Shulem wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 4:45 pm
I won’t even begin to discuss it further or see any need to find additional fault in this model. Sorry, it’s simply DOA out of the starting gate.
This is a model I have looked at extensively. Setting aside all the ways it doesn't fit with post-1830 statements by Church leaders and members, I'd argue its the only geography that matches the internal geography and narrative of the Book of Mormon. What's most striking about this model is that it corresponds with:
1. Samuel Mitchell's hypothesis that the moundbuilders came from this geography and fought a great battle of extinction near the Hill Cumorah
2. Captain Kidd's ship (the Kedah Merchant) was named after the main trading port in this geography
3. The mythological founder of this geography was a warrior from the Middle East named Maroni
4. Arabic geographies describing this island/peninsula referred to it by names that resemble toponyms in the Book of Mormon: Komara, Komorriya, Rahma, Sidon, Kamran (fun fact, the Comoros Islands are called Comoro because Arabic geographers believed the Comoros Islands and Madagascar were settled by a Biblical people called the Kumr (think Moriancumr), who after the tower had sailed to the peninsula of Komara in ships modeled after Noah's Ark (not unlike the Jaredites).
5. The maps of this geography that could have been used as a template in the decades before the publication of the Book of Mormon match the internal geography of the Book of Mormon quite well.
Remember, Martin Harris had visited Samuel Mitchell two times (possibly more) before the publication of the Book of Mormon and Mitchell had told him that the characters taken from the Book of Mormon, were from a nation now extinct,
which he named.
Richard Bennet proposes that Samuel Mitchell was interested in the Book or Mormon characters because he saw it as a way to support his hypothesis that the moundbuilders in Ohio and New York were Malay. So let's suppose Samuel Mitchell told Martin Harris in 1828 that the Book of Mormon characters were from the now extinct Malay moundbuilders who were destroyed in a great battle near Onandaga, New York. What would be the probability that the Book of Mormon (and the 1834 Zelph account) tells that story using that geography as a template?
It would follow that the Book of Mormon intended to tell the story of Samuel Mitchell's Malay moundbuilders, and their leader Maroni, on the peninsula of Komara.