I
"I am going to Cumorah" is what the old man, turning down a ride in their wagon, said to Joseph, Oliver, and David.
(https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/MStar/id/27175)
Hugh Nibley points us a road to Cumorah. In a marginal note--just two words--about Mormon's description of Cumorah as "a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains," Nibley writes "spots"; "rock-pits." A few verses down comes another note: "Redoubt; Armaggeddon; Flanders." It is as though Sargeant Nibley were scouting the area for Mormon, prior to the final battle. Something about the pockmarked, spotty nature of the landscape: rock-pits, fountains, and the criss-cross of watercourses, made of Cumorah, for Nibley, the perfect redoubt. (See his annotated Book of Mormon, one of many, BYU Ancient Studies Library, Hugh Nibley, BX 8622.1 A1 1963b, copy dated 7/5/78.)
Professor Hoskisson also notes in passing (2004) an ancient Syrian place name Kamaru and, following Jean-Marie Durand, suggests it represents an Amorite name deriving from the same root as Akkadian kumara. As Michael C. Astour tells us, Kamaru occurs (up to three times) in ancient Syria--and it persists to this day in the place name Kimar, Syria, just east of the Afrin River (see Michael Astour, "Semites and Hurrians in Northern Transtigris," etc.).
I now turn to James E. Hoch's startling book, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. Here's what caught this reader's attention in 2011:
A list of place names recorded in the Nubian temple of Amarah West gives us the Syrian Ginta ku-ma-ra, the Winepress of Kumara (or Kumarah). You cannot get any closer to Cumorah than the clear and consistant hierogyphic "group writing," developed by the Egyptian scribes to vocalize Semitic words and names, that expresses West Semitic Ginta Kumara, that is, Gath Kumara (see James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts, 293, #425 = K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions II, 217, no. 98, Dynasty XIX; for II, 217, Scroll down to page 246: https://archive.org/details/KennethA.KitchenRamessideInscriptionsVol2 ).
A list of place names recorded in the Nubian temple of Amarah West gives us the Syrian Ginta ku-ma-ra, the Winepress of Kumara (or Kumarah). You cannot get any closer to Cumorah than the clear and consistant hierogyphic "group writing," developed by the Egyptian scribes to vocalize Semitic words and names, that expresses West Semitic Ginta Kumara, that is, Gath Kumara (see James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts, 293, #425 = K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions II, 217, no. 98, Dynasty XIX; for II, 217, Scroll down to page 246: https://archive.org/details/KennethA.KitchenRamessideInscriptionsVol2 ).
The first element, Ginta, says Hoch, appears variously in the Amarna Letters (royal Egyptian correspondence that documents many Syro-Palestinian place names) as Gimtu-, Ginti-, or Giti, which corresponds to Hebrew and Ugaritic, gt or gath, a winepress. As for Kumara, the consonant-cum-vowel syllabic "group writing" is very clear: Gardiner's sign list D28, "arms extended," Hoch, 511, /ku/; Aa15 and D38, "unclassified sign" plus "forearm with hand holding a rounded loaf," Hoch, 508, /ma/ (listed as ma4); D21, "mouth," Hoch, 509, /ra/: ku-ma-ra. (Hoch, #425, Ginta Kumara is the first example listed under Ginta; the "sign groups" for Semitic names are listed in Hoch, 506-512).
Kumarah or Cumorah, as a vineyard, perfectly matches "a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains."
And where was Ginta Kumara?
A second Kumara--if not the very same place--lies in ancient Hurrian country, according to the Great North Syrian List of Thutmose III (and other lists): "k-m-r- (ka-m-r-w)," Michael C. Astour, "Place-Names from the Kingdom of Alalah in the North Syrian List of Thutmose III: A Study in Historical Topography," Journal of Near Eastern Studies (1963, 22:4), 230. The place, "still called Kimar," lies "in the Gebel Sim'an, east of the Afrin River," Michael C. Astour, "Semitic Elements in the Kumarbi Myth: An Onomastic Inquiry," Journal of Near Eastern Studies (1968 27:3), 173. As Professor Astour reminds us, the name of the Hurrian god Kumarbi means "(He) of Kumar."
