I wanted to talk about “Nahom”. It's one of those names which occurs in no other text
and is sort of plopped into the story of Lehi and Sariah and their traveling party
almost with a dare to find this place. Well, it has been found
and in fact its discovery has been called the first archaeological proof of the Book of Mormon.
Let me talk a bit about how this came about; my wife and I were subscribers to a magazine called
“AramcoWorld” and this magazine would arrive with wonderful stories about the Middle East,
both ancient and modern. And on one occasion in late 1997, I was reading an article on an exhibit
that was showing in Paris at the time. This exhibit included ancient Yemen artifacts. And
in one of the photographs that was featured in the article I could see a votive altar.
What drew my attention was the architecture in miniature. There are tiny steps, there are
inset windows, there are stalactite formations decorating the bottom of the roof and so on.
The reason that I was interested in that is because in Lehi's dream he calls the building that
he saw the great and spacious building strange. Now it's not the only thing he calls strange.
In his dream he also called certain paths and roads strange, and it occurred to me
that he thought the building strange at least partly because of its architecture. He came from
a place Jerusalem which had architectural influences both from Babylon to the east
and from Egypt to the southwest. And there would have been circles,
like in building materials like pillars and so on. But everything in South Arabia is square.
Everything comes to a right angle. And so, I thought perhaps Lehi saw strange architecture.
So, I wrote to Paris to the exhibit giver, the exhibit host, and ordered a catalog and this
book arrived in the mail on ancient Yemen that was the exhibit. Its first showing was in Paris, then
it was to go on to Madrid, eventually end up in London and even be shown in Washington D.C. When
the catalog arrived, I of course was interested in the pieces that showed architectural features.
So, I found a series of altars. They're called votive altars because they were carved by a donor,
had them carved, and then he would give this altar to a temple.
So, I had my camera right down next to the page with a macro lens on it and I
was taking photographs of different altars, and I thought I should read what the excavator says.
The excavator was Burkhard Vogt, a German archaeologist. So, I read this thing.
This is the limestone altar from the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. and around the top
there was an inscription band where the donor wrote his name, his father's name,
grandfather's name, and tribal name, and the occasion on which he gave the altar to the temple.
Well, the temple stands just outside the ancient capital, and still modern city of Marib
of the Sabean kingdom, ancient Sabean kingdom, it was the capital of that kingdom.
So, I began to read “Bi>athar son of Sawd son of Naw>ån the Nihmite
on the occasion gave the altar and a person to the temple”. Obviously, this donor has given a person
to the temple to be a permanent fixture, permanent servant, a permanent helper. Kind of like Samuel's
mother Hannah did for him, when he was just young. Well, I'm a little slow. It took a while,
but about 30 minutes later, it dawned on me that I had just read the word Nahom as a tribal name. In
ancient Semitic languages you deal with language not written with vowels but only with consonants.
So, the name “Nahom” in 1 Nephi
chapter 16, the place of Ishmael's death and burial was written in the text NHM.
I know it's spelled in English “N-a-h-o-m” but that's the modern rendition of this
that Joseph Smith dictated, but at base it's “NHM”. And I just read those same letters as the
name of a tribe which it turns out gave its name to a certain geographical area in south Arabia.
Well, I thought so, so here's an altar, carved in sometime in the seventh- sixth
centuries B.C. exactly when Lehi and Sariah were on the road. And it preserves a name
from south Arabia in the approximate place that we would expect it.
So, I started to write. I wrote a short article. I sent it over to the editor of the Journal of Book
of Mormon Studies. This issue, which is number 8; issue 8, number 1. So, I sent it over to John
Sorensen who was then the editor. I had included words like “maybe”, “perhaps”, “possibly”,
those kinds of words, not being really too pushy about reaching any conclusion.
He sent it back almost immediately and said get rid of all those words. Let's be more definite.
So, in this issue of the Journal Book of Mormon Studies, in the back, sandwiched between
an article on the so-called Lehi cave in southern Israel, and an article on Anthon transcript
sat my little piece: “The Place Which Was called Nahom: New Light from [Arabia]”.
