River Sidon

The River Sidon is the only river mentioned by name in the Book of Mormon. It was near the city of Zarahemla. There were several battles fought in and around this river. These include the battle between Captain Moroni and the Lamanite leader Zarahemna. This battle was ostensibly fought near the source or “head of the river Sidon”.^[1] The northward flowing river Sidon, east of the city of Zarahemla, is described as originating in highlands to the southeast.^[2] According to the Book of Mormon, the river Sidon ultimately flows into a “sea”.^[3] The river Sidon is never mentioned in lands north of Zarahemla. Identifying the fishery river Sidon is crucial to locating the land of Zarahemla. The Book of Mormon does not indicate that the river Sidon was an impressively large or mighty river. In Book of Mormon antiquity, the river Sidon was shallow enough to cross on foot (for some distance north of its headwaters), yet deep and swift enough to carry away semi-buoyant human carcasses.^[4] Accepting the location of the land of Cumorah inferred in LDS scripture,^[5] author Phyllis Carol Olive identifies the Book of Mormon River Sidon as the northward flowing Buffalo Creek / River of western New York.^[6] Olive asserts that the headwaters of Buffalo River (Sidon) were at one time fed with additional water from a lake that is now extinct.^[7]

According with the Panama hypothesis, the head of the River Sidon may well have been somewhere along Highway 55 in Columbia prior to the Great Earthquake. According with the Tehuantepec hypothesis, the river is in Mesoamerica on the popular map of Mesoamerica that was circulated in the BYU Bookstore before the current map (which relies on the Great Earthquake.) Both Hypotheses are used at the ^[8]

References