Professor Astour tells us just what the Syrian place name means. The noun kumaru, kuwaru, etc., which signifies generally a construction of earth, specifically refers to a ramp or rampart (buttressing a city or city gate), a redoubt, or a dike. Such an embankment may also have agricultural uses, that is, the protective wall of a garden (think of the Persian paradeisos). Consider the following theophoric name: 'Ammukumarra, "'Ammu is a rampart." A like epithet speaks to "Teshub, the lord of the kamaru of the city of Irrite" (Michael Astour, "Semites and Hurrians in Northern Transtigris," Ernest R. Lacheman Festschrift, 26). (Think of Gilgamesh and the wall of the city Uruk.) Note, again, the ending in -a: Ginta Kumara, 'Ammukumarra: that's where the Amorite, or West Semitic element, surfaces. Book of Mormon Cumorah properly shows the West Semitic, rather than the East Semitic, that is, Akkadian, ending.
Beetling embankments, ramparts, and dikes: all these may serve for defensive earthworks, heaped up by men. Of superior worth would be a place where nature herself, in a riot of fountains and pits, rivers and embankments and escarpments, dikes and ditches--all criss-crossed and confounding--and rocks of all sizes everywhere, builds for man a place of redoubt--like Flanders. The whole makes for a natural beehive of military preparation, and, to be sure, the editors of the CAL (Comprehensive Lexicon of Aramaic) see in the Syriac word for beehive (kwr) a trace of the same Akkadian kmr in its sense of walling (brick wall and so on).
And where was Ginta Kumara?
A second Kumara--if not the very same place--lies in ancient Hurrian country, according to the Great North Syrian List of Thutmose III (and other lists): "k-m-r-
Professor Astour tells us just what the Syrian place name means. The noun kumaru, kuwaru, etc., which signifies generally a construction of earth, specifically refers to a ramp or rampart (buttressing a city or city gate), a redoubt, or a dike. Such an embankment may also have agricultural uses, that is, the protective wall of a garden (think of the Persian paradeisos). Consider the following theophoric name: 'Ammukumarra, "'Ammu is a rampart." A like epithet speaks to "Teshub, the lord of the kamaru of the city of Irrite" (Michael Astour, "Semites and Hurrians in Northern Transtigris," Ernest R. Lacheman Festschrift, 26). (Think of Gilgamesh and the wall of the city Uruk.) Note, again, the ending in -a: Ginta Kumara, 'Ammukumarra: that's where the Amorite, or West Semitic element, surfaces. Book of Mormon Cumorah properly shows the West Semitic, rather than the East Semitic, that is, Akkadian, ending.
Beetling embankments, ramparts, and dikes: all these may serve for defensive earthworks, heaped up by men. Of superior worth would be a place where nature herself, in a riot of fountains and pits, rivers and embankments and escarpments, dikes and ditches--all criss-crossed and confounding--and rocks of all sizes everywhere, builds for man a place of redoubt--like Flanders. The whole makes for a natural beehive of military preparation, and, to be sure, the editors of the CAL (Comprehensive Lexicon of Aramaic) see in the Syriac word for beehive (kwr) a trace of the same Akkadian kmr in its sense of walling (brick wall and so on).
Nature walls off Cumorah and her hill--Mormon has the advantage.
For the ruins of palatial Tell Ain Dara, our Syrian Kumara towering over the paradisaical Afrin Valley, see http://romeartlover.tripod.com/Deinair.html. Tell Ain Dara, Gath Cumorah, Ginta Ku-ma-ra, Rampart and Winepress and Paradise, Semitic names vocalized in Egyptian hieroglyphs, a kind of "reformed Egyptian" for that special purpose--these are the things that catch one's attention.
II
In an earlier essay (published in 201o), I link Cumorah with a rare Hebrew, Aramaic, and, perhaps, Ugaritic verb kmr, which variously expresses darkness, gloom, blackness. Professor Hoch thinks kmr to be a by-form of the verb kmh (Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts).
