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3 Nephi 8


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10 hours ago, pogi said:

Can you give me a reference that explains how a single eruptive event could create a mountain great enough to encompass an entire city?  Any geological evidence of such a historical event?

I don't know, but I have found that Mormon engages in hyperbole in his record, because that's how he writes, so I tend to assume that would characterize some of his descriptions.

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9 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

Thank you,  you rock!!

Those were the days. I think the critics were a higher quality back then too. I wonder what happened to all those people?

 

Some posters (critics and defenders) have died unfortunately, others stuck to their elists as a better way to keep the conversations focused. Probably some lost interest in any online discussion. 
 

I like the posters a lot now, but want the old ones back too.   I don’t know about quality, we tended to have evangelical scholars on occasions which added depth to those types of discussions. I think there were more philosophers or at least dabblers for Mark to discuss things with.   Brant has kindly stuck around, but he also had several others joining him.  There were a number of FAIR members posting, but time and life have whittled them down and new (and plenty old) FM members aren’t even aware of this board I am guessing.
 

And critical arguments were generally ‘new’ to me, so that might have made those making them seem more impressive. :)  

Edited by Calm
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59 minutes ago, Calm said:

Some posters (critics and defenders) have died unfortunately, others stuck to their elists as a better way to keep the conversations focused. Probably some lost interest in any online discussion. 
 

I like the posters a lot now, but want the old ones back too.   I don’t know about quality, we tended to have evangelical scholars on occasions which added depth to those types of discussions. I think there were more philosophers or at least dabblers for Mark to discuss things with.   Brant has kindly stuck around, but he also had several others joining him.  There were a number of FAIR members posting, but time and life have whittled them down and new (and plenty old) FM members aren’t even aware of this board I am guessing.
 

And critical arguments were generally ‘new’ to me, so that might have made those making them seem more impressive. :)  

When I first found the board I was amazed at the war of scholars going on. We had been sailing around for a few years and I no idea until we anchored in Pago Pago and we were able to get internet in the Anchorage. It made me want to choose sides and come back to the Church. 

 

Edited by rodheadlee
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12 hours ago, pogi said:

Can you give me a reference that explains how a single eruptive event could create a mountain great enough to encompass an entire city?  Any geological evidence of such a historical event?

Landslides do it quite frequently. 

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When Mt Rainier blows, there will be cities covered up or washed away, rivers and lakes created or destroyed, valleys where mountains used to be, and mountains thrown up out of valleys. What a day that will be!

This will be our song here in western Washington, we’ll, if there are any of us left to sing it....

 

Edited by Bernard Gui
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21 hours ago, alter idem said:

I don't know, but I have found that Mormon engages in hyperbole in his record, because that's how he writes, so I tend to assume that would characterize some of his descriptions.

This idea of hyperbole has been mentioned by others too.  I suppose that is one possible explanation, but then we’d have to accept the revelations about the event, and the voice of the Lord afterword confirming the events to be hyperbole as well.

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Mr. Marklin mentioned this before, but I think it deserves a closer look.
 

While not a mountain overnight, if inhabitants were quickly killed or scattered and only years later when people had recovered enough to travel, it might be possible that something like this occurred where two towns were covered in lava and the volcano grew into a mountain over several years  

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parícutin

 Fascinating to read the eyewitness account of its ‘birth’.  Growth was pretty quick. 

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On that first day, the volcano had begun strombolianpyroclastic activity; and within 24 hours there was a scorian cone fifty meters high, created by the ejection of lapilli fragments up to the size of a walnut and larger, semi-molten volcanic bombs. By the end of the week, reports held that the cone was between 100 and 150 meters high.[4][9][11] Soon after the start, the valley was covered in smoke and ash.[4]

For comparison, from ground to torch the Statue of Liberty is 93 meters. 
 

I don’t see a need to restrict the destruction to a single eruptive event and we need to be careful in assuming what we mean by “great” would be the same as those who saw a volcano in the place of a city would describe it as. Great might be used in terms of extraordinary or awesome (neither of which are used in the limited vocabulary of the BoM btw).

Edited by Calm
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On 8/21/2020 at 9:26 AM, pogi said:

What kind of geological event could create a "great" mountain "upon" a city within a matter of 3 hours? I can't think of anything like that ever being described by what we know of geological forces. 

Lava flowing over a city in connection to a volcano could be described this way, imo, especially if one knew the town was there but hadn’t seen it happen. 
 

If you think the use of “city” requires it to be a larger site, you need to be aware that vocabulary isn’t that varied in the Book of Mormon. While city or cities is used around 400 times, towns is only used twice and there is no town, village or villages is used 7 times. Towns is always used with villages as well. As in towns and villages or towns and villages and cities. 
 

https://gospelcougar.blogspot.com/2007/12/word-frequency-in-book-of-mormon.html?m=1

Edited by Calm
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“Great” is used almost 700 times in the Book of Mormon for a variety of definitions. Besides no awesome or extraordinary, wonderful appears 3 times, I need to check if that is in the Isaiah section or not.  Use for quality as opposed to quantity is common, such as great earnestness, great question, and great order. 
 

