horses. Having only the Book of Mormon's description of Nephite society, however, we should not be comparing this literary description of a society with archaeological knowledge of other societies. We should be comparing it instead with the ancient literature of other societies that did or didn't have horses.

Explicitly mentioning horses and chariots is strong evidence that the text portrays a society with wheels and horses. It is in contrast not good evidence against the presence of wheels and horses, if the text merely fails to mention explicitly a lot of details about how the horses and wheels were used. A contemporary text from a society that crucially depended on horse-drawn chariots would probably also fail to go out of its way to mention details that would have been obvious to everyone in its audience.

[huckelberry]

Hi,

I'm new to this chat board. I have to say that accuracy doesn't seem to be prized here. I'm the author of the INTERPRETER article. I don't say that Book of Mormon horses were tapirs. I have included the discussion for completeness. I doubt that was the animal. Horses in the Book of Mormon are rarely mentioned. Tapirs are more plentiful in the area today, although who knows what it might have looked like in 589 BCE.

The point of the article is that if horses (Equus caballus) existed among the Book of Mormon peoples, they did not use them as virtually all other developing civilizations used them. They didn't help in war or with transportation or in other ways.

This is important for determining the size of the Book of Mormon "Promised Land."

More importantly, it shows that critics have overstated their case when they say or imply that DNA evidence proves the Book of Mormon is not historical.

Thanks,

Brian Hales

Mr Hales, I understand your objection to this thread characterizing your article as supporting tapirs as horses. You clearly are interested in other things and left the tapir thing uncertain. Do we here value accuracy? Points of view and attitudes here are definitely not uniform. There are even long term people here who are not particularly interested in Daniel Peterson.

I thought your article made a couple of interesting points. First it would realistic to portray a non horse culture and the Book of Mormon does that. You combine that with other observations to show a limited area for the Book of Mormon story. This may be crucial for your important point which is that a small area could be isolated enough to not involve the Jewish immigrants in highly problematic competition with native inhabitants yet allowing those inhabitants to contribute to the otherwise unrealistic population growth rate. I think that proposes a very narrow needle to thread but is a theory fitting important considerations together.

[Shulem]

Regardless of the actual topographical shape of the Promised Land, the dimensions, calculated from foot-travel distances, would be approximately 200 by 500 miles

From the tip of Delmarva where Lehi landed, along the Pocomoke river which was the Sidon and through the narrow strip of wilderness and across the peninsula -- through the narrow neck, and up to Cumorah we go!

There you have it folks. THAT is what Joseph Smith imagined when telling his imaginary story.

Delmarva, yeah baby!

[drumdude]

Regardless of the actual topographical shape of the Promised Land, the dimensions, calculated from foot-travel distances, would be approximately 200 by 500 miles

From the tip of Delmarva where Lehi landed, along the Pocomoke river which was the Sidon and through the narrow strip of wilderness and across the peninsula -- through the narrow neck, and up to Cumorah we go!

There you have it folks. THAT is what Joseph Smith imagined when telling his imaginary story.

Delmarva, yeah baby!

Shulem, seriously you need to submit your work to Interpreter.

If they don’t publish it, but publish Hales, it really exposes them as completely biased and just a clubhouse.

You have done 10 times as much work as any of them.

[Shulem]

Shulem, seriously you need to submit your work to Interpreter.

If they don’t publish it, but publish Hales, it really exposes them as completely biased and just a clubhouse.

You have done 10 times as much work as any of them.

Well, thanks for that! I'm not too worried about things right now because I'm very, very, confident that Delmarva will eventually win out when people in general realize that it was just a land template Smith used to develop and keep track of his story while maintaining a difficult chronology that crisscrosses and moves through the timeline. It was an amazing effort by Joseph Smith! My hat is off to the prophet because he did a fantastic job concealing his work and putting it all together.

I'm pleased to have readers on this board that have taken the time to read my threads and get their aha moment. Some are a little slow to come around, such as Vogel, but he will come around eventually, I think.

[Shulem]

Some are a little slow to come around

Such as Dan Peterson who might like to have a change of heart and come to Discuss Mormonism® and consider the implications of Delmarva being Joseph Smith's best kept secret. You know it to be true. Search your heart! Feel the force within you.

Come to Shulem. It is your destiny.

[Moksha]

Brother Hale's thesis of the tapirs being eaten could help explain their absence from the Delmarva Peninsula.