In 1958, National Geographic Found Two Holy Lands. The Book of Mormon Had Already Named Them.

Two Jordans, Two Nebos, Two Goshens: The 1958 Magazine That Put Utah Beside the Holy Land

The Book of Mormon promised a Jerusalem “like unto” the old one. In 1958, a magazine mapped it. A National Geographic writer laid Utah beside the Holy Land and found two Jordans, two Nebos, two Goshens, two salt seas and two miracles of quail. He thought he’d found a coincidence of geography. The Book of Mormon had already called it a type: a holy city built “like unto the Jerusalem of old” (Ether 13:8). Here is every comparison in the magazine, and what the scriptures say about God’s people in two promised lands.

A man who couldn’t stop seeing it

Ten years before he wrote this, David S. Boyer, a staff writer for National Geographic, drove down out of the hills from Jerusalem into the Jordan Valley, and what he saw, he wrote, “has haunted me ever since.” (MAGAZINE, p. 849)

Boyer had grown up in another Jordan Valley. His Mormon pioneer ancestors had come down Emigration Canyon by covered wagon in 1847 and looked out over a treeless plain stretching toward a great salt lake. He kept telling himself he’d photograph the two side by side someday, so people could see what he saw. In December 1958 he did: twelve pages, with two maps facing each other and Utah’s printed upside down so the valleys would line up. He called it geography’s “astonishing tricks of duplication.” (MAGAZINE, pp. 849, 852–853)

Part One · Every comparison in the magazine

Photographs appear below their matching comparisons. Select an image to enlarge it. On small screens, scroll the table sideways.

Comparison	The Great Salt Lake Valley	The Holy Land	Page
The river	A Jordan River, named by the pioneers after the Bible’s	The Jordan River	848–850
The scenery	A smooth stream, an arid background, a weed-fringed bank, eucalyptus trees (native to Australia), even boats that could be “the work of one builder.” One boat is named, in not-quite-Latin, “Holy Land”	The same, in nearly every detail	848
The shape of the valley	A 60-mile Jordan running from freshwater Utah Lake to the salt Great Salt Lake	A 65-mile Jordan running from the freshwater Sea of Galilee to the salt Dead Sea	852–853
The freshwater lake	Utah Lake, “Source of the American Jordan,” below the Wasatch Range	The Sea of Galilee, below snowy Mount Hermon (“the Mount Sion of the Bible”)	856–857
The salt sea	Great Salt Lake, about six times saltier than the ocean, 4,200 feet above sea level	The Dead Sea, 1,286 feet below sea level, just as salty. Arabs called it Bahr Lut, the Sea of Lot	851, 853
Floating	Swimmers play bridge in it, sitting up like an armchair	Bathers float the same way	851
An ancient lake behind it	Prehistoric Lake Bonneville	—	851, 855
The mountain of Moses	A Mount Nebo, named for the peak where Moses viewed the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:1)	Mount Nebo in Moab	852–853, 857
Goshen	A Goshen on the Utah map	Goshen in Egypt, where Joseph settled Israel	852–853
The land becomes Canaan	“This barren land became their Canaan”	Canaan, the land of Abraham	849–850
The ancient caves	Black Rock Cave near Great Salt Lake, with relics about 4,000 years old	The caves of Qumran above the Dead Sea, where the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts were found	854
Water turned to farmland	The pioneers, the first modern Americans to irrigate on a large scale, turned “their own bleak Jordan Valley into a garden.” Water still runs down Salt Lake City’s gutters	Israel’s Jordan River canal, dug under fire; Boyer imagines Utah’s way of sighting a level ditch across a dish of water working there too	850
The quail	1846: the last refugees out of Nauvoo, sick and starving, are fed by flocks of quail that fall where even the sick can catch them	Exodus 16: quail cover Israel’s camp in the wilderness	850–852
The plague	Crickets devour the first grain, “as dark and baleful as the locusts” of Egypt, until gulls come from the lake and eat them	Locusts sweep the Jordan Valley, and there are no gulls	852–853
The trees	Flash floods taught Utah to limit grazing and replant	Israel plants millions of tamarisks, the tree Abraham planted at Beersheba, and plans 200 million trees	853, 855
The copper	Bingham Canyon, among the richest open-pit copper mines in the world	Solomon’s smelters at Ezion-geber; the land “out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass” (Deuteronomy 8:9)	855
Gold	Brigham Young told his people not to chase the California gold fields	—	855
Potash from the salt	Bonneville’s salt flats yield potash by evaporation	The Dead Sea yields potash by virtually the same process, the only other place on earth	851, 855, 858
Hot springs	Hot springs found on the pioneers’ first day in the valley	Hot springs at Tiberias and near Gadara	858
Living in common	The United Order: communal settlements	The kibbutzim of Galilee, holding property in common	856–858
The children	Young Utahns walking the flats by Great Salt Lake	Jordanian children walking the Dead Sea shore, Moab on the far side	859
The last word	—	A Utahn can’t look across the Jordan and the Dead Sea without hearing, “strangely ringing in his ears the words of Brigham Young, ‘This is the place!’”	858