Wonderful is used once in 2nd Nephi and then used as “wonderful works” and “wonderful contentions”.

”hill” is mostly used with either a name similar to the hill known as _____ or in combination with mountain. 
 

Hill or hills is used 36 times while mount, mountain, or mountains is used around 70. Need to check if mount is being used more as a verb and if names are associated with the mountain or if “mountain” might be a more generic use.  Added:  mount is only used once as a verb and that is in 2nd Nephi.  Mount frequently has a name attached like Mount Doom, but also is used by itself. 
 “Mountain” was only used once with a name, so could be a more generic term than whatever was translated as “hill”.

 

Edited by Calm
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34 minutes ago, Calm said:

Lava flowing over a city in connection to a volcano could be described this way, imo, especially if one knew the town was there but hadn’t seen it happen. 
 

If you think the use of “city” requires it to be a larger site, you need to be aware that vocabulary isn’t that varied in the Book of Mormon. While city or cities is used around 400 times, towns is only used twice and there is no town, village or villages is used 7 times. Towns is always used with villages as well. As in towns and villages or towns and villages and cities. 
 

https://gospelcougar.blogspot.com/2007/12/word-frequency-in-book-of-mormon.html?m=1

Lava flowing over a city doesn’t create a mountain in its place, however.  This event is said to be associated with plural mountains being raised up where there were no mountains before.

Edited by pogi
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1 hour ago, pogi said:

This could only be a possible explanation if we accepted the hyperbole theory.

No, only if we can give room to a small scale model, or the possibility of smaller-than-anticipated/envisioned events that were perceived and thus recorded as larger (and smaller than we are preconditioned to consider or interpret)... Or a theory of "relativity" :) 

Edited by CV75
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37 minutes ago, pogi said:

Lava flowing over a city doesn’t create a mountain in its place, however.  This event is said to be associated with plural mountains being raised up where there were no mountains before.

If the Parícutin volcano had opened up in the middle of one of those towns instead of the cornfield nearby, would you accept the description as similar? (Outside the plurality)

Edited by Calm
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29 minutes ago, CV75 said:

No, only if we can give room to a small scale model, or the possibility of smaller-than-anticipated/envisioned events that were perceived and thus recorded as larger (and smaller than we are preconditioned to consider or interpret)... Or a theory of "relativity" :) 

Do you mean any workable model should not include mountains like we find in mesoAmerica, because those are too big and couldn’t realistically be raised up in 3 hours.   

 

Edited by pogi
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This references the possibility of volcano complexes or one volcano triggering another:

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-eruption-one-volcano-trigger-eruption-another-nearby-volcano?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products

It is unlikely in my view that anyone was documenting these occurrences when they were going on, so it may have been years or even decades before they got around to do it and eyewitnesses of specific occurrences may not have been available, so gaps may have been filled. 
 

Pogi, did you read the Kowallis paper yet?

Quote

It is an account of what, at first glance, appears to be a complex event or group of events that would be difficult to explain in terms of any single cause.  In fact, have often heard my fellow Latter-day Saints describe how all the physical features of North, Central, and South America that we see today were formed at this time, so great was the destruction.  A reshaping surfaces of these continents, however, goes against all available geologic evidence.  I believe that as we look at the 3 Nephi account in detail, we will find that it is describing a more localized event—an event that fits with the restricted geographic views of many Book of Mormon scholars.


However, the 3 Nephi account cannot be explained solely as a massive earthquake or storm, for neither of these natural disasters can account for all the features described.  All of the details of the entire the account can, however, be explained by a specific type of natural phenomenon occurring only in certain geologic settings—an explosive volcanic eruption similar to the eruption in Papua New Guinea and to the eruption on Santorini.  I am certainly not the first who has recognized this event for what it is, but I hope here to more completely outline the events that occurred and demonstrate that all of these events can be explained in the context of a single explosive volcanic eruption.

The formatting screwed up the quote so it is going to take a bit to fix it. Added:  think I fixed everything

Edited by Calm
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19 minutes ago, pogi said:

Do you mean any workable model should not include mountains like we find in mesoAmerica, because those are too big and couldn’t realistically be raised up in 3 hours.   

 

Nephi’s account was Likely written long after the events. I don’t think we should limit the total effect of the event to only three days .

Parícutin became a mountain in a few years. And in only a few days had achieved significant elevation. 

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10 minutes ago, mrmarklin said:

Nephi’s account was Likely written long after the events.