So that's where it began. It was published and those who read the article and knew the issue
sensed immediately that in the name of the tribe we now had confirmation
of the name that Nephi parks in his narrative. That felt pretty good, I must say.
But there's a second story associated with this. It took a while but people who don't
like the Book of Mormon who think it's a fraud, and so, on finally got around to mounting another
explanation. Well, it couldn't possibly be that Joseph Smith knew this name through inspiration,
there had to be another way to explain his inserting this name into his narrative.
A colleague Dan Peterson drew my attention to a blog post, where someone had theorized that
Joseph Smith had gone to the Dartmouth College library and found it in one of two publications.
This person theorized that when the Smith family was living in Lebanon, New Hampshire,
and Hyrum Joseph's older brother was a student at an academy there, that young Joseph, now
six or seven, wanders over to the Dartmouth College library,
and this also is another assumption. That he was interested in pre-Islamic Arabian,
and another assumption, he pulled a couple of books off the shelf went browsing through them,
found on maps inside the books the name “Nehhm” N-e-h-h-m” for a certain spot in ancient Arabia.
Then, 15 years later when he's dictating the Book of Mormon to Oliver Cowdery,
he remembers this name and sticks it into the narrative as a place name. The assumption also is
that Joseph Smith can actually go from where his family is living to Dartmouth College,
which is a good piece away, several miles away. And that the injury or the weakness of his leg,
for which he suffered a surgical procedure with no anesthesia, that he somehow either
before or after the surgery made it over to the college library. All these assumptions,
and the reason was that the needed books are currently in Dartmouth's collection,
so, they must have been available to Joseph Smith.
So, I read this thing and I thought, has anybody looked at the accession records
in the library? Accession records are records that are made for books that are received by a library
that show the date of receipt in the library, and sort of is the tracker of what happens to them.
So, I contacted the woman who was the institute teacher at Dartmouth. She had been in the past,
an employee of the University, so she knew her way around. I asked her would you check
on these two particular books. Books I had in mind were written: one by Carsten Niebuhr, a German who
had gone to Yemen in the 18th century, under the sponsorship of the Danish King, spent a long time
in Yemen, wrote a couple of books including maps and they're published in German,
eventually translated into English before Joseph Smith was born.
And were available in the United States certainly by the time Joseph Smith was a child.
The second one was written by a Frenchman in the middle of the 18th century,
who also in a map of Arabia, that he drew and inserted into his book
showed the same place, Nehem in Arabia, southern Arabia.
And that book was also, had also been translated into English well before Joseph Smith's birth
and was available in the United States. Well, this woman did her due diligence;
found out that the German book, now translated into English, had been acquired by the library
25 years after the Smiths had left New Hampshire.
The book written by the Frenchman - a copy of it was in the Dartmouth library when the
Smiths were living in New Hampshire, but that copy did not possess the map.
Instead, several decades later Dartmouth library acquired the translation of the French book with
the map but the Smiths are long gone, and in fact it was close to the time of Joseph Smith's death.
There's no way that Joseph could have consulted these volumes, found a name
on a map, remembered it and inserted it into
his text of the Book of Mormon chapter 16 of 1 Nephi verse 34, 15 years later.
As a test case, I've a couple of years later, I was at a conference in Providence,
Rhode Island at Brown University, which is one of my Alma Maters.
So, I went to the special collections building, the John Hay Library on the Brown campus,
and I also consulted the accession records there. Both books, German book translated into English,
French book translated into English, both of those were in the collection, but like at Dartmouth
those books did not come into the possession of the Brown library until decades after they were
published and certainly decades after the Smith family had already gone to the west,
Kirtland, Missouri, Nauvoo, even all the way to Utah; for those who had survived.
So, the sense that Joseph Smith picked up this name
from some place where he could consult it is simply beyond belief.
It's already well over a century since Joseph Smith wrote those names in his text.
Well, what does all this say? A student assistant once received, once we had received notice from
the Institute instructor at Durham that she had consulted the accession records and that these
books were not received until decades after the Smiths were gone, from that part of New England,
my student assistant said, “Well, we can believe in the Book of Mormon again.” Yes, but more than
that, we already know that the Book of Mormon holds the word of God and that's my witness.