(MAGAZINE, every row)

Boyer saw all of this as geography. He was right about the geography. What he didn’t know is that the Book of Mormon had already named the pattern.

Part Two · What the magazine didn’t know

A type, named in advance

The prophet Ether, writing on this continent long before Lehi, saw a holy city here:

“…a New Jerusalem should be built up upon this land, unto the remnant of the seed of Joseph, for which things there has been a type… they shall build up a holy city unto the Lord, like unto the Jerusalem of old; and they shall no more be confounded.” — Ether 13:6, 8 (TEXT)

“For which things there has been a type.” “Like unto the Jerusalem of old.” The Book of Mormon doesn’t say the second holy land happens to resemble the first. It says God built it to. (OURS) A geographer in 1958 photographed the type without knowing it had a name.

Part Three · God’s people in two promised lands

1 · Two peoples, two records

“…take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah… then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim… and join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.” — Ezekiel 37:16–17 (TEXT)

Two peoples, two records, one hand. And the end of the prophecy: “they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all” (37:22). (TEXT) The two lands and the two records are meant to become one.

2 · Joseph’s land

Moses blessed Joseph with a land of its own: “Blessed of the LORD be his land… for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills” (Deuteronomy 33:13, 15). And Jacob blessed Joseph as “a fruitful bough… whose branches run over the wall,” his blessings reaching “unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills” (Genesis 49:22, 26). (TEXT)

My reading: a branch of Joseph ran over the wall of the sea, and his blessing reached to the everlasting hills of a second promised land. The Book of Mormon’s own allegory says the Lord of the vineyard planted a branch “in a good spot of ground… choice unto me above all other parts of the land of my vineyard” (Jacob 5:43). (TEXT; MY READING)

3 · Two exoduses, two Moseses

Nephi patterned his family’s journey on the first Exodus, out loud: “let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided” (1 Nephi 4:2). On the shore, building the ship, he walked his brothers through the whole Exodus to prove God would do it again (1 Nephi 17:23–26). (TEXT)

The Lord told the Latter-day Saints the same thing about their exodus: “I will raise up unto my people a man, who shall lead them like as Moses led the children of Israel. For ye are the children of Israel… and ye must needs be led out of bondage by power, and with a stretched-out arm. And as your fathers were led at the first, even so shall the redemption of Zion be” (D&C 103:16–18). And the revelation that organized the trek west was addressed “concerning the Camp of Israel in their journeyings to the West” (D&C 136:1). (TEXT)

So the quail weren’t a coincidence of geography either. (OURS) A camp that called itself Israel, led by a man like Moses, was fed in the wilderness the way Israel was fed, and named its mountain for Moses’ mountain.

4 · Two lands, one condition

Both promised lands come with the same covenant clause:

• The land of Canaan: “That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you” (Leviticus 18:28).

• The land of the Book of Mormon: “whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off… For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands” (Ether 2:9–10). (TEXT)

Choice, and conditional, both of them. “Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper, and shall be led to a land of promise… choice above all other lands” (1 Nephi 2:20). (TEXT)

And the risen Lord named both promised lands in a single sermon. Of this land: “this people will I establish in this land… and it shall be a New Jerusalem” (3 Nephi 20:22). Of the other, a few verses later: “the land of their fathers for their inheritance, which is the land of Jerusalem, which is the promised land unto them forever” (20:29). (TEXT)

Then why does Isaiah call America Egypt?

If you’ve read our Egypt articles (When Isaiah Says Egypt, He Means America), you’re asking exactly the right question. How can the same land be Canaan and Egypt?

