The Hill Cumorah problem

Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery and later prophets identified the New York hill as the site of the final battles; the hill is archaeologically empty.

What the Church claims

The New York hill where Joseph Smith obtained the plates is the Cumorah (and Jaredite Ramah) of the Book of Mormon, where hundreds of thousands died.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. No battle debris, no weapons and no remains have been found at the New York hill, and the surrounding archaeology shows no event of the kind described. The claim fails on the ground. What keeps it from untenable is that the Church has quietly stopped insisting on it and many apologists now place Cumorah elsewhere, so the claim being tested is one the institution no longer defends.

The record

  • Oliver Cowdery's Letter VII (Messenger and Advocate, July 1835) states as fact that the final Nephite and Jaredite battles took place at the New York hill ('the entire power and national strength of both the Jaredites and Nephites were destroyed'); it was reprinted in Church periodicals in Joseph's lifetime.
  • Brigham Young taught in 1877 that Cowdery and Joseph walked into a room inside the hill holding 'more plates than probably many wagon loads' and the sword of Laban.
  • Joseph Fielding Smith, Mark E. Petersen (General Conference, 1953) and Bruce R. McConkie all rejected a second Cumorah and placed the final battles at the New York hill.
  • BYU archaeologist John E. Clark is quoted describing the New York hill as 'a clean hill. No artifacts, no walls, no trenches, no arrowheads'; no on-site excavation has been carried out.
  • A 1993 letter from the Office of the First Presidency (F. Michael Watson, 23 April 1993) is cited for the position that no specific site is conclusively connected with the text; the 2019 geography statement does not mention Cumorah at all.

The moving target

  • 1835-07: The New York hill is where the Nephite and Jaredite nations were destroyed.
  • 1877-06-17: The New York hill contains a room full of Nephite records.
  • 1953: Rejected the idea of two Cumorahs.
  • 1993-04-23: No conclusive connection between the text and any specific site.
  • 2019-01: Silent on Cumorah.

The exchange

John Sorenson; Scripture Central; FAIR; Interpreter

There are two Cumorahs. The battle hill was in Mesoamerica (Sorenson proposes Cerro El Vigia in Veracruz); Moroni carried the plates to New York, and early Saints later attached the name to the local hill. Letter VII was Cowdery's opinion, and the cave story is a vision.

The answer: This asks members to believe that the second elder of the Church, writing with Joseph's cooperation and reprinted with his approval, was wrong about the most famous hill in Mormonism, and that apostles who said so in General Conference for a century were also wrong. The text itself never says Moroni traveled thousands of miles. It is a possible reading adopted because the New York hill is archaeologically empty, not because any source suggests it.

What they get right: The name 'Cumorah' for the New York hill is not securely attested from Joseph himself before the 1830s, and the text does say Mormon hid the records in Cumorah but gave Moroni's plates separately.

Jonathan Neville; Rod Meldrum (Heartland)

Letter VII settles it: Cumorah is in New York, and Mesoamerican scholars are rejecting the prophets.

The answer: Heartlanders are right about what the early leaders taught. But a New York Cumorah means hundreds of thousands of dead with weapons and armour around a glacial drumlin that has yielded nothing, in a region whose archaeology shows no such societies.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Cumorah is the one Book of Mormon place with a fixed modern location, vouched for by Cowdery in 1835, by Brigham Young's cave account, and by twentieth-century apostles in conference. That location is archaeologically sterile. The Mesoamerican school resolves this by declaring those leaders mistaken and adding a second hill; the Heartland school keeps the prophets and loses the archaeology. Each side's critique of the other is sound, and the Church's 2019 statement avoids the topic entirely.

The apologetic case

Mormon 6:6 distinguishes the records Mormon hid in Cumorah from the plates he gave Moroni, and Moroni wandered for decades afterwards, so a distant final resting place for the plates is not excluded by the text; early members could naturally have transferred the name.

What would change this

Excavation at or near the New York hill revealing large-scale ancient warfare, or an early Joseph Smith document distinguishing the plates' hill from the battle hill.

Closely related

Sources

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