While the link isn't convincing, it does call to mind the Egyptian name for the fertile Nile Valley, Km.t, the black land. Again consider the Syrian place name, Gath Kumara (the winepress or olivepress of Kumara). The names of West Semitic presses and vineyards often bespeak blessing and fertility. The Bible gives us Gath Rimmon (Persimmon Winepress) and Gethsemane, which last evokes the fatness of the olive and the purity and brakhah--the blessed nature--of its oil. Gath Kumara fairly sings of fertile soil, and much calls to mind a like West Semitic root, krm, vineyard (Vineyard Winepress; Orchard Winepress). As Gath Kerem, so Gath Kumara. Indeed, Gath Kumara yields inherent possibilities for plays on words: the Gath Kumara thus corresponds to the Gath Kerem, the Wine Press of the Hilltop Vineyard, as we might translate the place name. A play on words certainly arises in Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard: the Kerem is planted in a qeren (horn), "a even the Qeren ben Shamen, or "a very fruitful hill" (Isaiah 5:1). But Qeren ben Shamen, though often rendered as "a hillside rich in oil," that is, "fertile," first registers the "horn of rich olive oil," a cornucopia. In Zenos's allegory of the Olive Tree in Book of Mormon Jacob 5:43, we find such a qeren as symbolic of Lehi's land of promise: "I did plant in a good spot of ground; yea, even that which was choice unto me above all other parts of the land of my vineyard." Much of the vineyard consisted of poor and yet poorer soil, about which the keeper of the Vineyard's owner complained incessantly; the children of Lehi were tucked away into a qeren.
II
In an earlier essay (published in 201o), I link Cumorah with a rare Hebrew, Aramaic, and, perhaps, Ugaritic verb kmr, which variously expresses darkness, gloom, blackness. Professor Hoch thinks kmr to be a by-form of the verb kmh (Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts).
While the link isn't convincing, it does call to mind the Egyptian name for the fertile Nile Valley, Km.t, the black land. Again consider the Syrian place name, Gath Kumara (the winepress or olivepress of Kumara). The names of West Semitic presses and vineyards often bespeak blessing and fertility. The Bible gives us Gath Rimmon (Persimmon Winepress) and Gethsemane, which last evokes the fatness of the olive and the purity and brakhah--the blessed nature--of its oil. Gath Kumara fairly sings of fertile soil, and much calls to mind a like West Semitic root, krm, vineyard (Vineyard Winepress; Orchard Winepress). As Gath Kerem, so Gath Kumara. Indeed, Gath Kumara yields inherent possibilities for plays on words: the Gath Kumara thus corresponds to the Gath Kerem, the Wine Press of the Hilltop Vineyard, as we might translate the place name. A play on words certainly arises in Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard: the Kerem is planted in a qeren (horn), "a even the Qeren ben Shamen, or "a very fruitful hill" (Isaiah 5:1). But Qeren ben Shamen, though often rendered as "a hillside rich in oil," that is, "fertile," first registers the "horn of rich olive oil," a cornucopia. In Zenos's allegory of the Olive Tree in Book of Mormon Jacob 5:43, we find such a qeren as symbolic of Lehi's land of promise: "I did plant in a good spot of ground; yea, even that which was choice unto me above all other parts of the land of my vineyard." Much of the vineyard consisted of poor and yet poorer soil, about which the keeper of the Vineyard's owner complained incessantly; the children of Lehi were tucked away into a qeren.
Cumorah, the Fruitful Land, the Cornucopia, so much as Protective Rampart of the same, thus bookends nicely with the Book of Mormon Land Bountiful (perhaps reflecting the Semitic root ts-m-r, Tsumar), being respectively the north and south boundaries (rampart as boundary?) of the Land Northward in the Book of Mormon, even Kumar and Tsumar (see F. Grondahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit, 199: ts-m-r, "fruchtbar sein"; the Prophet Joseph Smith is on record as naming fruitful Zion, Zomar). Worthy of note is another Book of Mormon hill, the Jaredite Comron, Place of Comr. . . (Ether 14: 28-29; the Printer's Manuscript names the hill Comron, not, as in our editions, Comnor: Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of The Book of Mormon 6:3874; The Book of Mormon Onomasticon, q.v., "Cumorah," also suggests an etymological link between Cumorah and Comron, though no conclusion is reached.