Because it’s the same land in two roles, and the covenant decides which. (MY READING, on the texts below)

Look at the verse Boyer himself quoted. He used Genesis 13:10 for the Jordan plain: “well watered every where… even as the garden of the Lord.” He stopped one phrase short. The verse goes on: “…even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt.” (MAGAZINE, p. 850; TEXT) The same valley is the garden of the Lord and like Egypt, in one sentence. Then that plain chose Sodom.

In Isaiah, Egypt is a role, not a map. It’s the strong power God’s people lean on instead of Him: “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses… but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 31:1). They “trust in the shadow of Egypt” (30:2), when they could have trusted the shadow of His hand (49:2; 51:16). (TEXT) And even Jerusalem can play it: John calls the city where the Lord was crucified “spiritually… Sodom and Egypt” (Revelation 11:8). (TEXT)

So this land is Canaan to the people who keep the covenant: the desert blossoms, the quail fall, the gulls come. And it becomes Egypt when it forgets Him, a great power that trusts its own chariots. The decree on this land says which, and it’s the same decree that was on the first: “serve God, or they shall be swept off” (Ether 2:9). Geography doesn’t decide which land you live in. The covenant does.

5 · Two capitals, one law

“…for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.” — Isaiah 2:3 (TEXT)

Two places, one law. Joel says it too: “in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance” (Joel 2:32). And our own revelation sends each people to its own: “Let them… who are among the Gentiles flee unto Zion. And let them who be of Judah flee unto Jerusalem, unto the mountains of the Lord’s house” (D&C 133:12–13). (TEXT)

Moroni closes the whole Book of Mormon speaking to both cities in one breath: “Awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion; and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders forever, that thou mayest no more be confounded” (Moroni 10:31). (TEXT)

And notice one of Boyer’s captions: he calls snowy Mount Hermon, above the Sea of Galilee, “the Mount Sion of the Bible.” That’s Deuteronomy’s own name for it: “mount Sion, which is Hermon” (Deuteronomy 4:48). (MAGAZINE; TEXT) A Mount Sion over Galilee, and a Zion in the mountains of Utah.

6 · Two deserts that blossom

Boyer quoted Ezekiel for Israel’s reforestation: “This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden” (Ezekiel 36:35). And he wrote that the pioneers turned their bleak valley “into a garden.” (MAGAZINE)

Isaiah promised both: “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (35:1), and “he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD” (51:3). (TEXT)

7 · Two salt seas, and one prophecy

Only one of the two salt seas has a prophecy about it. Ezekiel saw water flowing out from under a rebuilt temple, down to the east, “into the sea: which being brought forth into the sea, the waters shall be healed” (Ezekiel 47:8). Joseph Smith taught it plainly: “Judah must return, Jerusalem must be rebuilt, and the temple, and water come out from under the temple, and the waters of the Dead Sea be healed” (History of the Church 5:337). (TEXT; SOURCED)

Boyer stood on the Dead Sea’s shore in 1958 and saw rotting barges and burned-out potash works. The prophecy says that sea will live. (OURS)

The kicker

Turn back to the front of that same December 1958 issue. On page 784 is another article: “The Men Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls.” And in Boyer’s own pages, a photograph of the Qumran caves, where Old Testament copies “the earliest known in Hebrew” were found. (MAGAZINE, pp. 784, 854)

In one issue, a magazine set Utah beside the Holy Land, and told the story of the cave where the oldest book of Isaiah came out of the ground. (Our Qumran story).

This is the place

Boyer ended his article with Brigham Young’s words ringing in his ears beside the Dead Sea. He meant it as a feeling, but the scriptures mean it as a promise:

• A type, named before either city stood: “like unto the Jerusalem of old” (Ether 13:8).

• Two sticks becoming one in God’s hand (Ezekiel 37:17).

• Two capitals and one law (Isaiah 2:3).

• And one people, no more confounded (Moroni 10:31).

Liken it, Nephi said. In 1958, a geographer did, with a camera and two maps. The Book of Mormon had already told us why the maps would match.

THE GREATER PORTION · “to him is given the greater portion of the word” (Alma 12:10). Next: The Book of Mormon Tells You What Isaiah Means. Look Before and After Every Chapter. (on liken) · our Qumran story.

With thanks to Morgan Philpot, who pointed us to Boyer’s article, and to Ken’s copy of the December 1958 issue.