Nahom and Bountiful on the apologists' chart

How Nahom, Bountiful and the Arabian route are scored on the apologetic chart: one real hit, counted many times.

What the Church claims

The burial place already 'called Nahom' and the fertile coast of Bountiful match real places in Arabia that Joseph Smith could not have known of, corroborating Lehi's journey as real history.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. The NHM altars are real, they sit where the text puts the burial, and no route by which Joseph could have known the name has been shown. As a claim about the Arabian leg of the journey it stands. It does not reach further, and on the apologists' chart this one place-name is counted several times over as though it did.

The record

  • Three altars from the Bar'an temple at Marib, dated 7th-6th century BC, were donated by a man identified as a 'Nihmite'.
  • Dan Vogel's objection that NHM could not be dated before AD 600 was mistaken; the excavator dated the altars earlier.
  • Carsten Niebuhr's 18th-century map marks 'Nehhm'; Jeff Lindsay concedes copies were in some US libraries (Allegheny College; Philadelphia).
  • Roper scores all 21 Old World journey items confirmed, seven of them from one candidate Bountiful.

The moving target

The Church has never scored the anachronism chart, endorsed the Nahom argument, or published a position on what the altars prove. Nahom appears in Church magazines and in Book of Mormon videos as illustration, never as a claim the Church stands behind. The chart itself is the work of independent apologists, and the Church has never adopted its counting, its categories or its percentage.

The exchange

Warren Aston; S. Kent Brown; Scripture Central; Rappleye and Smoot

Name, date, location and the eastward turn converge; Joseph Smith could not have known.

The answer: NHM is a tribal name with unknown vowels; the inscription says nothing of a place, a burial ground or Israelites. The consonants N-H-M also give biblical Naham, Nehum and Nahum, any of which could inspire a coined name. A European map showed Nehhm, and south-east is simply where fertile Arabia was known to lie. With dozens of Book of Mormon toponyms and the whole Near East to search, one three-consonant match is not surprising (Jenkins).

What they get right: It is a real, pre-600 BC, correctly located name, and the specific claim that it postdates Lehi was wrong. Access to Niebuhr's map in rural New York or Pennsylvania is possible but undemonstrated.

The chart's compilers

Nahom is one item among 226 and the chart's case is cumulative. Attacking the single strongest item leaves the trend untouched.

The answer: The chart does not treat Nahom as one item. Nahom, Bountiful, the turn 'nearly eastward', the trail's watering places and the plausibility of the Arabian route are counted separately and each scored as confirmed, so one archaeological find is carried into the total five or six times over. That is the mechanism the percentage runs on. A cumulative case assembled by counting a single piece of evidence repeatedly is not cumulative; it is compound interest on one deposit.

What they get right: The NHM altars are a real find, correctly dated and correctly located, and no honest account of the Book of Mormon's evidences leaves them out.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Nahom is a single correspondence of three consonants. It is the strongest item on the chart and still does not rise above 'interesting coincidence or lucky borrowing', because base rates for such matches are high and the New World half of the geography has produced nothing comparable in two centuries.

The apologetic case

The text says the place was already 'called' Nahom (unlike places Lehi named), puts it where an ancient cemetery region and the NHM tribe actually are, links it to mourning (Hebrew nhm), and turns east exactly where the incense route does. No critic predicted any of this.

What would change this

For critics: proof Joseph Smith had no access to Niebuhr-derived maps would strengthen the hit. For believers: evidence of a Niebuhr or D'Anville map in his circle would largely dissolve it.

Closely related

Sources

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