The Promised Land is the land to which the Lord led the Jaredites and, later, the family of Lehi1. The Lord called it “a land which is choice above all other lands,” preserved for a righteous people (Ether 2:7). The Jaredites crossed the sea and landed on its shores (Ether 6:12). The Lord decreed that whoever possessed the land must serve God or be swept off when ripened in iniquity (Ether 2:10). The same oracle adds that the land’s inhabitants would be free from bondage and from all other nations if they served “the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ” (Ether 2:12).
Lehi1 told his sons the land was given as an inheritance for his seed and for all whom the Lord would lead out of other countries (2 Ne. 1:5). He prophesied that none would come to the land except those brought by the hand of the Lord (2 Ne. 1:6), and that those who served God according to his commandments would have it as a land of liberty (2 Ne. 1:7). The land was to be kept from the knowledge of other nations so long as its people kept the commandments; when they dwindled in unbelief and rejected the Messiah, the Lord would bring other nations against them and scatter them (2 Ne. 1:9, 2 Ne. 1:11). The promise of prospering in the land was conditioned on keeping the commandments (1 Ne. 2:20, 1 Ne. 4:14). Jacob described the people as driven out of the land of their inheritance and led to a better land, an isle of the sea (2 Ne. 10:20).
The geography is given as a land southward and a land northward joined by a narrow neck of land, with seas to the east and west; from the line between Bountiful and Desolation it was a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite from the east to the west sea, so that the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water (Alma 22:32). A narrow strip of wilderness running from the east sea to the west sea, through the borders of Manti by the head of the river Sidon, divided the Lamanites from the Nephites (Alma 22:27). The Nephites held the land of Bountiful from the east to the west sea, hemming the Lamanites in on the south so they could not pass into the land northward (Alma 22:33).
In a separate covenant promise, the Father told the Nephites he would gather his people and give them again the land of their fathers, the land of Jerusalem, which is the promised land unto them forever (3 Ne. 20:29).