If kmr is a by-form of kmh, and if both evoke Km.t, could not Gath Kumara at least connote the black, fertile soil? After all, Kumarbi, he of Kumar, is an earthy, chthonic, fertility deity for the ancient Hurrians (in upper Mesopotamia), and his mythology speaks of a descent into the "dark, dark earth." As for Pomegranate Wine Press, the pomegranate with its abundant seeds becomes, like the fertile black humus, a symbol of fruitfulness par excellence. In the palace garden of Ashurnasirpal III pomegranates and vines richly intertwine (see E. Cook, AJA 108, 56).
That said, Michael Astour, and others, correctly assign the Syrian place names built on the root kmr to the semantic field of kumaru, to heap up, pile. Kimar, ancient Kumaru, is thus Rampart or Ramp, the place of the Embankment--just east of the Afrin river. Gath Kumara, if the same place, is thus the Winepress of the place Rampart, the (brick) Walled Winepress, or the like. Any other associations with beehives or the black soil (the rich loam piled up about the river banks, etc.), if made at all, would have been secondary, but the association remains natural and inescapable.
Alexander Militarev, an adventurous lexicographer, links Egyptian km, kmm, Km.t with a West Semitic root for darkness, gloom, blackness ('km), but, here, we find ourselves in by-paths: is the "original" root km? or 'km? or kmr? Or is kmr also a by-form of 'km, and therefore to be linked etymologically with Egyptian km and Km.t? Here is a language confounded and contorted into by-forms and shades of meaning. As early as the 19th century, scholars linked, though weakly, km with some of these same Semitic forms. Hoch has it right: the root has taken on affixes (an -r extension), owing perhaps to dialect or confusion with another verb. Kmr, km, 'km: these likely do not all derive from the same root, but no matter--babel language has thrown them together. The semantic field--and the symbolic--has overlapped since the earliest times.
We cannot know just what came to the ordinary Nephite's mind, when he heard the name Cumorah, but some mind linked name and nature's fortress. We have only a fragment of the Hebrew spoken by the ancients: Biblical Hebrew, much of it poetic, classical, does not yield enough material to provide answers to questions about Semitic roots like kmr.
Yet Mormon tells us what the place Cumorah was like, and does so in terms suggestive of the West Semitic name Kumaru. Yet we may imaginatively perceive a link between the kum of Cumorah and that of Km.t (Kumat or Kamat). (The Greek word for mound is likewise kom.) Ramps and mounds are heaped-up of piles of black earth. And the Nile Valley, after each inundation, runs all a-dot with little black mounds, each awaiting the touch of life. Black earth spells germination, a semiotically rich theme belonging to the common Afro-Semitic "encyclopaedia." Kmr signifies black heaps of fertile soil, so well as ramparts, dikes, and ruined mounds.
While Professor Astour explains the place name Kumaru in light of Akkadian kumaru (to throw down and thus heap up, etc.), the Sumerian lexeme answering to kumaru yields GUR-GUR, which refers to the tallying up of a sum: you heap up, and then you total the gain. So why not associate Hurrian Kumaru with the high-yield Kumat, or Black Land? "Every spring," explains Professor Ronald J. Leprohon, "the Nile flood would subside and what first emerged from the water were triangular-shaped islands of rich black earth. These little mounds represented the promise of new life, which led to the notion that all creation must have begun exactly the same way" ("Egyptian Religious Texts," Egyptology Today (ed) R. H. Wilkinson, 231). Such ideas need not be exclusively Egyptian, and Kumarbi's center place may thus be another Black Land, another place of beginning where life stirs into being. Similar little mounds do indeed appear in the Mesopotamian record, but here the theme is not "the promise of new life," but annihilation: "as if the flood had devastated them, I [Sargon] piled up (his cities) into ruin mounds [u-kam-mi]" (CAD K 114).
