What did Mormon mean by his description of the population of Zarahemla?

Thomas R. Valletta

“He was eleven years old, and he was taken by his father to a land southward to Zarahemla—the big city, the big capital. … The land was covered with buildings, and he [had] never seen anything like that. … As an eleven-year-old, he’s impressed. You’d be impressed with these things. So we have to be very careful and not be simplistic when we read the Book of Mormon. When this kid tells us that people in Zarahemla were as numerous as the sands of the sea, how many hundred trillion people are there? It doesn’t mean that at all. It’s a metaphor here, as it were the sands of the sea” (Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon, 4:192–93).

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