American Consulate - Hermosillo March 6, 1989 Elder Ryan Nelson Chatham, Ontario Dear Elder Nelson: You may have heard by now that Bishop Timmins passed away on February 26. He was lucid and able to visit with his family almost to the end. His funeral was packed with his many friends and ward members. The services were among the most impressive in my memory and I'm sure were a solace to his family. His wife passed your letter to me, asking that I try my hand at a reply. You ask about the Hill Shim mentioned in Ether 9:3. As you will understand, we know very little in concrete terms about Book of Mormon geography. But is not unreasonable to make certain assumptions. For example, the Hill Cumorah was known to the Jaredites as Ramah. Few things in life are more perdurable than place names. In England some place names have endured from pre-Celtic times through the invasion of the Celts, the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans. To be sure, there have been changes in pronunciation and spelling, and some forests, fortified spots, and hills have taken on additional linguistic baggage in the process. Dunfermline in Scotland, for example, seems to mean "hill hill swamp" (dun = hill in gaelic, fern = hill in Saxon, lin = swamp or wet meadow). Not far from us in Arizona is a hill called Picacho Peak. Pic = hill in Spanish, peak = hill in English. So we again have "hill hill". This more or less what I have to suggest may have occurred with regard to the names Ramah, Cumorah, and Shim in Book of Mormon times. Nothing is more common in the study of languages than the observation of interchange and "drift" of vowels and consonants. Ramah is obviously an earlier form of Cumorah, "ramah = mora". And I suspect the Cu was a Nephite addition, being probably equivalent to whatever was particularly striking about the hill to the Nephites. Cu-morah is therefore probably an iterative of the same description of the hill in two separate languages. Moreover, as I'm sure you're aware, most Book of Mormon scholars take it for granted that there were two Cumorahs: one in Central America where the Nephites lives out most of their history; the other in Western New York state near the Finger Lakes where Joseph Smith found the plates. Again, nothing is more common than for migrating folk to take place names with them and apply them to new sites. Thus we have New Yorks, New Londons, New Amsterdams, and New Berlins (etc. etc. etc. ) all over the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand -- wherever Englishmen roamed. The Book of Mormon index (p. 329) confirms my theory that Ramah and Cumorah refer to the same hill (at least in its Central American location). It also tells us that Shim was known to both the Jaredites and Nephites, and that it was in the hill Shim where Ammaron deposited his records -- and from which Mormon later took them. I would not myself find it difficult to identify Shim with the Central American Cumorah, reading some consonantal shifts into the change in pronunciation since the letter C commonly undergoes a sound shift from "k" to "ch" or "sh" and vice versa., as in modern Italian, Romanian, and Hebrew (remember how Joshua tested the Canaanite infiltrators by having them pronounce the word "shibboleth"? The Canaanites could pronounce it only as "shibolet" a problem many Germans have in trying to learn English. It seems the "th" sound has been retained only in modern Icelandic, English, and Spanish. This Shim = Cum + Ramah (or "morah"). But this neat suggested answer to the question is brought in question by Book of Mormon scholar John Sorenson, for whom I have the highest regard. In his An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (see pages 343-46) Sorenson suggests that Shim actually lay between the Jaredite land of Moron (source of Moroni's name? [fellow from (or born in ) Moron]) and the hill Ramah, or Cumorah. Sorenson's reading of the B of M puts Shim not far from the eastern seashore. This and other data would therefore put it south of modern Veracruz, probably in the Tuxtlas mountain mass, or less likely, in the Sierra Madres some 80 miles further south. There is a B of M "land" called "Shem", which may itself be realted to Shim (hill of the land of Shem??), vowel shifts also frequently having grammatical significance. We use 'em in English to indicate tense and number: I lie (today), I lay (yesterday). I have an ox (singular), I have several oxen (plural). Perhaps in the Jaredite or Nephite languages vowel shift was employed to indicate location, like our modern prepositions. This was true in Latin and continues so in modern Romanian. Sorenson adds that no place was of greater importance in Nephite history since they struggled to the death for almost 35 years in or near Shim in southern Veracruz. Which brings us to my next point. Veracruz is on the Gulf of Mexico. When my companion and I were studying B of M as missionaries 40 years ago, we decided that the Nephites must have fought in slow retreat from the area of the narrow neck of land (probably the ithsmus of Tehuantepec) northward over many generation. They would thus have been compelled to retreat along the Gulf Coast until they hit the Mississippi River. Because of its width near the Gulf, they'd have had to retreat almost straight north along its west bank until reaching a point where the river could be crossed. This would have brought them to the Finger Lakes area just south of Lake Erie, the exact location of the Second Cumorah near which the Nephites were wiped out. I know this extends Book of Mormon geography into regions where few scholars have taken it. But the fact remains that anthropologists have found enormous stacks of bones in this very area, indicating some mighty pre-Columbian battles in the region. And given the fact that the modern Indian tribes of the region were never very numerous, one wonders where else all the bones could have come from. Besides which we know that Moroni was exhausted and probably wounded during his last battle and could not have wandered far to hide the plates. And Joseph Smith found the plates about 1200 years later in this exact location. In brief, while I can't tell you where the Nephites found the Jaredite record, they did. Moroni had it (see Ether 13:1) and so in all probability did his father Mormon -- and possibly even more remote Nephite ancestors. And nothing would have been mentioned more prominently in the Jaredite records than the Hill Shim where their great battle of destruction took place. This being so, the records were probably found in or near the Hill Shim (or Cum) which gave the Nephites (and us) an apposite warning of their (our) own future should they (we) disobey the commandments of God, as well as a place name to tinker with and transform into their own tongue. It may also have given Ammaron the idea to hide his own records in the same hill, where Mormon recovered them thirteen years later during a lull in his war. The same association of name and place similarly seems to have given Mormon's son Moroni the idea to hid the records, with his additions, in another hill some twenty-three hundred miles to the north following his own lost battles. The wars of the Jaredites and Mormon's battles with the Lamanites took place near the original Shim, or Cum, or Ramah -- or Cumorah, whether the originals of these be the same hill, as I am half willing to suggest, or two different locations, as per Sorenson. The later battles between the Nephites and Lamanites in the time of Moroni probably took place a couple of thousand miles to the north, near our modern Cumorah. Some students suggest that Moroni carried the plates with him during his years of lone wandering -- during which time Brigham Young even suggested he visited the site of the Manti Temple). It is hard for me, however, to envision this aging warrior toting some sixty or seventy pounds of gold plates with him during twenty years of wandering, especially since, if he had the record with him, it is remarkable that he didn't inscribe a single additional line of commentary. Of course, there is the third theory, that he simply picked up the records in his angelic form from wherever they had lain hidden and flew them to Palmyra -- then carried 'em off to some other spot after the Prophet replaced them in the hill. Some early leaders in the Church subscribed to this view. The evidence to support this view, cited I believe by W.W. Phelps on at least one occasion, was that the New York Hill Cumorah has been pretty well dug over and no one's come up with the plates or even the sword of Laban. But I like to test my own theories by the rule of Occam's Razor: i.e. that the simplest explanation sufficient to account for the phenomenon is to be preferred over more elaborate formulations. So I live with the "provisional understanding" that the plates were transported in the baggage train of the Nephite army during its slow retreat and buried soon after the final battle by a wounded Moroni, who returning after his wanderings to the Far West, inscribed his final thoughts and counsel to our generation, leaving the plates where he'd originally stored them after the battle and where Joseph Smith eventually found them. Sincerely,