That said, Michael Astour, and others, correctly assign the Syrian place names built on the root kmr to the semantic field of kumaru, to heap up, pile. Kimar, ancient Kumaru, is thus Rampart or Ramp, the place of the Embankment--just east of the Afrin river. Gath Kumara, if the same place, is thus the Winepress of the place Rampart, the (brick) Walled Winepress, or the like. Any other associations with beehives or the black soil (the rich loam piled up about the river banks, etc.), if made at all, would have been secondary, but the association remains natural and inescapable.
Alexander Militarev, an adventurous lexicographer, links Egyptian km, kmm, Km.t with a West Semitic root for darkness, gloom, blackness ('km), but, here, we find ourselves in by-paths: is the "original" root km? or 'km? or kmr? Or is kmr also a by-form of 'km, and therefore to be linked etymologically with Egyptian km and Km.t? Here is a language confounded and contorted into by-forms and shades of meaning. As early as the 19th century, scholars linked, though weakly, km with some of these same Semitic forms. Hoch has it right: the root has taken on affixes (an -r extension), owing perhaps to dialect or confusion with another verb. Kmr, km, 'km: these likely do not all derive from the same root, but no matter--babel language has thrown them together. The semantic field--and the symbolic--has overlapped since the earliest times.
We cannot know just what came to the ordinary Nephite's mind, when he heard the name Cumorah, but some mind linked name and nature's fortress. We have only a fragment of the Hebrew spoken by the ancients: Biblical Hebrew, much of it poetic, classical, does not yield enough material to provide answers to questions about Semitic roots like kmr.
Yet Mormon tells us what the place Cumorah was like, and does so in terms suggestive of the West Semitic name Kumaru. Yet we may imaginatively perceive a link between the kum of Cumorah and that of Km.t (Kumat or Kamat). (The Greek word for mound is likewise kom.) Ramps and mounds are heaped-up of piles of black earth. And the Nile Valley, after each inundation, runs all a-dot with little black mounds, each awaiting the touch of life. Black earth spells germination, a semiotically rich theme belonging to the common Afro-Semitic "encyclopaedia." Kmr signifies black heaps of fertile soil, so well as ramparts, dikes, and ruined mounds.
While Professor Astour explains the place name Kumaru in light of Akkadian kumaru (to throw down and thus heap up, etc.), the Sumerian lexeme answering to kumaru yields GUR-GUR, which refers to the tallying up of a sum: you heap up, and then you total the gain. So why not associate Hurrian Kumaru with the high-yield Kumat, or Black Land? "Every spring," explains Professor Ronald J. Leprohon, "the Nile flood would subside and what first emerged from the water were triangular-shaped islands of rich black earth. These little mounds represented the promise of new life, which led to the notion that all creation must have begun exactly the same way" ("Egyptian Religious Texts," Egyptology Today (ed) R. H. Wilkinson, 231). Such ideas need not be exclusively Egyptian, and Kumarbi's center place may thus be another Black Land, another place of beginning where life stirs into being. Similar little mounds do indeed appear in the Mesopotamian record, but here the theme is not "the promise of new life," but annihilation: "as if the flood had devastated them, I [Sargon] piled up (his cities) into ruin mounds [u-kam-mi]" (CAD K 114).
Mormon's Cumorah speaks to ruin, even annihilation.
The Sumerian lexicon also yields KUM (to be, become hot, heat), a word likely to be a Semitic loan-word; it's a shared word anyhow. How to bridge the gap between Egyptian Kuma and Sumerian KUM, between black and hot? Lamentations 5:10 speaks of faces "hot like an oven" (nikmaru), and some have translated the word as scorched, blackened. Hot as an oven; black as an oven, it is all the same. Blackness absorbs heat. Afroasiatic Km, together with its by-forms kmr and 'km, signifies heat. Heat, gloom, sadness, darkness, blackness all come together in an original root, kum. For Job, a very trying day, a day in which everything piles on, is a kamirirey yom--not just kmr but kmr-r.
