Why did Joseph Smith add honey bees and elephants?

Question

to America in his Book of Mormon when they didn't exist here until later centuries?

Answer 1

Elephants are mentioned only once (Ether 9:19) as having been "had" by the ancient Jaredites. This occurrence is at an early point in the history of the Jaredites, probably well before 2500 B.C. based on the chronology proposed by Sorenson in An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Is this an obvious blunder? Mastodons and mammoths, a form of elephants, lived across North America and part of South America.

At the moment, I think that the single mention of elephants among a very early group of New World people could be accounted for plausibly by surviving mammoths or mastodons, which later became fully extinct. Failure to find abundant elephant remains from the Jaredite period need not be taken as proof against the Book of Mormon.

There are several references to bees or honey in the Book of Mormon - but all occur in the Old World. Lehi's group found honey in the Old World, a passage quoted from Isaiah mentions bees, and the Jaredite group carried bees with them as they traveled in the Old World. We are not told that the Jaredites brought bees into the New World. Bees are missing in the list of items placed on the ships in Ether 6:4. But no wonder: I'd be uncomfortable being locked in a closed vessel with hives of bees. With no indication of bees being brought to the New World, we have nothing to explain. We simply don't have to explain or apologize for things that the Book of Mormon does not say.

Nevertheless, the allegation that bees were unknown in Book of Mormon times may be incorrect. In my copy of Michael D. Coe's excellent book, The Maya (4th edition, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), Coe discusses Mayan life based on the Spanish missionaries' "first-class anthropological accounts of native culture as it was just before they came" (p. 155). He states that "the Maya farmer raised the native stingless bees, which are kept in small, hollow logs closed with mud plaster at either end and stacked up in A-frames, but wild honey was also much appreciated" (p. 156). Honey was a valuable export from the Yucatan (p. 157). Coe also refers to Classic Maya rituals to increase animal life and honey (p. 172).

Answer 2

I don't know where or how Joseph Smith came up with his book of Mormons, but the Bible was completed with Revelation and the death of the apostles, John being the last in 98 C.E.(common era). There would be no more books because the apostles warned of the coming apostasy(falling away from the truth) after their deaths. And not until the last days would the truth be revealed.

Answer 3

ok I know that in the book of mormon they brought over bees for huney, but elephants??? I have never herd of that one. Nor have i ever read it. Just because they haven't found eveidence that the honey bees were there, doesn't mean that they weren't. Also, science hasn't been able to prove the biblical accounts that are told, that doesn't make it false.

Answer 4

The book was translated many years ago. he obviously had some divine intervention in order to translate the Book of Mormon. The book is written for people in this time as well, so I'm sure he did was he was suppose to even if it didn't make sense to him.