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Question: What is the Limited Geography Theory and model?
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Question: What is the Limited Geography Theory and model?
The Limited Geography Model is based upon an accurate reading the Book of Mormon text and limits geography to several hundred miles
The Limited Geography Theory (or LGT) is a non-traditional interpretation of the text, but one that has gained wide acceptance among the Book of Mormon scholars and readers over the last 60 years.[1] It is based on a close reading of the text, which indicates that the lands inhabited by the Lehites could be traversed on foot in only a few weeks, making the area no larger than present-day California.
Advantages of this model:
- a limited model seems to match the textual information about distance with much greater accuracy
- a limited model offers a more realistic fit for an ancient society, which would have had great difficulties travelling or communicating over the vast distances required by the Hemispheric Geography Theory
- a limited model potentially restricts Book of Mormon peoples to an area which matches regions (e.g., such as Mesoamerica) known to have had high culture, city-building, written language, etc.
Disadvantages include:
- many Church members are unfamiliar with the basis for this model, having not paid close attention to issues of distance and travel times, since they have been more focused on the spiritual details of the Book of Mormon instead of its mundane details.
- most early members and leaders of the Church have, when they made geography explicit at all, tended to adopt a hemispheric model
- being a "newer" model, some claim that advocates of the LGT are 'changing the Church's story' about the Book of Mormon, even though the Church has been clear that it had no official or revealed Book of Mormon geography.
- placing the model exactly becomes more difficult, since a smaller geography can 'fit' more than one potential location.
- critics of the theory maintain that it uses mental gymnastics to explain away the mention of an "exceedingly great distance" in the text. Traditionally, it had been believed that there was an exceedingly great distance between the core of the Nephite domain and the Hill Cumorah in the area where the Nephites and Jaredites were destroyed.
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