Cumorah, with its many waters, rivers, and fountains, calls up Spring's fertility, a black land like the Egyptian Kumat, as km.t was likely pronounced. (For the vocalization of Egyptian km.t, see Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, 42, 88. Egyptians referred to themselves as the Ramats ni Kumat (the people of Kumat), or even as the Kumut). Where such a link between ku-ma-ra and the black earth may not be linguistically sound, we may yet term it semiotically suggestive, part of a shared connotative encyclopaedia, somewhere on the other side of denotation and dictionary. Matching dictionary and the denotative would be Cumorah the Redoubt, the Rampart Land, "serving," as Shakespeare would have it, "in the office of a wall." In other words, Cumorah denotes a Rampart, a stronghold, "this fortress built by Nature for herself"; it may also connote a land rich in promise.
III
Is a New York Cumorah a rampart too far?
The search for Cumorah will be facilitated so well by the meaning of the name as by Mormon's description of the land and the hill that bear the name. And until those who seek Cumorah identify a place that better matches the linguistic and narrative evidence, a study of New York antiquities can still serve up surprises.
E. G. Squire's study of the native antiquities of New York, whether Huron or a bit older, comes chock full of details about how First Nations threw up earthworks and dug ditches in tandem with the natural defenses found in springs, spits, pits, bays, fissures in the limestone, etc. Squire's descriptions astonish. The natural defenses are already sufficiently strong to require but little in the way of the works of men: some ditches for palisades, earthen gates and ramparts--these last, large but not spectacular--and so forth.
Even for the reader who situates Cumorah in Mexico (and as Hugh Nibley reminds us, Anahuac, that is the Valley of Mexico, does signify waters), Squire's study will prove indispensable in setting forth the proper Cumorah terrain (Ephraim G. Squire, Antiquities of New York, 1853). Western New York, anyway you slice it, has always been good Cumorah land. Nibley argued that a New York setting for Cumorah was not a bridge too far; he also saw the merit in a Mesoamerican or Peruvian setting, provided Cumorah's hill remained a hill, and not some ridiculous mountain, upon which no armies could be arranged in battle formation. That's how Hugh Nibley saw it. Now we also see Cumorah in Syria.
And Syria today sadly sees Cumorah.
Notes
Curiosity about Zarahemla, the land of Nephi, or the narrow neck of land comes with the reading. Hugh Nibley once answered a direct question about the location of the city of Zarahemla with some specific indications. I don't know what startled me more: that I would ask so directly or that such specificity would be immediately forthcoming.
The Sumerian lexicon also yields KUM (to be, become hot, heat), a word likely to be a Semitic loan-word; it's a shared word anyhow. How to bridge the gap between Egyptian Kuma and Sumerian KUM, between black and hot? Lamentations 5:10 speaks of faces "hot like an oven" (nikmaru), and some have translated the word as scorched, blackened. Hot as an oven; black as an oven, it is all the same. Blackness absorbs heat. Afroasiatic Km, together with its by-forms kmr and 'km, signifies heat. Heat, gloom, sadness, darkness, blackness all come together in an original root, kum. For Job, a very trying day, a day in which everything piles on, is a kamirirey yom--not just kmr but kmr-r.
Any relation to Akkadian kumaru? Who can say?
Again, I can't make a lexical connection, but it's easy to see how semantic and symbolic fields might overlap. In West Semitic one of the meanings of kmr and 'km has to do with the heat necessary for the germination of plant life in the dark earth. Which brings us back to the greatest Hurrian god, Kumarbi, he of Kmr, the chthonic rampart god. A blade of wheat is his symbol. Does Syrian Kumaru, then, signify rampart? or black earth? or both?
Again, I can't make a lexical connection, but it's easy to see how semantic and symbolic fields might overlap. In West Semitic one of the meanings of kmr and 'km has to do with the heat necessary for the germination of plant life in the dark earth. Which brings us back to the greatest Hurrian god, Kumarbi, he of Kmr, the chthonic rampart god. A blade of wheat is his symbol. Does Syrian Kumaru, then, signify rampart? or black earth? or both?