People trying to survive that level of destruction who were already living on close to a subsistence level in modern terms are unlikely to be concerned immediately with recording events, I am guessing, even if working together and living communally or however it was.  I would suspect great effort to record Christ’s visit officially. The traveling to collect all the witnessed info, assuming there were witnesses still living in all cases would have taken time, I am guessing. And the eventual account would have been to some extent ritualized, it being a sacred account and not a government/academic report or civil historian’s hobby, though some info may have come from the first source. Oral histories might be collected and complied into one coherent account by bards or whatever was the local equivalent, assuming there was one. There is reference to such in the Kowallis article. 

Edited by Calm
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I want to include more quotes as specifically addressing concerns imo, but formatting just doesn’t work, so anyone interested (Pogi if you haven’t already) really needs to read it at the source. 
 

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3240&context=byusq

Then if one takes issue with a claim, please post where the claim is and why. 
 

The burial of towns/cities starts on page 166 or 32 if you go by number of pages. 
 

An example resulting in the deaths of 25,000 people:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armero_tragedy

Quote

At 11:30 p.m., the first lahar hit, followed shortly by the others.[29] One of the lahars virtually erased Armero; three-quarters of its 28,700 inhabitants were killed.[26] Proceeding in three major waves, this lahar was 30 metres (100 ft) deep, moved at 12 metres per second (39 ft/s; 27 mph), and lasted ten to twenty minutes. Traveling at about six metres per second (20 ft/s; 13 mph), the second lahar lasted thirty minutes and was followed by smaller pulses.[30]

A third major pulse brought the lahar's duration to roughly two hours. By that point, 85 percent of Armero was enveloped in mud. Survivors described people holding on to debris from their homes in attempts to stay above the mud. Buildings collapsed, crushing people and raining down debris.[30]

The front of the lahar contained boulders and cobbles that would have crushed anyone in their path, while the slower parts were dotted by fine, sharp stones which caused lacerations. Mud moved into open wounds and other open body parts — the eyes, ears, and mouth — and placed pressure capable of inducing traumatic asphyxia in one or two minutes upon people buried in it. Martí and Ernst state in their work Volcanoes and the Environmentthat they believe that many who survived the lahars succumbed to their injuries as they were trapped, or contracted hypothermia, though the latter is unlikely, given that survivors described the water as warm.[30]

Another lahar, which descended through the valley of the Chinchiná River, killed about 1,800 people and destroyed 400 homes in Chinchiná.[5] In total, more than 23,000 people were killed, approximately 5,000 were injured, and 5,000 homes[26] throughout thirteen villages[28] were destroyed. Some 230,000 people were affected, 27,000 acres (11,000 ha) were disrupted, and there were nearly 20,000 survivor-refugees.[31] The Armero tragedy, as the event came to be known, was the second-deadliest volcanic disaster of the 20th century, surpassed only by the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée,[32] and is the fourth-deadliest volcanic eruption recorded since 1500 AD.[33] It is also the deadliest lahar,[34] and Colombia's worst natural disaster.[35]

To me, it is pretty clear the descriptions are realistic. The issue is finding what would be left 2000 years later, which is not dealt with in the article except to say that such events are reasonable for that area. 

Edited by Calm
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59 minutes ago, mrmarklin said:

Nephi’s account was Likely written long after the events. I don’t think we should limit the total effect of the event to only three days .

Parícutin became a mountain in a few years. And in only a few days had achieved significant elevation. 

Anything like that in mesoAmerica that is about 2,000 years old?

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Zhws6GG.pngey7LhGz.pngAlthough I'm not convinced 3 Nephi 8 is accurate history, an alternative explanation could be the devastation caused by a comet strike in the ocean. Such an event wouldn't be so easy to identify and could completely transform a wide swath of geography in a matter of hours. There's an example of this in the Indian Ocean:

"At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface. The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land." (source)

These formations are up to 600 feet high, and three miles from the ocean. They are 25 miles long. I suppose it's possible that a strike like this one occurred within the Book of Mormon timeframe, and it remains hidden on the ocean floor. Scientists are only now starting to identify and date them. One interesting comment from the article:

"Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C. Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami. Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

Edited by Rajah Manchou
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11 hours ago, pogi said:

Do you mean any workable model should not include mountains like we find in mesoAmerica, because those are too big and couldn’t realistically be raised up in 3 hours.   

No, I mean that a smaller-scale model would use smaller mountains such as those we find in Mesoamerica (or elsewhere, if covered by the model).

Something else  to consider is the surgical precision with which the various forms of destruction in 3 Nephi were executed: "O all ye that are spared because ye were more righteous than they..." This was a miraculous event controlled by the power of God (e.g. Jacob 4:6, Helaman 10:9, Ether 12:30, Mormon 8:24). Certainly these same things could have taken place within a fairly isolated, few-thousand square mile area somewhere among the micro-geologies and micro-geographies of Mesoamerica.

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