Episode 12: "Llama face!" (Enos 1:21)

"Llama faaaaaaaace!"

Anyone who has seen Disney's "The Emperor's New Groove" will instantly recognize where the title of this post comes from.

However, "llama face" has nothing to do with today's post.  But llamas do!


And now, with that somewhat shaky segue...


As you may have noticed, today's post is only about one, single verse--Enos 1:21.  This may lead to the assumption that perhaps this verse is packed with tons of deep and poignant doctrine, like the scriptural equivalent of a "zip file."

But no; it's just a simple verse about animals and farming.

Animals are something that have been a curiosity for me in the Book of Mormon, though.  I often wonder what the Nephites and Lamanites had in mind when I read various passages that mention animals--I know what I have in mind, but is it the same as these ancient people?

I'll illustrate what I mean with an example: sheep.  I rarely hear about sheep outside of church (and even then, it's usually used in a derogatory way to describe a "group mindset" amongst a population).  When I hear people in church talk about shepherds and sheep, I can picture in my mind what they are talking about, even though I haven't grown up around shepherds or sheep (and in fact, I've only seen real, live sheep maybe a handful of times in my life).

Yet, when I've researched the history of sheep in the Americas (yes, believe it or not, I've researched the history of sheep in the Americas--I really am that nerdy) I haven't found anything solid that demonstrates the presence of sheep before European presence.

So, this begs a few questions; and these questions may seem pedantic or even trivial--and, to be honest, they are pedantic and trivial in some respects--but the reason I ask myself these questions is, I just really want to get into the heads of the people I'm reading about.  Were there some species of sheep anciently that went extinct before the Europeans showed up?  Or, were there never sheep in the Americas before Europeans, and thus, in the Book of Mormon, when various prophets and even the Savior Himself spoke of sheep and shepherds, the Nephites and Lamanites had to do something similar to me: conjure up an image that they associated primarily with a religious context and nothing else?  Did Nephites and Lamanites even know what sheep look like?

To illustrate that vein of possibilities--that sheep were perhaps borderline mythical to Book of Mormon peoples --I'll share something I found while researching the word "lamb" in the Book of Mormon.  The word "lamb" occurs 62 times in the Book of Mormon:

• a whopping 56 of them are references to Christ (and yes, these are numbers I came up with myself, doing word-searches on my digital scriptures on lds.org and categorizing every single search result.  Hey! Scripture-study can't all be fun and games!) 
• one occurrence of "lamb" is referring to the Children of Israel (2 Ne. 15:17) 
• two occurrences are talking about the last days when lambs and lions will become roommates (2 Ne. 21:6 and 30:12)   
• there were also two occurrences of the word "lamb" in which the escape of God's servants from death-by-wild-beast came about because these servants were protected and played with the wild beasts, the narrative in their stories using "lamb" as a symbol of innocence and safety 
• and then finally, the last occurrence of "lamb" is in 3 Ne. 4:7 where the Gadianton Robbers wore over their armor "lamb-skin dyed in blood."  Considering the war with Gadianton Robbers at this time was a "holy war" as much as it was secular, it comes as no surprise that their leader, Gaddianhi, would choose such a symbolic device for his warriors' appearance--he wanted to send a very clear message to the Christian believers among the Nephites.

Thus, all but one of these occurrences are instances of "lamb" being used symbolically.  And even that last reference, in which they were wearing lambskin dyed in blood, it is very possible that the Nephites ascribed Old World terms to New World creatures, and the lambskin was really the hide of some other animal that perhaps resembled a sheep.  

In my research, I found a few candidates for "sheep" within the Book of Mormon setting (i.e. the ancient Americas).  I put "sheep" in quotes because something we run into in history with colonist populations is the tendency for colonizers to take words or terminology familiar to them, and use those words to describe objects that are foreign to them, but which resemble a familiar object.  There's a term for this phenomena but I can't remember what it is and I'm too lazy to look it up.  Maybe I'll put it on here later when it finally comes to me.

Anyway!  One example of this is, in fact, with early European visitors to South America, who compared llamas to sheep--and in fact, they kept llamas for wool, as well as for hides ("lamb-skin" perhaps?), and for food, and as beasts of burden (Wikipedia: "Llama").  Another example from European contact is found with the bison, or buffalo, which some European groups called a "cow" (albeit a funny-looking cow).

Sketches of some local wild-
life in S. America done by
European colonists.  You
can't read it in this picture,
but the one in the upper
righthand corner is labeled,
"chilihueque".

Then there's the now-extinct "chilihueque" (or "hueque"), which existed in central and south central Chile in pre-Hispanic and early colonial times.  One hypothesis about them is that they were domesticated llamas brought from the north (where some people believe would have been the stomping grounds of the Jaredites; this has led some to also believe that perhaps the chilihueque were in fact these mysterious animals called "cureloms" and/or "cumoms" mentioned in Ether 9:17-19).

But the point of this post isn't to quibble over the finer details of terminology and animal husbandry in the Book of Mormon: I couldn't imagine a duller topic of discussion, nor a more pointless topic of discussion.  Desperate efforts to "prove" scientific or archeological facts in the Book of Mormon are, in my opinion, missing the point.  If one feels threatened whenever they see something in scripture that doesn't add up with the canon of knowledge in the scientific or academic community, then their faith in the book is rooted in the wrong things.

That being said, I feel no compunction about exploring these peoples' world and getting into their heads as much as possible.  Thus, when someone says "sheep" in the Book of Mormon, I wonder what they had in mind.  I know what Nephi had in mind: he grew up in the land of Jerusalem, so I know he was very familiar with the image of sheep that I myself have.  But what about someone born and raised in the promised land, several generations removed from their forefathers who came out from Jerusalem?

Maned wolf

Consider, on the other hand, occurrences of the word "wolf." In several places in the Book of Mormon it mentions "ravening wolves" and wolves that enter into the sheepfold and wreak havoc.  Assuming that all the events in the Book of Mormon really took place where most people assume they did (we really don't know for certain where all this stuff happened: it could've been in Canada for all we know...), the only candidate for "wolf" in South America is the maned wolf.  The maned wolf has a fairly limited territory on the continent, though, and is actually pretty shy; and, though this is no large obstacle, the maned wolf actually looks more like a fox (though it's not related to the fox...nor the wolf... nor any other canid--it's basically the "lone wolf" of wolves).  So, "ravening wolf" may not really match the maned wolf, but if we can stretch our imagination to calling llamas "sheep," then perhaps this, too, can pass.  

Nevertheless, I wonder, again, if it was a solid or an abstract picture in their minds when someone spoke to them about wolves and sheep.  There are only 5 occurrences of "wolf" or "wolves," and all of them are used symbolically in conjunction with sheep.  This leads me to believe that there were no actual wolves living in or around where the Book of Mormon took place, because all references to them in the record are in purely abstract terms.

But, again: pedantic and trivial.  When the Nephites spoke about "flocks" and "herds," who knows what they were referring to?

Flocks of turkey were kept, anciently;

"horse" might refer to deer;

                                                                                               the peccary is a relative of the wild pig;

some species of small, hairless dogs were fattened and eaten in various cultures of ancient South America (take that, "Beverly Hills Chihuahua"!);

tapir were the largest animals we know of and look a little bit like cattle (but maybe that's stretching it).

Somehow, though, when we read of Ammon defending the king's flocks in Alma 17, the story doesn't seem so romantic when we picture him defending "flocks of turkey."

So, maybe in this one instance, I would prefer ignorance...