Cumorah, with its many waters, rivers, and fountains, calls up Spring's fertility, a black land like the Egyptian Kumat, as km.t was likely pronounced. (For the vocalization of Egyptian km.t, see Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, 42, 88. Egyptians referred to themselves as the Ramats ni Kumat (the people of Kumat), or even as the Kumut). Where such a link between ku-ma-ra and the black earth may not be linguistically sound, we may yet term it semiotically suggestive, part of a shared connotative encyclopaedia, somewhere on the other side of denotation and dictionary. Matching dictionary and the denotative would be Cumorah the Redoubt, the Rampart Land, "serving," as Shakespeare would have it, "in the office of a wall." In other words, Cumorah denotes a Rampart, a stronghold, "this fortress built by Nature for herself"; it may also connote a land rich in promise.
III
Is a New York Cumorah a rampart too far?
The search for Cumorah will be facilitated so well by the meaning of the name as by Mormon's description of the land and the hill that bear the name. And until those who seek Cumorah identify a place that better matches the linguistic and narrative evidence, a study of New York antiquities can still serve up surprises.
E. G. Squire's study of the native antiquities of New York, whether Huron or a bit older, comes chock full of details about how First Nations threw up earthworks and dug ditches in tandem with the natural defenses found in springs, spits, pits, bays, fissures in the limestone, etc. Squire's descriptions astonish. The natural defenses are already sufficiently strong to require but little in the way of the works of men: some ditches for palisades, earthen gates and ramparts--these last, large but not spectacular--and so forth.
Even for the reader who situates Cumorah in Mexico (and as Hugh Nibley reminds us, Anahuac, that is the Valley of Mexico, does signify waters), Squire's study will prove indispensable in setting forth the proper Cumorah terrain (Ephraim G. Squire, Antiquities of New York, 1853). Western New York, anyway you slice it, has always been good Cumorah land. Nibley argued that a New York setting for Cumorah was not a bridge too far; he also saw the merit in a Mesoamerican or Peruvian setting, provided Cumorah's hill remained a hill, and not some ridiculous mountain, upon which no armies could be arranged in battle formation. That's how Hugh Nibley saw it. Now we also see Cumorah in Syria.
And Syria today sadly sees Cumorah.
Notes
Curiosity about Zarahemla, the land of Nephi, or the narrow neck of land comes with the reading. Hugh Nibley once answered a direct question about the location of the city of Zarahemla with some specific indications. I don't know what startled me more: that I would ask so directly or that such specificity would be immediately forthcoming.
On the other hand, I also heard Brother Nibley say on more than one occasion, "I wouldn't touch Book of Mormon geography with a forty-foot pole." Did he place any value on John Sorenson's Mesoamerican research, a Mesoamerican approach to the Book of Mormon? Yes. Brother Nibley praised and recommended his work to students. Where a question remains open, we might profit from any thoughtful study.
I greatly prize my own copy of John Sorenson's last book, Mormon's Codex. There is so much in the book that calls to mind the Book of Mormon. On the other hand, everywhere we turn the Book of Mormon swims into ken, from news reports to ancient place names in Syria. Even thumbing through a Greek lexicon presents surprising correspondences to Book of Mormon thought. Scripture is resonant.
So what about the "forty-foot pole"?
An overmuch concern with Book of Mormon geography in the Americas, beyond noting the internal consistency of geographic reference within the book, lies outside intelligent endeavor. Determined argument on such matters becomes the mark of the huckster or the fanatic and hardly speaks to spiritual or social refinement.
Notes
"I am going to Cumorah": Joseph F. Smith, Orson Pratt, Interview with David Whitmer, 1878 Millennial Star
Paul Y. Hoskisson, "What's in a Name: Cumorah," The Journal of the Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon Onomasticon Project (BYU, Neal A. Maxwell Institute), q.v. "Cumorah"
Michael Astour, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
An overmuch concern with Book of Mormon geography in the Americas, beyond noting the internal consistency of geographic reference within the book, lies outside intelligent endeavor. Determined argument on such matters becomes the mark of the huckster or the fanatic and hardly speaks to spiritual or social refinement.
Notes
"I am going to Cumorah": Joseph F. Smith, Orson Pratt, Interview with David Whitmer, 1878 Millennial Star
Paul Y. Hoskisson, "What's in a Name: Cumorah," The Journal of the Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon Onomasticon Project (BYU, Neal A. Maxwell Institute), q.v. "Cumorah"
Michael Astour, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
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